SMEs’ Structural Mechanism Of Rent Acquisition In Network Growth

With the acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid development of information communication technology, market competition is getting increasingly fierce and the external environment faced by enterprises is getting increasingly complex. Following the beaten track of atomic enterprise logic and purely relying on the resources and capacity of enterprises can no longer satisfy the surviving and growth demands of enterprises. Enterprises begin to rely more and more on the cooperation with other members in the network such as suppliers, customers, or even competitors to obtain competitive advantages, to realize networked growth. The network organization forms, such as value network, industrial cluster, module production network, and virtual enterprise, have achieved great success and become the hot topic for the academic circles. When enterprises are laying emphasis on internal knowledge accumulation and creation, the resources and elements in the network and the networked production cooperation mode have become the important source for enterprises to create value and obtain surplus profits.However, under the network environment, the creation of network welfare surplus and acquisition of rent incomes of enterprises in the network are restrained and impacted by the social relationship among all subjects. As the important component of the enterprise resource basis, the relational network among enterprises is extremely valuable for enterprises, and plays the crucial role in the process creating and pursuing economic rent of enterprises. Relying on the specific network structure, enterprises can fully deploy and utilize network resources, and further obtain returns from the exchange and cooperation with other network members, to seek for the network welfare surplus, obtain rent incomes, and achieve the strategic target of the enterprises and the growth of the enterprises. Profoundly exploring the relationship between the network structure and the rent acquisition mechanisms is helpful for directing the operational practice of enterprises, guiding their operational behaviors, and promoting the overall value creation efficiency of the network.Thus, the paper attempts to start from the structural embeddedness perspective and intensively studies the study model of enterprise growth theory, social network theory, and economic rent theory, and puts forward the research model on structural embeddedness and rental income, and divide structural embeddedness from two dimensions of network density and network centrality, and describes the rent acquisition mechanism of enterprises from the two aspects of rent co-creation mechanism and rent proprietary mechanism, and measures the networked growth situation of the enterprises from rent income level. Through the descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis of the data obtained from questionnaire survey, it reaches the conclusion that structural embeddedness has relatively obvious positive influence on the rent income level of the enterprises. Meanwhile, the rent acquisition mechanism has played intermediation role between structural embeddedness and rent income level, and has theoretical value for study.