Ethnic entrepreneurship and immigration

This article draws upon qualitative research with ethnic minority entrepreneurs in Strathclyde, involving 43 interviews with ethnic minority small firm owners and entrepreneurs from the Strathclyde region in Scotland and three more detailed case studies. We argue that, in Scotland, ethnic minority entrepreneurship has faced different issues from those that have been identified in the literature, success has been achieved through innovative developments, necessary partly due to special environmental factors in Scotland, which include a low rate of new firm formation and the peripheral nature of the market. The relevance of such development, however, provides examples and ‘cases’ of successful entrepreneurship that has relevant application to other areas of the UK and Europe. We use analysis of the recorded interviews and case studies to demonstrate that the keys to successful diversification and development rely upon the development of effective networks and marketing strategies and the use of contacts to form the bridge into mainstream development. Our recommendations concentrate on how enterprise development can be achieved successfully for ethnic minority entrepreneurs. We concentrate upon the lessons that can be learned and the results that can be applied to other areas in terms of policy and support towards ethnic minority entrepreneurs.

The government plays an important role in the socio-inclusion of immigrants and ethnic minorities in its capacity as employer and purchaser of services. The government's functioning as "a business," in particular as a buyer of goods and services that includes immigrants and minorities in Europe, is examined. Several factors are significant in the growing importance of ethnic minority and immigrant entrepreneurship in Europe: (1) as an alternative to wage labor, unemployment, and public assistance; (2) as a source of benefit for national economies; (3) as a pathway to socio-economic integration. Immigrant and ethnic minority business is gaining recognition among several European governments (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). Public procurements and the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of 1994 are reviewed, along with European Union legislation, and debates on a social approach to public procurement. In most countries, government at all levels is the largest consumer in the market; the current trend in government is to contract out an increasing proportion of its spending. In the European Union, public procurement contracts account for 14% of the GDP, i.e., over 1,000 billion Euros per year. Proactive procurement policies are profitable and advantageous from both a business and a social policy viewpoint.(CBS)

Purpose: Racism is an essential factor to understand racial health disparities in infection and mortality due to COVID-19 and must be thoroughly integrated into any successful public health response. But highlighting the effect of racism generally does not go far enough toward understanding racial/ethnic health disparities or advocating for change; we must interrogate the various forms of racism in the United States, including behaviors and practices that are not recognized by many as racism.Methods: In this article, we explore the prevalence and demographic distribution of various forms of racism in the United States and how these diverse racial ideologies are potentially associated with racialized responses to the COVID-19 crisis.Results: We find that among white Americans, more than a quarter express traditional racist attitudes, whereas more than half endorse more contemporary and implicit forms of racist ideology. Each of these types of racism helps us explain profound disparities related to COVID-19.Conclusions: Despite a robust literature documenting persistent patterns of racial disparities in the United States, a focus on the role that various forms of racism play in perpetuating these disparities is absent. These distinctions are essential to realizing health equity and countering disparities in COVID-19 and other health outcomes among people of color in the United States.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine what factors affect entrepreneurs with minority background to access public financial institutions’ funds in initiating and developing their new ventures. Following the signal theory, social capital theory and the liability of newness perspective, the effect of demographic characteristics of entrepreneurs were investigated and the differences between ethnic minority and non-minority entrepreneurs’ access to financial institutions’ funds were compared. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on the data of 2,119 high technology and non-high technology firms from the Kauffman foundation survey. The empirical analysis was focussed on the characteristics of entrepreneurs of these new ventures and the nature of the financial arrangements of these businesses to test the theoretical framework. Findings – This study provides empirical evidence that ethnic minority entrepreneurs are less likely to access loans from financial institutions than non-minority entrepreneurs. Moreover, the education level of ethnic minority entrepreneurs was identified as a key factor to help them to access financial institutions’ funds. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is that the data did not allow us to explore the actual reasons for observed correlations between entrepreneurs’ ethnic background, demographic characteristics and their use of financial institutions’ funds. Practical implications – Since the constraints in the access to financial resources greatly impact the success of new ventures, this study indicates through what factors minority entrepreneurs can increase their credence to get more financial support. In addition, it is also helpful for the loan managers of financial institutions to make rational decisions when they assess the application of minority entrepreneurs. Originality/value – This study enriches the understanding of minority entrepreneurs in the entrepreneurship literature. First, it aggregates major minorities in the USA and strives to identify systematically different financing behaviors of these minority entrepreneurs; second, it provides empirical investigation on the correlation of ethnic minority background and access to funds from financial institutions and the moderating effect of a set of demographic factors.

