Search results

This study aims to investigate the role of ethnic networking ties in immigrant entrepreneurship literature, shedding light on insights that have been overlooked in existing literature.

A systematic literature review was conducted using a sample of 127 articles sourced from the Web of Science database. This review used a combination of bibliometric and content analysis.

The findings revealed the underproduction in this research field. The authors identified the dual characteristics and different types of ethnic ties, presented across various stages of immigrant business, the aspects often overlooked in current research. Drawing from these results, the authors proposed a conceptual model introducing four interconnected dimensions – local context, personal level, ethnic enclave and business development stages – that collectively shape the examination of ethnic ties and suggest avenues for further research to understand their role in the immigrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This study offers three notable contributions to existing literature. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that systematically reviews the current research status of ethnic ties in immigrant entrepreneurship. Secondly, it uncovered the dynamic nature of ethnic ties and their roles across various immigrant business stages. Thirdly, it introduces a conceptual model that serves as a framework for future investigations, addressing the under-explored multidimensional nature of ethnic ties, thereby presenting several practical, social and theoretical implications.

This paper responds to several calls for a cross-national comparative study of immigrant entrepreneurship throughout the longstanding discourse of this phenomenon. This study aims to comparatively analyze the nature of immigrant enclave entrepreneurship among one immigrant community across three different jurisdictional contexts (UK, Denmark and Norway) based on comparative ethnographic methods of inquiry.

The data was collected in person from April 2022 to June 2023 by the researchers to identify the similarities and differences of migrant entrepreneurial activities in three immigrant enclaves (Manchester, Oslo and Copenhagen). Comparative ethnographic narrative analysis methods and template analysis approaches were combined to analyze interviews, observations and secondary published data.

This study examines spatiality, sectoral occupation and market orientation for comparative analysis. Through detailed analysis, it uncovers the spatiality and nuances in market demands and sectoral similarities across diverse regulatory environments. Notably, it identifies traditional migrant sectoral occupations shared across regions and its relevance to immigrant enclaves.

This scholarly contribution explores immigrant entrepreneurship in various national contexts, emphasising their engagement in neglected and low-value sectors within immigrant enclaves. The study addresses the influence of the host economy’s conditions on immigrant entrepreneurs, impacting their strategic orientation and the extent of their “embeddedness”. It responds to the theoretical gap in immigrant entrepreneurship literature by conducting a cross-national investigation across countries, extending the comparative dimension to Norway and Denmark. The research employs a unique design focusing on a specific immigrant group and emphasizes spatial contexts, sectoral proliferation and market orientation within immigrant enclaves, offering insights into the mixed embeddedness perspective and the broader environmental forces shaping migrant entrepreneurial activities in the UK and Scandinavia.

The consumption of ethnic food is an integral part of the Hispanic culture. Therefore, this study was carried out with the intention of assessing the consumption and preferences for ethnic specialty produce by the Hispanics in the east coast of the USA with an aim of formulating production and marketing guidelines to meet the increasing demands of the rising Hispanic population in the USA.

Data were collected through telephone interviews from 542 randomly selected Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in 16 east coast regions of the USA. Questions related to socio‐demographic details and consumption and preference for 20 pre‐determined ethnic specialty produce were asked. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression.

Chain grocery stores were the most common outlets for ethnic produce. Freshness and quality were the most important criteria for both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Expenditure patterns revealed that they allocate 71 percent and 62 percent respectively on ethnic produce compared with other produce. Age and education had a negative influence while income had a positive influence on the willingness‐to‐pay for ethnic specialty produce.

In this study, only ten crops each were selected as ethnic specialty crops that are consumed by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and the average willingness‐to‐pay for these crops were elicited.

Based on the expenditure patterns of 20 ethnic specialty produce commonly consumed and having a potential to be grown in the USA, this study recommends crops to be prioritized for production trials and grower recommendations.

The approach outlined in this paper uses a market‐driven assessment for crop prioritization research.

The purpose of this study was to examine racial/ethnic differences in AFS use and their contributing factors using a decomposition analysis.

The 2018 National Financial Capability Study dataset was used to analyze the four major types of AFS—title loans, payday loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own (RTO) stores—as proxies for AFS use. The study conducted both logistic regression analysis and decomposition analysis to examine the contributing factors.

