Ethnic Minority Business: Theoretical Discourse in Britain and North America

Abstract

One of the most novel features of recent labour market change in Europe and North America has been the increasing prominence of ethnic minority self-employment. Two decades of radical economic restructuring have brought about a marked shift away from employment in large ® rms to selfemployment in small ones; and, somewhat paradoxically, this trend has been most marked among members of certain migrant groups, often originating in the post-colonial Third World. At the most super® cial level this is evident in the increasingly high visibility, especially in the largest urban centres, of shops and services owned by immigrant-origin entrepreneurs. The South Asian and Chinese-owned small ® rms now so familiar a feature of the British urban scene have their counterparts in the North African and Asian businesses proliferating in parts of France (Dreyfus, 1992; Ma Mung and Simon, 1990), the Surinamese enterprises of Amsterdam (Boissevain, 1992), the Turkish enterprises of Germany (Blaschke and Ersoz, 1986) and above all the multitudinous polytechnic small business economy of North America, where well over 1m ® rms are classed as minority-owned (Light et al., 1994). In quantitative terms at least spectacle is borne out by statistics. In Britain the self-employment rate for people of Chinese ethnicity was recorded as 14.9 per cent of all economically active Chinese as opposed to 7 per cent for whites, while for Indians and Pakistanis the equivalent ® gures were 11.4 and 8.3 (OPCS, 1993). Comparisons with earlier benchmarks reveal these ® gures to be the product of two decades of rapid, sometimes breath-taking, growth (Table 1). Note here that the 1991 Census appears to underplay ethnic minority self-employment in comparison with other earlier or contemporaneous estimates. (See Blackburn, 1994; Curran and Burrows, 1988.) For the US, Light (1984) cites a dozen or so ethnic minorities as overrepresented in self-employment, with Jews (almost the stereotypical case), Chinese, Japanese and Koreans in the vanguard (see also Aldrich and Waldinger, 1990). In France too immigrant minorities are similarly prominent (Ma Mung, 1994; Boissevain, 1984). The overall impression is that ethnic minority capitalism is now virtually a standard feature of advanced urban economies and that, notwithstanding recession and economic crisis, it is waxing rather than waning (Ward, 1987a; Blaschke et al., 1990). Almost inevitably, the scholarly literature on ethnic minority business ownership has multiplied almost as rapidly as its subject