Ethnic minority entrepreneurship operates in increasingly complex and ambiguous environments. Thus there is the need for entrepreneurship educators to prepare students to handle ambiguity and to develop a more comprehensive, contextualised and individualised understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. In this paper, we present parables as a pedagogical tool to facilitate an understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship through the embracing and tackling of ambiguity by students. This is done through student interviews conducted with immigrant entrepreneurs in Sweden, followed by the construction of parables based on the interviews. The liberatory type of pedagogy where the student is the storyteller highlights multiple layers of meaning, including power, hegemony and exploitation in the interpretation and teaching about ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Such parable pedagogy encourages entrepreneurship educators to give more emphasis to ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the content and design of their curriculum.

Şelale BALAMBAR ERGAN Middle East Technical University/City and Regional Planning Department sbalambar90@gmail.com The concept of ethnic minority entrepreneurs in the economy represents the employment patterns in the particular country. Immigrants often experience discrimination and exclusion in the labor market and the outcome of this process is the high rate of unemployment. On the contrary, the ethnic economy could be regarded as a promising alternative to unemployment among immigrants. With this decision, immigrant entrepreneurs create their own business and support other immigrants if the business is successful. Currently, immigrant entrepreneurs are comprising big part of urban economies. Besides contributing to the economics of the countries, immigrant entrepreneurs also open the way for the integration of immigrants in the countries of settlement. By creating ethnic economy to overcome discrimination and exclusion, immigrants are making themselves attractive and integrated into the host society. In Italy, migrants from Turkey often are self-employed in the kebab fast-food restaurant sector. The ethnic economy plays a significant role to overcome discrimination and create integration channels. Data were obtained from interviews with migrants from Turkey who arrived in Milano in the years between 1988-2010. In Italy, many migrants from Turkey are immigrating for the purpose of work, study, and so on. In general, the kebab sector entrepreneurs migrated to Milan as asylum-seekers. Like any other post-industrial/low-skilled market, the kebab sector is easily accessible and attractive for many aspiring immigrant entrepreneurs. Thanks to the low demand for human capital and no requirement for special skills, therefore, Turkish immigrants preferred this sector. Turkish immigrants as ethnic entrepreneurs are open to new opportunities. The result of the study highlights the question of how did the Turkish immigrants manage their own insertion and incorporation into the host society.

With regards to entrepreneurship and migration, the overwhelming majority of studies have focused on entrepreneurs within the context of ‘South to North’ migration. This demographic is usually referred to in the literature as “ethnic entrepreneurs” (Waldinger et al., 1990) or “immigrant entrepreneurs” (Volery, 2007). More recently, a new trend is emerging: A small (but potentially significant) number of entrepreneurial migrants are emigrating away from developed economies. Differentiated from the former in terms of becoming entrepreneurs out of volition, and not necessity (Vance et al., 2016), these migrants have been labelled as “Self Initiated Expatriate entrepreneurs” (Andresen, 2014) or “expat-preneurs” (Solimine, 2015). The emerging trend of expat-preneurs poses several questions (and problems) for the existing theories surrounding ethnic entrepreneurs: Where do expat-preneurs fit into the theoretical landscape? Can the theories - created to account for ethnic entrepreneurs - also explain the behavior of expat-preneurs? This paper reviewed eight of the most prominent theories and found that all eight were created in the context of ‘South to North’ migration, with many of them assuming that immigrant entrepreneurs are disadvantaged. As a result, most of the theories are not - in their current state - broad enough to also account for expat-preneurs. Subsequently, most of the existing ethnic entrepreneur theories now need to be broadened to ‘make room’ for the phenomenon of expat-preneurs. This paper contributes to the gap in the literature surrounding expat-preneurs, which has been described as an an under-researched phenomenon (Andresen et al., 2014).

