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This paper aims to explore how immigrant small business owners construct entrepreneurial identities by deploying strategies of boundary making in Hong Kong.

Conceptually, it departs from the theoretical discussions of immigrant economy and ethnic boundary making. The analyzes are based on qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation primarily in the South Asian immigrant economies in Hong Kong in the period 2014-2017.

Four strategies of boundary work including blurring boundaries, inversion of boundaries, personal repositioning and reconfirming of boundaries are identified. They bring to light that small immigrant entrepreneurs in Hong Kong still encounter considerable obstacles in the process of social integration. Boundary work serves as strategies to release sentiments that would symbolically bring them closer to the mainstream society. Following the “city as context” framework (Brettell, 1999; Foner, 2007), this paper argues that the various boundary making strategies have been shaped by the legacies of racism, neoliberal governance of integration and urban work ethos highlighting problems and individual responsibilities in Hong Kong.

This paper contributes to the literature of the immigrant economy and social integration. First, it sheds light on the role of symbolic meanings and non-economic gains of immigrant entrepreneurship in social integration. Second, it illuminates our understanding that immigrant economy can provide a channel for advancing and weakening social status, thus reminding us not to assume the path of social integration as a straightforward and positive one.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conflict analysis framework that better captures the complexity of conflicts in divided societies by including the differing perceptions of identity boundaries between ethnic majorities and minorities in divided societies.

The analysis draws on the social boundaries and societal security literatures to develop a typology representing four dyads of perceived identity boundaries that illustrate the different dynamics of ethnic relations in divided societies.

The exploratory cases illustrate how the perceptions of identity boundaries have implications for conflict dynamics that call for different conflict management strategies.

The empirical cases serve to illustrate the application of the theoretical framework. Policy makers devising conflict management strategies in these deeply divided societies are likely to err if differing perceptions of social boundaries are not taken into consideration. Thus, the authors provide explicit policy recommendations for conflict management in each of the dyads presented in the typology.

Using the framework that incorporates differing perceptions of identity allows analysts to account for the impact of external actors in shaping and maintaining identity boundaries and allows for a consideration of the possible differing interpretations of the boundary held by different groups as well as the implications this has for conflict analysis and management.

The authors develop a model that accounts for the perceptions of both the majority and the minority of the identity boundaries that separate divided societies. They account for the implications for conflict dynamics and thus for conflict management strategies of differing perceptions of identity boundaries, which provides a perspective that is both theoretically significant and policy relevant, as most policy makers assume that ethnic minorities and majorities see the social boundary between them in similar terms.

Literature on immigrant and ethnic minority entrepreneurship almost exclusively focusses on the west, while neglecting other world regions. This neglect is problematic not only because international migration is on the rise outside the west, but also because it reveals an implicit ethnocentrism and creates particular presumptions about the nature of ethnic minority entrepreneurship that may not be as universally valid as is often presumed. The purpose of this paper is to examine ethnic minority entrepreneurship in non-western contexts to critically assess two of these presumptions, namely that it occurs in the economic margins and within clear ethnic community boundaries.

The authors draw on academic literature (including the authors’ own) to develop two case descriptions of ethnic minority entrepreneurship outside the west: the Mennonites in Belize and the Chinese in Cambodia. For each case, the authors describe the historic entrepreneurial trajectory, i.e. the historical emergence of entrepreneurship in light of relevant community and society contexts.

The two cases reveal that, in contrast to characterisations of ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the west, the Mennonites in Belize and the Chinese in Cambodia have come to comprise the economic upper class, and their business activities are not confined to ethnic community boundaries.

The paper is the first to elaborate the importance of studying ethnic minority entrepreneurship outside the west, both as an aim in itself and as a catalyst to work towards a more neutral framework.

