The moment of truth—Reconstructing entrepreneurship and social capital in the eye of the storm

Abstract

There are many images of entrepreneurship which all pay attention to the importance of social capital. Nevertheless, these understandings of entrepreneurship do not tell us about the capabilities and social ingenuity that people hit by a natural or man-made catastrophe may evoke. We have studied how the effects of the hurricane Gudrun, which hit southern Sweden in January 2005, were dealt with by civic and formal, private as well as public, organizations. The lessons from our rich case accounts are reflected upon in the perspective of ephemeral organizing and used to craft our notion of 'emergency entrepreneurship'. Its proposed features include coping with rupture in everyday life by the acknowledgement of local knowledge and leadership and the use of bridging as well as bonding social capital facilitating immediate (inter)action and swift trust. This appears as a spontaneous collective effort, 'social bricolage', which means combining and locally—in time as well as in space—integrating chunks of everyday routines according to the events and associated needs that the drama produces.emergency entrepreneurship, social capital, natural catastrophe, ephemeral organization, Sweden,

Social Bricolage: Theorizing Social Value Creation in Social Enterprises

“…The interplay between making do and stakeholder participation was also found by Johannisson and Olaison (2007) in their analysis of emergency entrepreneurship. Starr and Macmillan (1990) noted the role of the social assets of friendship, liking, trust, obligation and gratitude in co-opting resources into an entrepreneurial venture.…”

“…Interesting links in this vein are implied by Johannisson and Olaison (2007), who use the term "social bricolage" (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007, p. 55) to infer social networking activity and spontaneous collective action as part of an emergency rapid response. We extend their thinking to examine the creation and development of social enterprises.…”

“…The bricoleur is said to be ready to deploy whatever strategies are required under various circumstances, such as new organizational combinations, in response to unpredicted activity (Ciborra, 1996) and disasters (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007). The process of bricolage thus denotes a dynamic assembly of ongoing transformations and reconfigurations (Lanzara & Patriotta, 2001).…”

“…In practice, each social enterprise used stakeholder participation, in effect operating a social networking strategy (Johannisson & Olaison, 2007) as a means of extending their governance structures to generate new contacts and links with key players or to those with valuable resources or expertise which might benefit the enterprise. This strategy was described by Case #5"s chief executive who was considering undertaking a number of large-scale building development projects but lacked the necessary legal expertise to do so.…”

Connecting the Dots for Social Value: A Review on Social Networks and Social Entrepreneurship

“…The crystallization of those simple and complex relationships results in organization formation. Likewise, Johannisson and Olaison (2007) state that 'ventures crystallize out of personal networks, where relations are as much existentially as instrumentally defined, practised as much for crafting individual and collective identity as for actualizing new undertakings' (58). It should be noted that this notion of crystallization of the network is also used to characterize the formation of entrepreneurial teams (Chabaud and Condor 2009).…”