Middleman Minority Research Articles

Middleman Minority Nation: A New Conceptualisation of the State in Singapore

ABSTRACT The Singaporean state is often conceptualised as neoliberal, but I argue that this conceptualisation is mistaken. While Singapore embraces the neoliberal ‘all you have is yourself’ ethos, I contend, the state does not apply this ethos to individuals and families, but to society as a whole: to the relation between Singapore and ‘the world’, rather than to the domestic realm within Singapore. That is, Singapore is a communalist and not an individualist society – a society in which the group is paramount, and in which the rights and responsibilities of individuals are subordinated to group interests. I introduce the term ‘middleman minority state’ (MM state) to capture this social phenomenon, whereby the state scales up the tactics of the classic middleman minority to the level of a small nation-state. I argue that the uniqueness of Singapore as a polity is not fully reflected in 20th-century economists’ views on society and economics, which provide only a partial map of Singapore. Instead, we must look to Singapore’s history as a centre for middleman minorities, whose values and behaviour patterns were transformed into a successful state strategy as the country became an independent nation-state in the 1960s.

White Immigrant Merchants, the U.S. Mexican Population, and Middleman Entrepreneurship in the Early Twentieth-Century American West

ABSTRACT Studies applying middleman minority theory to white immigrants’ retail enterprise in the United States overlook the possibility that, in the early twentieth-century American West, white immigrants were attracted into merchandizing by opportunities to exploit a sizable and colonized Mexican population. The present study investigates this possibility. Regression analyses of 1930 Census data show that foreign-born whites were most likely to become merchants in those western locations that once belonged to Mexico and had the largest Mexican populations, consistent with the proposition that white immigrants’ middleman retail entrepreneurship was supported by the U.S. Mexican population’s size and colonized status. The results extend internal colonization scholarship by inferring that Mexican populations in the West, similar to black populations in non-western cities, provided white immigrants with a minority consumer market that was leveraged into retail enterprise in the early twentieth century. Thus, white immigrants, like native “Anglos,” benefited from the Mexican population’s subordination.

Indian South Africans as a middleman minority: Historical and contemporary perspectives

Beginning in the 1940s, a literature on middleman minorities emerged to demystify the intermediary economic niche that Jews had occupied in medieval Europe. They were viewed as ethnic entrepreneurs occupying the economic status gap. In the 1960s, scholars began to apply middleman minority theory to colonial societies and to American society. More recently, Coloureds in South Africa have been identified as a middleman minority of another type: semi-privileged proletarians occupying an economic status gap in labour between whites and Africans. A political status gap between whites and Africans, both seeking alliances to achieve hegemony, is also occupied by Coloureds. Among South African Indians, one finds ethnic entrepreneurs: a small shopkeeping and trading class from South Asia. But there are also Indian semi-privileged proletarians who emerged from the indentured labour population in the early twentieth century. This article employs a historical institutional approach to analyse political tensions among Indians, and examines the cleavage between Indians and other races over political rights vis-a-vis the South African state. It also offers a typology contrasting ethnic entrepreneurs with semi-privileged proletarians in terms of the differing economic status gaps they occupy. Furthermore, it illustrates how Indians occupy a political status gap in a complex settler colonial society like South Africa.

Book Review - Elena Sommer, Social Capital as a Resource for Migrant Entrepreneurship: Self-Employed Migrants from the Former Soviet Union in Germany Munich: Springer VS, 2020, 331 pp.

According to the author, this book aims to explore the accessibility and use of social capital within and outside the migrant community from the former Soviet Union (FSU) for migrant enterprises that operate in various markets over time. Elena Sommer’s book aims to shed light on a phenomenon that has spawned an international lexicon of words and phrases that include “ethnic entrepreneurship,” “ethnic business,” or “ethnic economy,” “middleman minority,” “sojourners,” “transculturality,” “orthodox ethnicity,” and “reactive ethnicity.” In her exploratory research, based on evidence from 62 qualitative interviews, Sommer examines the usage of social capital for entrepreneurial practices of self-employed migrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany. The study resulted from the author’s doctoral research at Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS). It was designed to show how business-related social relationships are influenced by a company’s marketing policy and access to specific entrepreneurial social networks. The author investigates the types of relationship networks migrants use as a platform for creating and growing small enterprises and how migrants’ entrepreneurial social networks evolve.