The results of the logistic regression analysis demonstrated significant disparities in the use of alternative financial services (AFS) among racial and ethnic groups. Specifically, it was found that Blacks were more likely to utilize title and payday loans, pawnshops, and rent-to-own (RTO) stores compared to Whites. In contrast, Hispanics and Asians/individuals of other ethnicities were less likely to use title loans, but Hispanics were more likely to opt for payday loans over Whites. Furthermore, objective financial literacy exhibited a negative association with the likelihood of using these four types of AFS, whereas subjective financial literacy consistently showed a positive association. When examining the decomposition analyses, it became evident that both objective and subjective financial literacy played significant roles in explaining the racial and ethnic disparities in AFS usage. However, the patterns varied in three specific pairwise comparisons.

This study revealed the relative contributions of each factor to the racial/ethnic disparities through decomposition analysis. Our Fairlie decomposition approach addressed non-linearities within the decomposition framework, particularly in estimating the probabilities of AFS utilization, given its binary outcomes. This extension builds upon the Oaxaca decomposition. The study offers valuable insights into the variations in AFS use among different racial and ethnic groups.

This study examined differences related to gender and racial/ethnic identity among academic researchers participating in the National Science Foundation’s “Innovation-Corps” (NSF I-Corps) entrepreneurship training program. Drawing from prior research in the fields of technology entrepreneurship and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, this study addresses the goal of broadening participation in academic entrepreneurship.

Using ANOVA and MANOVA analyses, we tested for differences by gender and minoritized racial/ethnic identity for four variables considered pertinent to successful program outcomes: (1) prior entrepreneurial experience, (2) perceptions of instructional climate, (3) quality of project team interactions and (4) future entrepreneurial intention. The sample includes faculty (n = 434) and graduate students (n = 406) who completed pre- and post-course surveys related to a seven-week nationwide training program.

The findings show that group differences based on minoritized racial/ethnic identity compared with majority group identity were largely not evident. Previous research findings were replicated for only one variable, indicating that women report lower amounts of total prior entrepreneurial experience than men, but no gender differences were found for other study variables.

Our analyses respond to repeated calls for research in the fields of entrepreneurship and STEM education to simultaneously examine intersecting minoritized and/or under-represented social identities to inform recruitment and retention efforts. The unique and large I-Corps national dataset offered the statistical power to quantitatively test for differences between identity groups. We discuss the implications of the inconsistencies in our analyses with prior findings, such as the need to consider selection bias.

This article explores in a qualitative manner the motivations of women entrepreneurs who start and run ethnic food businesses in London.

Our approach is qualitative and deploys phenomenographical analysis of interview narratives around categories of motivation.

We find that women ethnic food entrepreneurs are driven by a combination of desire for self-actualisation, identity-maintenance and community considerations. We demonstrate that women ethnic food entrepreneurs often go against the logic of the market, and they do so not because they lack other options, but for reasons that have to do with their (self-)identification as women and professionals, their prerogatives as mothers and daughters, their ethnic heritage, their emplacement in urban and global communities and their need to contribute. Our findings enrich understanding of female-led ethnic food entrepreneurship not as a demanding, overall unproductive undertaking for women with no other options, but as a realm of inspiration, community engagement and female-led innovation.

Our main contributions are the qualitative interrogation of perceptions and experiences of identity and difference in urban entrepreneurship from the point of view of our interviewees; providing concrete empirical evidence for it through our sample and proposing an approach to thinking women-led ethnic food entrepreneurship as a vehicle for translating urban superdiversity into social interactions across barriers of difference. We speak to the field of women entrepreneurship studies but specifically to the understudied realm of women-led food entrepreneurship, and to the cross-disciplinary field of (im)migrant entrepreneurship.

This study links ethnic identity and global identity with perceptions of brand globalness (BG) and brand local iconness (BLI) regarding home country brands. Identity Theory considers consumer behavior as driven by multiple identities concurrently and interactively.

Samples from two populations, Mexicans living in Mexico and Mexican Americans in the United States, were exposed to eight randomly presented real-world Mexican brands, followed by existing measures for several constructs. Comparing such populations is uniquely appealing for studies of immigrants’ home country brands. Data is analyzed via linear regression.

Ethnic and global identities have an interactive effect on BG, BLI, and purchase intention even after controlling for ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism. With the interaction term between ethnic identity and global identity included in the model, (a) global identity exhibits more efficacy than ethnic identity in explaining purchase intention; and (b) relationships involving BLI grow stronger while those involving BG become weaker. The direction of the effect of global identity depends on whether BG or BLI serves as the mediator. Ethnic identity has a significant effect on purchase intention through BLI among Mexican Americans.

