The Influence Of Social Network On Firm Performance Of Industrial Cluster

As an effective form of organization, industrial cluster offers great advantages to the development of firms. However, what should firms do to adapt to the ever-changing environment of market with the help of inside and outside network of industrial cluster, and further promoting the realization of better business performance. More and more studies have showed that social network has a great effect on the firm performance (innovation performance and marketing performance),but how social network works on firm performance remains to be further explored.This study aims to investigate the influences that inside and outside social network of industrial cluster bring to the firm performance.The paper firstly reviews some research achievements of the basic theories such as social network theory and so on, and retrospects the recent studies about the relationship between firm's social network and firm performance, meanwhile clarifying the inter-relation among the inside and outside social network of industrial cluster, organization learning and business performance, which makes up the paper's theoretical model. Then, posing the research hypotheses of this paper based on the above studies. Last, we obtain studying data by means of field visits to firms in Ceramics Idustrial Cluster of Liling together with the questionnaire. With the help of statistical software of SPSS and EVIEWS, we make empirical test about the hypotheses . As a result, we draw the conclusion as follows:Firstly, there exists difference of relationship between the inside network of cluster and outside network of cluster: Both strength and redundancy of the inside social network are stronger than the outside social network of the cluster. This dynamic and open network of business relationships becomes a communication channels among the cluster members, which is conductive to strenghtening relationships and causes increasing redundancy. Secondly, ties strength and redundancy have an important effect on organization lear- ning and business performance. firms can obtain much valuable knowledge and resources through strenghening the ties in inside and outside cluster. It is beneficial to improve the organization learning capacity and business performance. The redundancy of network in the inside cluster can bring remarkable and negative effects to the improvement of organization learning capacity and business performance.Thirdly, the inside network ties and outside network ties have no different effects on organization learning and business performance. Keeping relative weak relationship with outside organization is useful for firm to get high quality resource and improve organization learning capacity and business performance.Fourthly, the redundant relationships between inside network and outside network of industrial cluster has evidently different effects on the organization learning capacity and business performance. The inside redundant relationship of the cluster has a greater effect on organization learning and innovation performance than the outside redundancy of the cluster, but it is not significant in the marking performance.Fifthly, organization learning is an important medium to connect social network with business performance. This study shows that firms can improve the business performance by promoting organization learning capacity. The promotion of this studying capacity can be obtained by constructing a qualitative networks inside and outside cluster.