Academic research has consistently advocated the relevance of social networks and social capital to entrepreneurship. In spite of the increased recognition that networks and social capital are critical for the success of social ventures, empirical studies are still scarce. This study contributes to get a more comprehensive understanding of the influence that entrepreneurs’ personal network and social capital could exert in the management of social organizations, specifically on the process of resource acquisition for the functioning and development of social organizations.
The empirical study developed within the Portuguese social organizations revealed that the involvement of social entrepreneurs in networks is able to offer some benefits to organizations related to its ability to acquire resources. Specifically, the results revealed that the social entrepreneur’s
personal network is able to favor the capacity of acquiring human resources and relevant information.
The founders’ social capital is also able to enhance the capacity to acquire financial resources. This pattern is found for all social organizations, regardless the control variables, such as age or size. No specific benefits were found with respect to physical resources, capacity to obtain tax exemptions, access to better suppliers or exchanges with other social organizations.
The findings attained are consistent with the network approach to entrepreneurship (Witt, 2004; Dodd et al., 2006; Hoang and Antoncic, 2003) and are aligned with existing evidence that confirms the benefits that networks and social capital are able to provide (e.g. Jenssen, 2001; Jenssen and Koening, 2020; Bernardino, Freitas Santos and Fagundes, 2017). The results attained allowed to go further in the comprehension of a topic that although relevant and promising is still under-exploited in the context of social entrepreneurship.
The main limitation of the study is to include only Portuguese social organizations. As social networks and social capital are a very contingent dependent phenomenon, this could compromise the ability to generalize the results to other empirical contexts.
In the future, it will be worthy to study the role of other types of networks (such as entrepreneurial or institutional) on the resources acquisition, as well as the way different structural characteristics of the social network are able to shape the benefits attained. It would also be interesting to quantify the effective impact that network produce on the performance that social ventures are able to achieve. In addition, it would be positive to develop a comparative study between entities belonging to social and commercial entrepreneurship.
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