Summary Immigrant entrepreneurship still comprises smalls stores confined to the lower segment of markets. Nowadays, however, immigrant entrepreneurs are becoming visible also in high-value activities which characterise advanced urban economies. This transformation was partly the result of the increasing level of educational attainment of many immigrants and members of ethnic minorities, but it was also driven by the shifts in the structure from industrial to post-industrial economies, which occurred in the last two decades. The potential of self-employment to open up avenues of upward social mobility has, thus, further increased. The qualitative shift from low-value to high-value added business occurring among parts of the immigrant population, moreover, has emphasised the potential significance of immigrant entrepreneurs for the national and, in particular, the local economies in the countries of settlement. Given its strategic importance for, on one hand, the integration of immigrants in the countries of settlement, and, on the other, the potentially significant contribution to the economies of these countries, immigrant entrepreneurship scores high on policy makers’ agendas across the OECD member states. The chapter presents a framework to analyse immigrant entrepreneurship and its potential contribution to immigrants’ social incorporation based on the mixed embeddedness approach, which stresses the interplay between opportunities for business, on the one hand, and immigrant entrepreneurs and their resources on the other. It, then, explores how regulation may affect markets and, therefore, opportunities. Regulation come in different forms, in complex packages that define what is “possible” in a market. It is, thus, not just a matter of repression and constraining but also of enabling. From this perspective, the chapter gives also a brief overview of the main characteristics of the actual policy measures implemented to strengthen immigrant entrepreneurship. The actual policies implemented in order to promote immigrant entrepreneurship focus mainly on the agency of the entrepreneur, rather than the opportunity structure. Moreover, they seem to be mostly geared to the nascent entrepreneurs and to a much lesser extent to the already established immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurs. A new set of policies specifically aimed at immigrant entrepreneurs in vacancy-chain markets and, at the same time, a revision of the regulations (national and local; formal and informal) that

Despite the large influx of ethnic minority (or migrant) entrepreneurs of various origins in the Dutch society, members of this group rarely join institutional collaborative business organizations. This is surprising, as institutional embeddedness and anchoring is usually seen as a powerful organizational mechanism for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we focus on franchise organizations, which ethnic entrepreneurs hardly ever join. It is, in contrast, noteworthy that the degree of mutual collaboration among native Dutch firms in the SME sector is generally very high. The motivation for our study stems from the fact that it is, from a social cohesion point of view, important to understand why a certain group within society acts very differently from the rest of society. Furthermore, it is also important to know whether this deviation is temporary or structural, and whether it will be solved by itself over time or only with external assistance (Davidsson 2002). Much has been written about the attitude and behavior of ethnic entrepreneurs in Western economies, mostly from a sociological point of view. However, to the best of our knowledge, the subject of this paper, viz. the lack of institutional collaboration in the form of franchise organizations among ethnic small firms, has never been dealt with till date. In this paper, we investigate the reasons for the weak institutional collaboration among small ethnic firms, by means of an empirical analysis based on semi-structured interviews with 40 ethnic (Turkish) entrepreneurs in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Turks, who have already lived in large groups in the Netherlands since the 1960s, appear to have a strong inclination to engage in entrepreneurial activities, which means that this group is particularly relevant for the present study. The retail sector, with its low entry barriers, is by definition an important sector in this context.

This exploratory, qualitative study considers how online home-based businesses offer opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs to ‘break out’ of traditional highly competitive and low margin sectors. Previous studies have found a positive association between ethnic minorities’ high levels of entrepreneurship and home computer use in ethnic groups. Despite these associations, previous studies have overlooked the particular opportunities offered by home-based online businesses to ethnic entrepreneurs. The study adopts mixed embeddedness as a theoretical lens to guide interviews with 22 ethnic entrepreneurs who have started online home-based businesses in the UK. We find online home-based businesses offer ethnic entrepreneurs novel opportunities to draw on their ethnic advantages and address the constraints they face. The unique affordances of this type of business allow entrepreneurs to develop the necessary IT skills by self-learning and experimentation and to sub-contract more difficult or time consuming aspects to others. The findings also show that, consistent with the theory of mixed embeddedness, whilst the entrepreneurs are influenced by social, economic and institutional forces, online businesses allow them to exert their own agency and provide opportunities to uniquely shape these forces.

