Abstract:
This paper aims to reveal the impact of social capital which was empowered
by Community Based Tourism projects on the business success of micro
and small-scale tourism entrepreneurs (MSSTEs) in rural tourism
destinations and to determine is there any distinction of the variation
created in the business success by the construct of social capital between the
MSSTES who were empowered and who were not empowered. Further,
determining of which type of social capital either structural or cognitive
does affect highly on the business success was focused. Positivism research
approach applied and a sample of MSSTEs in rural tourism destinations
from two provinces from Sri Lanka was selected. A pre-tested structured
questionnaire was used for primary data collection. Three hypotheses were
formulated and tested to reveal the impact of social capital on business
success. Independent sample T-Test, correlation and multiple regression
analysis were applied to test the hypotheses. Findings revealed that social
capital affect significantly on creating a variance in business success. Both
structural and cognitive social capital affect significantly on the business
success while structural capital shows more power to create a variance on
business success than cognitive social capital. This implies that tangible
social capital attributes such as well-functioning of community associations,
strong interpersonal and institutional networks, regular gathering, etc. are
perceived as very important for business success. Also, cognitive type
social capital such as shared vision, values and norms, trustworthiness,
equality in sharing resources and benefits, etc. creates a significant impact
on the business growth.
