Entrepreneurs and social capital: strategic leadership in the 21st century firms

This paper explores the relationships among entrepreneurship, leadership and social capital and its impact on the new face of business. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the rapid absence of well amalgamated aspects of social capital, and entrepreneurship within a society is more likely to produce a lack of leadership and thus, dysfunctional aspects of business. We first reviewed the extant literature in entrepreneurship, social capital and leadership. A more philosophical approach is undertaken to determine what entrepreneurship truly means and how social capital impacts on the natural creation of leadership. The focal point of the argument is that entrepreneurship is the process of the creation of a new business or a growing existing business through an exploration of new opportunities within or outside the existing market space. In order to achieve this objective, nations and institutions have to invest in the overall development of social capital. Thus we argue that social capital is one of the primary resources which need to be developed in order to achieve success of entrepreneurs and therefore leaders. Preliminary findings seem to suggest that a coherence of indicated factors: entrepreneurship and social capital, result in greater leadership ability, thus progress of the business and the overall economy. In addition the study seems to highlight that the dynamism of social capital serves as foundation for entrepreneurship and leadership advancements. We propose a conceptual framework that links entrepreneurship and social capital serving as the main drive for business viability, enhancing progress and a deeper understanding of business feasibility.