Minority status and self-employment: The mediating role of personal initiative, Emmanuel Wandera, Nkote Nabeta

Purpose: To examine the mediating role of personal initiative in the relationship between minority status and self-employment among self-employed women in Uganda. Methods: This study employed a cross sectional survey design to collect data from 203 self-employed women to test for the study hypothesis using partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using Smartpls version 3.2.9 professional. Findings: Findings indicate a positive and significant relationship between minority status and self-employment, and partial mediating role of personal initiative in the relationship between minority status and self-employment at 95% confidence interval. Implication: The findings of this research provide useful insights into the role of minority status in boosting self-employment among women. Personal initiative is not only a booster of self-employment but also enhances the ability of women to start enterprises for their survival. Limitations: The study was cross sectional hence imposing a limitation on changes in perception over time. Therefore, a longitudinal study in future is necessary. Besides, data were collected from self-employed women in Uganda. Above all, this study only considers minority status and personal initiative in explaining self-employment and yet there are other factors that could be explored. Originality/Value: This paper examines the mediating role of personal initiative in the relationship between minority status and self-employment in the context of minority women in a Uganda, against the auspice of middleman minority and personal initiative theory.

Evolution of “Ethnic” Business in Russia: Comparative Analysis of Entrepreneurship of Migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the entrepreneurial activity of migrants from Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan in Moscow and the Moscow region who have created a business in the period from the 1990s to the mid-2010s. The study was carried out on the analysis of 58 interviews with entrepreneurs and representatives of public organizations and journalists, as well as a survey of entrepreneurs of Kyrgyz origin conducted in 2017-2019. The comparison is based on the analysis of the factors and characteristics such as structural opportunities and limitations; motivation to engage in entrepreneurship; features of the formation of start-up capital, the composition of partners, personnel and consumer audience; types of entrepreneurial strategies; the role of ethnicity and ethnicity, as well as networks based on ties with relatives, fellow countrymen and compatriots. It is concluded that the concept of “middleman minority” is most suitable for describing the ideal type of entrepreneurship of migrants from Azerbaijan, and “ethnic economy” for migrants from Kyrgyzstan. However, the business activity of migrants is not limited to these types. The peculiarities of entrepreneurship of migrants, a variety of specific entrepreneurial strategies are born at the intersection of the mutual influence of migration history, socio-demographic characteristics and various socio-economic, political and local contexts in different historical periods.

Racializing Ethnic Entrepreneurship: Chinese Entrepreneurship in the Deep South

The research on ethnic entrepreneurship is prolific. Yet very rarely have scholars examined ethnic entrepreneurship through the lens of race and racialization. By using the example of Chinese-owned grocery stores in the Mississippi Delta region during the Jim Crow era, this article attempts to bridge the studies on migration, race, ethnic entrepreneurship, and place. Neither middleman minority nor ethnic enclave economy alone, the two main paradigms within the literature of ethnic entrepreneurship, fully explains the phenomenon of Chinese grocery stores in the Black communities in the U.S. South. By examining ethnic entrepreneurship through the lens of race and racialization, this article also explores the interracial relationships between Asian and Black communities by comparing and contrasting the Korean–Black relationship in Los Angeles and Chinese–Black relationship in the Delta. Despite the institutional barriers against interracial solidarity under the regime of White supremacy, which places Asian and Black communities in opposition to each other, certain historical and geographical contexts that facilitate interracial coembeddedness contribute to intercultural communications among communities of color and thus a more intimate interracial relationship.

“I Have an Accent in Every Language I Speak!”: Shadow History of One Chinese Family’s Multigenerational Transnational Migrations

According to scholar and Professor Wang Gungwu, there are three categories of Chinese overseas documents: formal (archive), practical (print media), and expressive (migrant writings such as poetry). This non-fiction creative essay documents what Edna Bonacich describes as an “middleman minority” family and how we have migrated to four different nation-city states in four generations. Our double minority status in one country where we were discriminated against helped us psychologically survive in another country. My family history ultimately exemplifies the unique position “middleman minority” families have in the countries they migrate to and how the resulting discrimination that often accompanies this position can work as a psychological advantage when going to a new country. We also used our cultural capital to survive in each new country. In particular, this narrative highlights the lasting psychological effects of the transnational migration on future generations. There is a wall of shame, fear, and traumas in my family’s migration story that still pervades today. My family deals with everything with silence, obfuscation, and anger. It has taken me twenty years to recollect a story so my own descendants can know where we came from. Thus, this is a shadow history that will add to the literature on Sino-Southeast Asian migration and remigration out to the United States. Specifically, my family’s migration began with my grandfather leaving Guangdong, China to Saigon, Vietnam (1935), to Hong Kong, (1969) (then a British Colony), and eventually to the United States (1975). This article explains why my family migrated multiple times across multiple generations before eventually ending up in California. Professor Wang urges librarians, archivists, and scholars to document and preserve the Chinese migrants’ expressive desires of migrant experiences and this expressive memoir piece answers that call.

