Women and Relational Capital in the SMEs Context: A Literature Review

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the beating heart of various economies, such as the Italian one. Several shocks have recently hit world economies. Relationship capital can be a useful tool to help SMEs face and overcome the recent challenges caused by events such as Covid 19. This contribution aims to investigate the relationship between relational capital and SMEs in order to highlight the issues most investigated by business and management scholars. Analysing the literature on the subject, three clusters have been highlighted following a bibliometric methodology. Subsequently, a focus was made on gender issues and women entrepreneurs since it is believed to be relevant. More precisely, 105 articles published on different sources such as scientific articles and conference proceedings are analysed, focusing on a sub-sample of 21 related articles that also deal with the gender issue. Despite the growing interest in the topic, the data has shown that academics scarcely investigate it. Thus, this work offers useful insights for scholars and provides the basis for outlining future lines of research on women and relational capital.