The Relationships Among Entrepreneurship Capital,Entrepreneurship Habitus And Entrepreneurship Practice

Researches on the entrepreneurial ecosystem have been increasing since 2009.Especially when entrepreneurship and innovation have gradually become a policy focus ever since 2014,researches on entrepreneurial ecology have shown a faster growth trend,which makes entrepreneurial ecosystem researches driven by policies and practices.Entrepreneurial ecosystems are combinations of social,political,economic,and cultural elements within a region that support the development and growth of innovative start-ups and encourage nascent entrepreneurs and other actors to take the risks of starting,funding,and otherwise assisting high-risk ventures.As the resource provider for the entrepreneurial enterprise and the customer,and the overall connections among them,the entrepreneurial ecosystem is an effective conceptual framework for understanding the relationship among different stakeholders in the entrepreneurial process and is also an environment-based regional economic development that creates support for entrepreneurial enterprises.It plays an important role in promoting the growth of start-ups and the healthy development of the regional economy(Stam & Spigel,2016).However,the current entrepreneurial ecosystem researches focus much on the identification of entrepreneurial entities.Less is known about the essential differences with concepts such as industrial clusters and national innovation systems.Besides,the absence of a relatively independent perspective and analytical framework of entrepreneurial ecosystems to make it an independent research field.The field theories of Bourdieu's works,as the important theoretical and analytical tools of sociology,have also been widely used in different management research topics.The study of the entrepreneurial ecosystem from the perspective of the field is to take the entrepreneur and the external environment as a whole research unit,without ignoring the influence of either aspect,but also emphasizes the interaction process and effects.By borrowing the three variables,namely capital,habitus and practice,this study establishes and analyses the relationship between entrepreneurship capital,entrepreneurship habitus and entrepreneurial practice in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.It compensates for the potential shortcomings of the binary logic in previous studies and provides a systematic and dialectical analysis framework for entrepreneurial ecosystem research.The entrepreneurial ecosystem from a field perspective is a geographically clustered economic cluster(Spigel & Harrison,2018),and the intensive entrepreneurship practices in the region shape the entrepreneurial ecosystem.Entrepreneurship practice is influenced by the value of the entrepreneurship capitals held by the entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurial field.Entrepreneurs will use their high-value capital to carry out entrepreneurship practices to accumulate more high-value capitals.Meanwhile,entrepreneurs internalize the rules of the perceived entrepreneurial field into entre-preneurship habitus,forming a framework of behaviour to determine whether a particular practice is consistent with the framework of behaviour,so entrepreneurial practices are also influenced by entrepreneurship habitus.In order to identify the connotations of entrepreneurship capital,entrepreneurship habitus and entrepreneurship practice,and the interactions among these three variables in the context of an entrepreneurial ecosystem,this study selects Shenzhen Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for the case study,with the completion of 51 semi-structured interviews and qualitative data coding.This study identifies and refines the content and dimensions of key variables and propose research hypotheses;180 questionnaires to refine the dimensions and content of the research variables through quantitative data with structural equation models and linear regression methods.Through a series of analysis and calculations,there are five conclusions to be drawn.First,the content of entrepreneurship capital is highly correlated with the specific context.The type of entrepreneurship capital in the same form may be of different attributes depending on the research context.Second,the entrepreneurship habitus is entrepreneurs' understanding and perception of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.There are two types: relatively self-interested one,namely,market habitus and relatively altruistic one,namely,community habitus.Third,there is a positive correlation between entrepreneurship capital and entrepreneurship practice.The more entrepreneurship capital the individual holds the more positive the entrepreneurship practice one will bring out.Fourth,there is a positive correlation between entrepreneurship habitus and entrepreneurship practices.The higher the level of perception of entrepreneurial habitus,the more positive entrepreneurial practices will be.Fifth,market habitus and community habitus of entrepreneurship habitus have positive moderating effects on the relationship between entrepreneurship capital and entrepreneurship practice.There are three innovative insights to entrepreneurial ecosystem literatures.First,it introduces the Bourdieuian approach for entrepreneurial ecosystem research,eliminating the research gaps caused by the binary analysis in the previous researches,and establishing a whole new research framework.Second,it develops a quantitative research tool for entrepreneurial ecosystems.With the analysis of interviews and public materials and other text materials,it defines the dimensions and specific content of entrepreneurship capital,entrepreneurship habitus and entrepreneurship practice,in the entrepreneurial ecosystem,and it empirically tests the relationships three variables with questionnaire data.Third,contrary to the previous entrepreneurial ecosystem studies that focus on the organizational level actors,this thesis focuses on the entrepreneurs and clarifies the difference and connection between entrepreneurial ecosystems and other similar concepts.