One of the salient developments in North America’s direct selling industry is the increasing diversity in both distributor and clientele base. It has been frequently noted that direct selling organizations comprised of certain ethnic minorities have been exceptional in terms of stability and growth in contrast to the industry’s reputation for a high turnover rate. Focusing on direct selling organizations led by ethnic entrepreneurs of Chinese immigrants, the current study employs structural ritualization theory and the concept of structural reproduction and considers organizational and leadership practices that are adapted by the immigrant entrepreneurs from their culture and pre-immigration experience. Utilizing participation observation, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions (along with document analysis), this study re-visits the time-honored issues of immigrant economic adaptation in a contemporary, multicultural context. Implications for future research, industry, and public policy based on our findings are also briefly discussed.

It is increasingly recognized that entrepreneurship plays a central role in economic development and that entrepreneurs are key elements of change in market economies. This chapter examines the arguments and evidence to support the proposition that ethnic diversity, as such, is a potential source of competitiveness, through the involvement of members of ethnic minorities in entrepreneurship. The involvement of ethnic minorities in entrepreneurial activities has attracted growing interest in recent years for various reasons. The argument needs to be viewed in the wider context of growing evidence of the links between entrepreneurship and economic development at the national level. The chapter is also concerned with ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the UK. In UK context, ethnic minority communities are a result of a long history of immigration, which includes migrants from former colonial territories, as well as, more recently, asylum seekers and migrants from other member states of the EU. Keywords: asylum seekers; competitiveness; diversity; economic development; ethnic minority entrepreneurship

Australia, one of the most cosmopolitan of contemporary western societies, has a long history of immigrant entrepreneurship, with many ethnic groups significantly over-represented in entrepreneurial activities, particularly in the small business sector of the Australian economy. This paper addresses the changing policy context that shapes the rate of formation of - and the growth and expansion of - ethnic enterprises in Australia. At a macro level, changes to Australian immigration and settlement policy and taxation policy indirectly impact on rates of immigrant minority entrepreneurship formation and survival. At the micro level, policy development that impacts directly on minority immigrant enterprises in Australia is very recent and largely undeveloped. This paper looks at immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia, including spatial dimensions, and at the impact of changing macro policy. It then reviews three key areas of micro policy responses to immigrant entrepreneurship: the education and training needs of ethnic entrepreneurs; policies designed to encourage unemployed immigrants to become entrepreneurs; and policy related to government strategies to improve communication with ethnic entrepreneurs. This paper concludes that there are few direct policy initiatives to promote immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia.

How entrepreneurship is portrayed in media can play an important role for how attractive it is perceived as a career and/or investment option. Communities need people of all ethnicities to be interested in starting businesses because economic development is tied so closely to community development. To date, little to no community development literature has been published about how newspapers frame ethnic minority entrepreneurs and how that might affect the community. This article examined such framing and its implications. This article presents a textual analysis of how ethnic minority entrepreneurship is represented in US newspapers included in the LexisNexis Academic Database from 2003 to 2008. Overall, ethnic minority entrepreneurship, including the struggles the entrepreneurs face, is almost invisible in the newspapers, despite its importance for the economy. From the articles that were published in this field, important patterns were identified. The article concludes with suggestions about how community development officials can assist ethnic minority entrepreneurs.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze Brazilian entrepreneurial communities in Florida, through the capitals theory approach.Design/methodology/approachBy adopting a comparative case study approach, the researchers conducted 80 in-depth interviews with Brazilian entrepreneurs in two different communities – Pompano Beach (Miami area) and Orlando, Florida. Data triangulation was performed through interviews with community stakeholders, secondary sources of data and surveys.FindingsAuthors propose a framework of 27 contexts, based on immigrant entrepreneurs’ capital provisions. Evidence points to different evolutionary paths of the two communities of Brazilian immigrants that were compared. Some of these contexts were found in other ethnicities from extant literature, which shows that it might be generalizable to other cases.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations relate to the fact that the comparative study was conducted in one ethnic group. Nevertheless, the paper brings insights to support future studies on immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship as a building block for future comparative studies on other immigrant communities.Practical implicationsThe work presents a guideline for future entrepreneurs in Florida.Social implicationsImplications of practice will arise after further studies in the contexts of economic, human and social capital. The cases of successful immigrant communities enlightened by the capitals theory might be useful to newly born ethnic enclaves.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper lies on the comparison of two entrepreneurial communities of the same ethnicity in Florida, showing different behaviors due to the internal and environmental factors. Moreover, the Brazilian entrepreneur’s particularities add up to the general theory of immigrant or ethnic entrepreneurship.