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要旨
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Exploring small worlds in social networks using big data has been all the rage. But true estimates of how they actually work have been fraught with technical difficulties that traditional methods could not fully address. Biases due to unobserved linkages and locally contingent factors may affect outcomes, not capturing important interactions. So, how can we enhance our understanding of real social networks, small world or not? A key is to qualitatively 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 social norms, values, and strategies shared by community members? This research directly addresses these issues with original qualitative evidence. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, we investigate, at the community level, the emerging networking patterns of Chinese entrepreneurs from Wenzhou, frequently dubbed the birthplace of spontaneous capitalism in China, 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 is related to Wenzhou’s success in light of small-world network theory.
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