Where and how do social entrepreneurs access resources in the early stages of their ventures? A relational chain typology of French social ventures

• The article investigates how social ventures mobilize resources via social ties. • It introduces the relational chains concept to analyze resource access over time. • We build a typology of six ideal-types based on when, where and how social ventures access resources. • It shows increasing local embeddedness of social ventures after legal status registration. • It reveals limited role of personal ties, compared to market and institutional ties. Very little research has described how social entrepreneurs leverage their local social networks to access resources, despite their proven crucial role in the early stages of such ventures. To address this gap, we draw on the concept of relational chains. We interviewed and collected data on 40 social ventures based in Grenoble, a French city known for its social activism. Using a quantified narration approach, we developed a typology of social ventures based on how, when, and where they mobilize social ties to access resources. Our work contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurship typologies by exploring original and little-explored dimensions and revealing two new findings: first, unlike in commercial ventures, the local embeddedness of social ventures tends to increase over time; second, the interpersonal ties of social entrepreneurs—weak or strong—play a minor role in accessing resources compared to local institutional and market ties.