Women and relational capital in the SMEs context: a literature review

Relational capital (RC) refers to businesses' relationships with their customers, suppliers, licensors, franchisees, and other partners. In today's complex business environment, RC is a critical aspect of social capital, which is developed through data and knowledge integration among different alliance relationships. These alliances are built on trust, collaboration, and shared decision-making processes, all of which contribute to enhancing the environmental performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Strategic alliances can also mediate access to valuable resources, leading to knowledge integration and organisational change that can benefit SMEs. RC is especially significant in fostering trust and developing partner policies, enabling valuable knowledge sharing. Thus, RC can promote innovative ways to integrate knowledge between different alliance partners. In light of what has been said, our study aims to carry out a systematisation of the literature to evaluate the state of the art of the theme of relational capital in SMEs by focusing attention on the gender area. The relationship between women and relational capital is an aspect that scholars should pay more attention to in future research. Few studies have analysed the gender aspect in studies on relational capital in the context of SMEs A bibliometric literature review will be performed. Management and accounting scholars use this literature analysis method to analyse the literature on the subject and identify the research mainstream. Furthermore, following the good practices in the literature, the VosViewer software will be used to identify and analyse the existing research lines on the topic and give a graphical view of the results. This work can be helpful for scholars and provide the basis for outlining future lines of research on women and relational capital. Since several studies have analysed the Italian context, it would be interesting to investigate different contexts, similar to Italy and others, such as emerging economies.