An 'Enhanced' Mixed Embeddedness: A Relational Approach to Ethnic Minority Businesses

Abstract

This paper advances the study of ethnic minority entrepreneurship by developing various hitherto implicit and under-theorised elements in the mixed embeddedness model. In the field of ethnic minority business studies, mixed embeddedness is a widely used framework whose main value derives from its strong emphasis upon context, especially its recognition of contrasts in national socio-economic and regulatory contexts. Notable here is its value for international comparisons across differing regulatory regimes and labour markets. Even so critics have highlighted several analytical problems, including a tendency to underplay the importance of organisational and scalar relationships, a historical perspective and transitional stresses entailed in market repositioning. Alerted to the possibilities offered by these gaps, we advance the model by integrating it with notions from relational economic geography to lend additional theoretical strength to its representation of the external politico-legal business environment. We also develop and extend a methodological framework, which promotes contextualisation and militates against ‘over-ethnicisation’, to outline how an ‘enhanced’ mixed embeddedness may be enacted for empirical applications.