Localizing ethnic entrepreneurship: “Chinese” chips shops in Belgium, “traditional” food culture, and transnational migration in Europe

ABSTRACTThis article explores the causes, dynamics, and theoretical implications of the “localization” of ethnic entrepreneurship through “traditional” food businesses in Europe. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2017, it analyses the emergence of “Chinese” chips shops in the Flemish province of Antwerp, Belgium. Highlighting the history of Chinese migration to Europe, it argues that a specific set of “contexts of exit” and “contexts of reception” explain this development. Important among these are Dutch language skills and long-term residence or citizenship in the Netherlands and Belgium, market saturation, and the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. The article posits that these Chinese entrepreneurs are neither “enclave entrepreneurs” nor a “middleman minority”: entering a “traditional” food sector, they must leverage on their “integration capital”. However, with this, they also become entangled in Belgian gastronationalism and gastropolitics. Finally, this “localization” also has a transnational dimension as many of these entrepreneurs re-migrated from the Netherlands.

Migration to the “First Large Suburban Ghetto” in America

In this article, I argue that Korean immigrant merchants were active agents who opened small businesses in South Central Los Angeles in order to overcome a range of disadvantages faced in American society. From a structural point of view, Korean immigrant merchants constituted a middleman minority group that played the dual role of “oppressed and oppressor” in the suburban ghetto. Although these merchants made efforts to maintain civil relations with their African American customers, they were often treated with hostile attitudes largely because of the exploitative relationship that existed between the two groups. However, I maintain that Korean American journalists and scholars have not only misunderstood the identity of the middleman minority as an innocent buffer but have also erroneously estimated that race relations with African Americans in Los Angeles were better than those in other areas of the United States.

Are We All Feminists? The Global Black Hair Industry and Marketplace in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Abstract The politically voiceless, economically visible, and racially indeterminate middleman minority status as noted by sociologists Edna Bonacich and Pyong Gap Min hardly comes to mind when scholars envision women of Africa and the African Diaspora. Still, when considering the ways the global black hair industry acts as a mechanism for work, production, value, agency, and mobility, we would be remiss if we did not include a discourse on the black hair industry, for it alternately critiques, challenges, and participates in binary conceptions of race, socioeconomic class, and citizenship. Further, while the traditional concept of the middleman minority subsumes the female identity under that of the male head of the family, the global black hair industry—largely established, fueled, and energized by black and African women—centralizes the female. Like many industries with a commanding economic force, black hair as an industry acts both within and without the bounds of the patriarchal state, macrocosmically, and the male head of the patriarchal family, microcosmically. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah, while concerned with her protagonist's mediation of the “Americanah” identity—the repatriated immigrant “with odd affectations, pretending to no longer know” home (2013a, 78)—also presents a unique observation of the ways that black hair and its commerce are also attendant, if not central, to notions of feminist ideology, both African and Western, advocated by Adichie in her feminist treatise “We Should All Be Feminists” (2013b). This paper seeks to illuminate the questions that Adichie raises in Americanah regarding the centrality and alterity of women, who, like traditional middleman minorities, act as consumers and producers within a market that is deeply entrenched in the racial, political, and economic framework of the larger patriarchal society, while also operating with a great deal of autonomy.

Coloured South Africans: a middleman minority of another kind

ABSTRACTBeginning in the 1940s, a literature on middleman minorities emerged to demystify the intermediary economic niche that Jews had occupied in medieval Europe. They were viewed as ethnic entrepreneurs occupying the economic status gap. In the 1960s, scholars began to systematically apply middleman minority theory to colonial societies and to American society. South Africa also has classic middleman minorities: immigrants from South Asia. This article identifies Coloured South Africans as a middleman minority of another type: semi-privileged proletarians. It also offers a typology contrasting ethnic entrepreneurs to semi-privileged proletarians.

The Challenges for Chinese Merchants in BotswanaA Middleman Minority Perspective博茨瓦纳华商面临的挑战-从其身为中介少数 派的角度分析

This paper discusses the challenges faced by Chinese merchants when engaging in retail activities in Botswana. The theory of a middleman minority will be used as a theoretical perspective to assess both the challenges and the strategies employed to meet them. The paper argues that Chinese merchants’ self-imposed isolation (combined with their sense of vulnerability as foreigners) is deeply rooted in their attitudes. This determines their circumstances and their responses to signs of hostility from the host society. On the other hand, the particular geographical location and economic situation of Botswana offers Chinese merchants opportunities to avoid competing among themselves and to manage their rejection by local society.

