Abstract
This paper examines community-level social capital, or community capital for short. Building on existing literature on social capital and supply chain networks, we specifically look at the community networks that evolved among the natives of China’s Wenzhou, often referred to as the birthplace of spontaneous Chinese capitalism. A key is to understand in depth whether and how individuals interact in local contingencies, to form a coherent pattern that may facilitate or inhibit further collective action. To what extent, moreover, is such pattern generation a product of community norms, values and strategies shared by community members? How does such pattern generation differ from other communities whose collective performance is less impressive? And why? This research directly addresses these issues with original evidence. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, we investigate, at the community level, the emerging networking patterns of Chinese entrepreneurs from Wenzhou, whose striking economic success has been widely noted. In particular, we examine the extent to which Wenzhounese entrepreneurs’ rapid rewiring of their links with various transnational locales and the concomitant efficient network search and information sharing on the basis of community cohesiveness is related to Wenzhou’s success. We find “commensurate trust”shared and enjoyed among its exclusionary community members a key to decode the secrets of their success as well as to limit their evolvability.
