The Influence of Social Capital and Guanxi on Organizational Learning and Innovation in SMEs.

Tsai, Wan-Ching Chen-Chi (2010) The Influence of Social Capital and Guanxi on Organizational Learning and Innovation in SMEs. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Literatures of learning in organisations have discovered social capital could enrich the information and knowledge acquisition for organisational development. Typically social capital is taken as the resource which could dominate the volume of external knowledge; and the relevant discussions also mainly concentrate their advantage on external interactions. In this thesis, I turn the emphasis to internal networks. In the relevant researches of organisational learning, they have pointed out the significant influences of power, labour division and internal/departmental boundaries on knowledge sharing and learning interactions. Social capital, which is existed within and between group networks, could affect their organisational learning. Thus, in this thesis, I am going to seek the contributions on the studies of organisational learning and social capital by demonstrating the effect of social capital on knowledge transfer and learning ability, with the emphasis of internal social networks. In order to present the influences of social capital on collective learning by comparing different social networks, I provide the evidences which were collected in family and non-family businesses. They are allocated on smaller IT Industry in Taiwan. Family businesses and non-family businesses have different social interactions; IT industry in Taiwan is a significant sector with intensive knowledge communication. They therefore became the researched groups which could facilitate the study. This thesis will develop the following topics: 1) the effect and development of social capital and guanxi on internal social interactions and collective learning; 2) the comparison of different social networks through the data in family and non-family businesses; and 3) the efficiency of learning and innovation under different social networks. I present the comprehensive discussions between social capital and collective learning, in which it consists of the contribution on the development of social capital theory and also the effect of social networks on collective learning. Besides, I add the concept of guanxi to explain and discover some specific social interactions embedded in Chinese/Taiwanese culture. This discussion introduces the important role of guanxi in Chinese/Taiwanese society and also provides some new insights of guanxi in Chinese/Taiwanese social interactions. Besides, it also illustrates the effect of guanxi on knowledge accumulation and resource development in Chinese/Taiwanese social networks. Furthermore, I stress on the effect of social networks which could contribute to different learning efficiency and innovation capability. These comprehensive discussions about their learning efficiency between two different types of social networks could not only present the influences of social capital and guanxi on their internal learning but also provide an in-depth understanding on learning in smaller family and non-family businesses in Taiwan. Thus, this thesis is constructed by the theoretical basis of social capital, guanxi and organisational learning. The contributions cover the development of each theory respectively and also the integrated findings with evidence in family and non-family businesses.