The Changing Character and Survival Strategies of the Chinese Community in India

The Chinese community has been settled in India for more than two centuries. Its relationship to the host society and to the authorities, first British and then Indian, has gone through different stages with different forms. It is important to examine the lives, traditions and attitudes of the Chinese community to understand its development and its changing character. This study argues that it is misleading to present this community as one that has always been marginalised and discriminated against in India. It examines the applicability of concepts such as ‘sojourning’, ‘corridors’ and ‘middleman minority’ to the community and its different sub-groups, both in British India and in post-independence India.

The Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–1947

This article describes and explains three patterns in the entry of Indian entrepreneurs in large-scale industries in South Asia, 1850–1947. It begins with Marwari businessmen in the jute industry in Calcutta. Then I discuss the success of the Parsi community in the Bombay cotton industries, and, finally, Gujarati (mainly Hindu) industrialists in Ahmedabad. I focus on three variables that might explain the timing, degree, and social and cultural variations in the emergence of indigenous industrialists in these cities. These variables concern: first, the colonial attitude towards indigenous industrialists in this field; second, whether or not these men belonged to a (religious) middleman minority; and, finally, their social and, in particular, occupational background.

Israeli-Palestinian Migrants in Jerusalem: An Emerging Middleman Minority

The increased tendency of Israeli-Palestinians to migrate to Jerusalem, despite internal and external barriers for their migration to Israel's large cities, is examined through a survey of 201 migrants. The role of higher education institutions as an initial pull factor explains their highly educated profile, but opportunities as a middleman minority between Israel and East Jerusalem Palestinians, who lack Israeli citizenship, are prime motives for staying in the city, despite limited housing and schooling choices, associated with not being identified with either Jewish or Palestinian Jerusalem. Although diverging from traditional middleman minorities, in their white-collar public and professional service concentrations and in serving a coethnic group, middleman attributes of Israeli-Palestinians in Jerusalem are most profound, based on being bilingual and possessing necessary formal credentials. Their case serves to broaden the context for the application of the middleman minority concept and to demonstrate the potential and limitations of middleman functions.

Arab American entrepreneurship in Detroit, Michigan

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the pathways to success of Arab American entrepreneurs in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, and how Arab American businesses impact the local Detroit economy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted extensive search of literature and in‐depth interviews with experts, entrepreneurs, CEOs and other senior executives of two large Arab and Chaldean community organizations. In addition, the authors also conducted site visits at community centers and the Seven Mile project in Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan.FindingsThe authors discovered several pathways to success important to Arab American entrepreneurship: start‐up capital provided by families and friends, training and education, support networks and support organizations in Detroit. In addition, some organizations, local churches and mosques have provided many essential services needed by new Arab American entrepreneurs. The authors found that the theory of middleman minority and the enclave economy theory provide very useful explanations for the phenomenon of Arab American entrepreneurship in Detroit. However, the natural business incubator model, first developed by Greene and Butler, best explains the success story of Arab American entrepreneurs in Detroit, Michigan.Originality/valueThe paper identifies some important pathways to the success of Arab entrepreneurship in Detroit, Michigan. The authors expand the natural business incubator model first developed by Greene and Butler by including the names of local organizations that play active roles in assisting Arab entrepreneurs in Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan.

Chinese entrepreneurs in poor countries: a transnational ‘middleman minority’ and its futures

In the early 1990s, I started doing ethnographic research among Chinese migrants in Hungary, a project that lasted until 2004 and included brief periods of research in Russia, Yugoslavia, and Roman...

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: a middleman minority in a transnational era

Part 1: History Early Contacts. Chinese Farmers, Hunters, Workers, and Merchants in Russia, 1858-1914. Chinese as Labourers and Soldiers in Russia's Wars, 1914-1922. Chinese in the Soviet Union, 1922-1989 Part 2: The Present Chinese Migration to Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989: Sources, Numbers, and Migration Strategies. Employment and the Ethnic Economy. Transnational Practices and Politics. Finding a Place in Eastern Europe? Conclusion: A Transnational Middleman Minority

Ethnic enclaves or middleman minority? Regional patterns of ethnic minority entrepreneurship in Britain

In public debate higher levels of self-employment among some ethnic communities are often celebrated as a manifestation of success. Regional economic development is a long-standing issue in British public policy, with the South-Eastern regions of England enjoying greater long-run prosperity than Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the other parts of England. The regional distribution of five entrepreneurial minorities in England and Wales is described. We test hypotheses derived from the middleman minority theory and the ethnic enclave model and find that self-employment in these groups is inversely related to minority share in the regional economically active population. The sectoral diversity of minority enterprises is positively related to their share in the regional economically active population.