1 SOCIAL CAPITAL AS NETWORKS OF NETWORKS: THE CASE OF A CHINESE ENTREPRENEUR Peter J. Peverelli, Faculty of Economics & Business Administration, VU University Amsterdam Email: ppeverelli@feweb.vu.nl Lynda Jiwen Song, School of Business, Renmin University of China, Email: songjiwen@gmail.com Introduction The social embeddedness of entrepreneurs has been a theme in contemporary debates on entrepreneurship for some time (Waldinger e.a. 1990, Portes & Sennebrenner 1993, Granovetter 1995, Rath & Kloosterman 2000, Kloosterman & Rath 2001, Lin 2001). Due to the rapidly increasing influence of China on the global economy, understanding the embeddedness of the emerging class of Chinese entrepreneurs has become more than a merely academic endeavor (Batjargal & Liu 2004, Yang 2007, Xiao & Tsui 2007). In most of these debates, the notion of embeddedness is linked to social networks. Entrepreneurs are seen as people who combine various resources (capital, knowledge, people, etc.) to create surplus value. These resources can be accessed through the different social networks of which the entrepreneur is a member (Kloosterman & Rath 2001: 192). The sum of the potential access to resources an entrepreneur accumulates in social networks is often referred to as social capital. Bourdieu distinguishes between economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. The capital of each individual is a specific mix of these three (Bourdieu 1986: 114). Lin (2001: 119) uses a definition that is more focused on the financial meaning of the word capital, when he states that the premise behind the notion of social capital is rather simple