Simultaneous focus on two interacting identities is novel in the international branding space. This approach is useful for illuminating the effects of brand attributes including BG and BLI as well as studying branding effects where self-symbolizing is of interest.

This paper looks at mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) support services in Aotearoa New Zealand, which predominantly center white queer voices and services and fail to account for the intersectional identities of young ethnic queers.

This exploratory, qualitative study investigated the social and professional support experienced and responded to by 43 young ethnic queers living in Aotearoa New Zealand, who were between 18 and 35 years of age. Participants identified as queer, non-binary, gay, pansexual, demisexual, gender fluid, non-binary and trans among others and held ethnic heritage from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas. Persadie and Narain's Mash Up methodological approach (2022) was used to analyze the data. Mash Up allowed us to understand the intersectional spaces of queer ethnic lives in white-dominated spaces, the ways in which young ethnic queers resisted the marginalization of their racialized being and took agency to counter actions and decisions that negated their presence and intersectional identities.

The findings from the study showed that young ethnic queers responded to the lack of adequate support services by establishing their own voluntary organizations and support networks. The study revealed that ethnic queer young people were critical of the white-dominated LGBTQIA+ support organizations; they created their own transformative spaces where they found “family” and community where they could be open about their queerness without the fear of rejection and stigma, while still advocating for equitable resources and an intersectional approach in queer mainstream services.

This paper provides valuable information on the lack of support for queer ethnic young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. The absence of information on the needs of this group poses a challenge to government departments, which rely on data to inform policy and allocate resources. The limited research and knowledge of this community make them less visible and, consequently, less likely to be given resources. It also means that harmful practices and behaviors toward queer ethnic young people by families and communities are more likely to go unnoticed and unaddressed. The paper also shows that the agency of young ethnic queers to create their own transformative spaces and to challenge the white-centric spaces, which have failed to consider their intersectional identities, has been instrumental to their well-being.

Since Piore’s (1979) seminal work on ethnic economies, there has been significant development in our understanding of the grouping process of immigrants and co-ethnics into economic, social, and political units, and the behavior of immigrant entrepreneurs within these groups. During the past two decades a number of sociologists have contributed several important concepts to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship such as social capital (e.g. Portes, 1998; Portes & Landolt, 1996, 2000), social embeddedness and network ties (e.g. Kloosterman & Rath, 2001; Portes & Sensenbrenner, 1993; Rath, 2002), and fine tuning the definitional distinctions between levels of co-ethnic cohesiveness, such as ethnic neighborhoods, ethnic economies, and ethnic enclaves (e.g. Light & Gold, 2000; Waldinger, 1982; Waldinger et al., 1990). More recently, business theorists have started to examine the problem of ethnic economic activity, incorporating more economic and entrepreneurship strategy concepts such as resource dependency (Greene, 1997), buyer-supplier relationships (Galbraith et al., 2003), access to financing (Smallbone et al., 2002), and differential marketing systems (Iyer & Shapiro, 1999). What appears to be sometimes lacking in modern discussions of ethnic economies and entrepreneurial behavior, however, is an underlying and unifying theoretical paradigm.

Although there is great potential for diversity, library and information science (LIS) is a relatively homogenous profession. Increasing the presence of librarians of color may help to improve diversity within LIS. However, recruiting ethnic minorities into LIS has proven to be difficult despite various initiative including scholarships, fellowships, and locally focused programs. The central questions explored in this research can be divided into two parts: (1) Why do ethnic minorities choose librarianship as a profession? (2) What would motivate members of minority groups to join a profession in which they cannot see themselves?

The research was conducted through semi-structured, qualitative interviews of 32 ethnic minority students from one of four ethnic minority groups (African American, Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American) currently enrolled in an LIS graduate program. Eleven themes emerged from the data: libraries, librarians, library work experience, LIS graduate program, career plans and goals, education and family, support, mentors, ethnicity and community, acculturation, and views of diversity.

The findings seem to support many assumptions regarding expectations and career goals. The findings related to libraries, librarians, mentors, and support illustrate that many recruitment initiatives are starting in the right place. However, the most noteworthy findings were those that centered on identity, acculturation, and diversity because they dealt with issues that are not often considered or discussed by many in the profession outside of ethnic minority organizations.