Ph.D. Thesis defense – Carla Riverola

Last Tuesday February 28th, Carla Riverola defended her PhD dissertation “Do entrepreneurs Link(ed) In? Exploring Entrepreneurs Usage of Social Media to Manage Social Capital” directed by Prof. Francesc Miralles.

This thesis identified that there is there is no clear stance on how entrepreneur’s usage of social media has improved their access to resources. Thus, under the Uses and Gratifications Approach this research suggested that entrepreneurs use social media to fulfil specific needs regarding their social capital, and explored their motives and satisfactions of this decision.

A mixed method approach was adopted in order to complement two types of data: (1) the exploration of the entrepreneurs’ perceptions through direct semi-structured interviews and (2) a longitudinal analysis of the entrepreneurs’ social media network and activity collected from their main online platforms.

The results of this work challenged the current knowledge on social capital through a dynamic perspective and proposes that social media provided a new framework for analysing the entrepreneur’s social network. This work also offered novel ideas to entrepreneurs on the potential ways to improve their social capital in order to address changing resource requirements.

Congratulations Carla!