Fellow-townsmenship as the mechanism for exploring and exploiting business opportunities: A longitudinal reflection of the nineteenth century Ningbo entrepreneurs in Shanghai

This research examines how fellow-townsmenship, a distinctive homophilous social network, functioned among Ningbo entrepreneurs pertaining to their simultaneous exploration and exploitation of business opportunities, or achieving ambidexterity, in the nineteenth century. By investigating data in relevant historical records from museums, archives and libraries, case studies based on two representative Ningbo entrepreneurs from a distinctive...