The Ethnic Entrepreneurship as a Multidimensional Process in the Context of System Approach

Abstract

The presence of migrants in the economically developed countries’ marketplaces has been growing in the last decades. It seems to be very inaccurate to do research in economics and social science without taking migrants’ participation in the labour market into consideration. Migrants not only participate in the labour market as employees but also they act as entrepreneurs. The nature of migrant entrepreneurship has been changing. Nowadays, migrants are starting businesses in sectors different from traditional retail or hotel and catering industries. Interestingly, the second generation of migrants born in the destination countries are following different businesses trajectories than their parents did, using the social capital and links between sending and receiving markets. Migrants are starting to act as new important actors in the economies of developed countries. Taking into account the existing research in this area, we propose a systematic approach to ethnic entrepreneurship, which is the main purpose of this article. Our system approach related to social sciences is understood as the recognition of macro- and medium- ranged dimensions of the system approach, and it presents ethnic entrepreneurship at three levels of analysis: input, system, output.