Ethnic Entrepreneurs


Book Description

Ethnic Entrepreneurs examines how diverse groups, including indigenous communities in Latin America and Latino communities in the United States, have become visible and valuable as agents of economic development in Latin America in recent years.




Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship brings together a group of eminent and up-and-coming young scholars who apply an intersectional perspective to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship. Against the traditional approach’s emphasis on ethnicity and its primacy, which tends to conflate ethnicity with other social groupings (i.e., social class), considers their effect as an additive or secondary consequence only (i.e., gender), or ignores their influence altogether (i.e., race), the studies in this volume recognize that multiple dimensions of identity intermix to condition entrepreneurial outcomes. Starting with the premise that systems of oppression and privilege, specifically capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, are endemic to the American social structure, the works in this volume recognize that these interlocking systems of inequality condition the life chances of entrepreneurs from diverse social locations differently, even among members of the same ethnic group. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.




The New Entrepreneurs


Book Description

With a focus on a diverse group of Latino entrepreneurs in the Houston area, Valdez explores how class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape Latino entrepreneurs' capacity to succeed in business in the United States.




Approaching Transnationalisms


Book Description

The term 'transnationalism' has gained considerable academic and popular currency despite a lack of clear definitions, in part because its overall form changes as its influence incorporates additional spheres of daily life on a variety of scales and contexts. The purpose of this volume is to bring together different perspectives on this phenomenon, using case studies that represent some of the most current thinking on 'transnationalism' in a wide range of disciplines. Central themes which this book explores include legal and economic reactions to transnational migration; the (re)negotiation of identities in the context of changing national, social and cultural identities; and the emergence of new imaginings of home and social space in transnational communities. Approaching Transnationalisms: Studies on Transnational Societies, Multicultural Contacts and Imaginings of Home foregrounds powerful transnational forces crossing the boundaries of nation-states, and at the same time, gives attention to the continued significance of the nation-state and the diversity of localized reactions to transnational challenges.




Ethnic Marketing


Book Description

Together with the development of transformative technologies that epitomize globalization, the ongoing movements of people across borders and other socio-economic pressures are creating a fast-changing business environment that is difficult for business to understand, let alone control. Dominant social expectations that immigrants should seek to adopt an assimilationist socialization path towards the host country’s mainstream are contradicted by minority ethnic group resilience. There is no evidence that these groups naturally disappear within the cultural and behavioural contexts of their adopted countries. Since ethnic minority consumers cannot be expected to assimilate, then they maintain some significant degree of unique ethnicity related consumer characteristics that convert into threats and opportunities for business. The inherent socialisation process also provides opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurship and for proliferation of ethnic minority business. Following from the extensive examination of scholarly perspectives of ethnic marketing theory, there is an acknowledged and marked divide between theoretical exhortations and what is done in practice, a relative oversight of the implications of mixed embedded markets, and a propinquity to overlook the crucial role played by ethnic entrepreneurship and ethnic networks. Opportunity valuations are difficult to enact due to a lack of intelligence about ethnic markets. Variable sentiment about the future of ethnic marketing links to different predictions on how the drivers of globalization will impact on the acculturation paths of ethnic minorities. Keeping a focus on the ethnic group as the unit of analysis, combining ethnic marketing and ethnic entrepreneurship theories provides intelligence about contemporary ethnic marketing and practice perspectives. The ultimate objective is to reduce the theory-practice divide through the development of a collaborative framework between business and scholars that converts into theory-in-use.




Immigration and Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Many nations invite foreigners to work within their borders, but few welcome them. Those countries that do receive a torrent of immigrants create pressures that analysts expect to intensify as population growth and social unrest mount in the less developed countries of the world. Immigration and Entrepreneurship, now in paperback, offers a comparative analysis of worldwide immigration issues while focusing more specifically on the emerging influence of entrepreneurship as a potent factor in the economic and social integration of immigrants.In linking the common immigrant and settler experiences with the upsurge in self-employment, the contributors to this volume use California as their base of comparison. The state has both a huge and varied immigrant population and an entrepreneurial economy that has facilitated the formation of immigrant-owned firms. The Los Angeles riots of the nineties indicated the volatility of the mix. Aided by ethnic and familial networks, such firms have served as a route of economic advancement.Immigration and Entrepreneurship offers a comparative perspective unique in the literature of immigration by broaching the topic from both global and local perspectives. Whereas most studies examine the experience of a single group or groups in a particular destination economy, this volume emphasizes variations in the way different nations receive immigrants as causes of differences in immigrant behavior. Among the innovative themes discussed by a range of international scholars are the entrepreneurial efforts and tensions in the garment industry in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin; Koreans' enterprise and identities in Los Angeles and Japan; and U.S. immigration policies. The result is a genuinely global methodology.




Race and Entrepreneurial Success


Book Description

A comprehensive analysis of racial disparities and the determinants of entrepreneurial performance—in particular, why Asian-owned businesses on average perform relatively well and why black-owned businesses typically do not. Thirteen million people in the United States—roughly one in ten workers—own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.




Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies for Start-Ups and Small Business


Book Description

Business competencies are very complex, and entrepreneurs' beliefs, actions, and aspirations for their businesses are widely influenced by their sense of values and beliefs. This influences the actions they take, especially in challenging situations. Successful entrepreneurs can accept challenges, learn to make responsible choices, and make sure to weigh all possible outcomes. Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies for Start-Ups and Small Business is an assortment of innovative research on the methods and applications of strategic models for entrepreneurship competency. While highlighting topics including intellectual capital, risk management, and entrepreneurship education, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business executives, industry professionals, academicians, students, and researchers seeking to reduce the level of failure of entrepreneurial activity within the global business community.




The History of Black Business in America


Book Description

In this wide-ranging study Stephen Foster explores Puritanism in England and America from its roots in the Elizabethan era to the end of the seventeenth century. Focusing on Puritanism as a cultural and political phenomenon as well as a religious movement, Foster addresses parallel developments on both sides of the Atlantic and firmly embeds New England Puritanism within its English context. He provides not only an elaborate critque of current interpretations of Puritan ideology but also an original and insightful portrayal of its dynamism. According to Foster, Puritanism represented a loose and incomplete alliance of progressive Protestants, lay and clerical, aristocratic and humble, who never decided whether they were the vanguard or the remnant. Indeed, in Foster's analysis, changes in New England Puritanism after the first decades of settlement did not indicate secularization and decline but instead were part of a pattern of change, conflict, and accomodation that had begun in England. He views the Puritans' own claims of declension as partisan propositions in an internal controversy as old as the Puritan movement itself. The result of these stresses and adaptations, he argues, was continued vitality in American Puritanism during the second half of the seventeenth century. Foster draws insights from a broad range of souces in England and America, including sermons, diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and colony, town, and court records. Moreover, his presentation of the history of the English and American Puritan movements in tandem brings out the fatal flaws of the former as well as the modest but essential strengths of the latter.




Handbook of Research on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship


Book Description

Professor Dana and his colleagues have carefully and successfully put together a collection of chapters on ethnic minority entrepreneurship from all parts of the world. The book comprises eight parts and 49 chapters. Undoubtedly, given the massive size and content of a 835-page book, it is fair to ask, is it value for money? The answer is unequivocally yes! A further comment on the content of the book should probably reassure potential readers and buyers of the book. . . This collection is undoubtedly rich, creative and varied in many respects. Therefore, it will be of great benefit to researchers and scholars alike. . . I will strongly recommend this book to researchers, students, teachers and policy-makers. Aminu Mamman, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research The volume presents an impressive panorama of studies on ethnic entrepreneurships ranging from Dalits in India to Roma entrepreneurs in Hungary. B.P. Corrie, Choice From a focus on middle-man minorities in the 1950s, the study of minority ethnic entrepreneurship has evolved into a vast undertaking. A major ingredient in this expansion is the massive population movements of the past thirty years that have created ethnic minority communities in almost all advanced economies. From New York to San Francisco, from Birmingham to Hamburg, from the Chinese in Canada, to the Turks in Finland, to the Ghanians in South Africa to the Lebanese in New Zealand, more than twenty chapters in this volume treat small-scale ethnic entrepreneurship and the cultural and institutional resources which support it. At the other end of the spectrum, the ethnic Chinese have created ever larger multi-divisional enterprises in the host societies of Southeast Asia. At the mid-point of the spectrum, analyzed in an elegant paper by Ivan Light, is the recently identified transmigrant entrepreneur accultured in two societies but assimilated in neither whose special endowments have provided the lynchpin for for much of the international trade expansion in the global economy over the past decade. And Dana and Morris provide us with much more Afro-American entrepreneurship, caste and class, the theory of clubs, women ethnic entrepreneurs, minority ethnicity and IPOs. In the quality of its contributions and in the reach of its coverage, this Handbook attains a very high standard. Peter Kilby, Wesleyan University, US The new Handbook of Research on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship, edited by Léo-Paul Dana, constitutes a major contribution to the literature on ethnic enterprise. Unlike previous work, which tended to focus on one country or one region of the world, this book is global in scope. You will find chapters on America, Europe, and Asia, as well as integrative essays that review important principles and concepts from the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship. I particularly appreciate the historical and evolutionary framework within which the contributions are situated. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone who has an interest in immigration and entrepreneurship or ethnic entrepreneurship more generally. Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina, US This exhaustive, interdisciplinary Handbook explores the phenomena of immigration and ethnic minority entrepreneurship in light of marked changes since the mid-twentieth century and the advent of easier, more affordable travel and more open and integrated national economies. The international contributors, key experts in their respective fields, illustrate that myriad ethnic minorities exist across the globe, and that their entrepreneurship can and does significantly influence national economies. The contributors go on to promote our understanding of which factors make for successful entrepreneurship, and, perhaps more importantly, how negative political consequences that members of successful entrepreneurial ethnic minorities might face can be minimized. This extensive collection of current research on entrepr