Entrepreneurship in Fragmented Networks:

Recent studies of the formation of collaborative networks typically identify patterns of cohesive social structures and their benefits for economic performance. Using systematic quantitative evidence on 3,700 corporate foundings and about 8,900 members of the corporate elite in late tsarist Russia (c.1869-1900), our study departs from, and thereby extends this previous research in two important ways. First, we consider economic networks that consistently lacked the kind of social cohesion identified elsewhere, and exhibited social fragmentation into numerous small and isolated clusters instead. Second, prior research has focused on the emergence of new network patterns and hence social change. We demonstrate instead how local strategies of individual entrepreneurs facilitated the reproduction of network fragmentation, and thus prevented social change.