Systematic Literature Review on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship: Citation and Thematic Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on ethnic minority entrepreneurship. A total of 174 articles converging on ethnic minority entrepreneurship, published between 2010 and 2020, were investigated. This paper extends existing knowledge of the sub-areas in ethnic minority entrepreneurship research by focusing on two different angles. Firstly, Citation analysis was performed to review research papers to recognize and classify the key areas of ethnic minority entrepreneurship currently being focused on and examined by the research community. Secondly, Thematic analysis was executed to discover the specific themes that are being researched. The study found seven different themes: immigrant studies, ethnic entrepreneurial motivations, ethnic startup process, motives of ethnic business success, failure factors of ethnic businesses, ethnic unique challenges, and favourite strong ties of ethnic minorities were identified as main themes. The number of research gaps identified should encourage novel paths and scopes in the ethnic minority entrepreneurship research field to fill these gaps in the literature.