This research focuses on the ways in which individuals play out their Scottish ethnic feelings and on the role of dress in this process. Using the grounded theory approach, participants defining themselves as ethnically Scottish were interviewed for this study. The findings indicate that respondents vary greatly in the emphasis they place on Scottish ethnicity when defining their self‐identities. Additionally, respondents differ in the degree to which they feel complete in their Scottish identity. Those who find their Scottish ethnicity to be salient to their definition of self put more effort into the construction of that identity. Oftentimes, ethnic dress symbols play a prominent role in this construction process – the importance of dress diminishes as feelings of identity completeness increases.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the life worlds of Tibetan students who participate in China’s inland boarding programs and seek to understand the social networks they develop in the Han-culture dominant school settings.

This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Tibetan students (Dorji and Lhamo) in a Beijing inland boarding high school.

This study found that the Tibetan students are capable social actors who construct two kinds of social networks, the “we” group (co-ethnics) vs the “they” group (cross-ethnics), and mobilize different social capitals strategically. The former provides them with emotional support, cultural affinity and a sense of belonging, while the latter helps them achieve instrumental outcomes, such as Mandarin proficiency, academic improvement and broadened horizons.

However, the group boundary they draw between the two kinds of networks reflects the futility of government efforts to promote interethnic integration through the inland schools.

The issue of minority students as active agents in constructing social networks and mobilizing social capital in unfamiliar sociocultural settings is a relatively new research area (Reynolds, 2007; Holland et al., 2007), whereas the Tibetan students in China are among the least known in the existing scholarship.

The purpose of this article is to develop an alternative approach to researching the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in Asian markets.

A conceptual approach is taken.

The paper has argued that in Asian markets culture can be better understood on the basis of cultural groupings (e.g. ethnic grouping) than on politically defined and artificially created national boundaries. The assessment and comparison of cultural differences and similarities in Asia can be conducted by using an “enlarged” emic approach. Given the idiosyncratic nature of relationships and the increasing significance of the emic contexts enriched by globalisation, the proposed approach is likely to generate a better understanding of the impact of culture on relationship creation and network formation in emerging Asian markets.

Managers doing business in emerging Asian markets need to go beyond traditional national culture stereotypes to capture cultural diversities and paradoxes in terms of, for example, ethnic culture, regional culture, professional culture, and emerging global culture groupings within and across national borders.

Differing from the “either/or” nature of the mainstream scholarship which tends to bipolarise national cultures, this paper emphasises the “both/and” character of Asian cultures which intrinsically embrace paradoxes in philosophies, values, and behaviours. The paper has suggested that an “enlarged” emic approach to cross‐cultural clustering and comparison be used in Asian contexts to better understand the workings of relationship creation and network formation in emerging Asian markets.

The aim of this study is to explore the status of contemporary ethnic entrepreneurship studies in 1999‐2008 in order to map the intellectual structure of ethnic entrepreneurship research and to provide insights for future research in this field.

This study collected citation data from SSCI, resulting in a data set of 403 journal articles and 18,656 cited references. Then using co‐citation analysis, this study identified the core research themes in the ethnic entrepreneurship literature in 1999‐2008.

The results showed that contemporary ethnic entrepreneurship studies clustered around a few key research themes and their research foci have shifted from research on enclave economies, ethnic enterprises, and social embeddedness to research on immigrant entrepreneurs, immigrant networks, and transnational entrepreneurs.

With the qualification of citation and co‐citation analysis, this study profiles the changing paradigms of contemporary ethnic entrepreneurship studies and traces the development of ethnic entrepreneurship research, and thus provides important insights on future ethnic entrepreneurship research, including transnational entrepreneurs, theory refinement and theory development on ethnic entrepreneurship, as well as ethnic culture and entrepreneurship. Limitations of using SSCI data are also discussed.

The intellectual structure of ethnic entrepreneurship literature has received relatively little attention in spite that a large number of studies have been done in this field. This study provides researchers with a new way of profiling key themes and their relationships in ethnic entrepreneurship, which will help the academia and practitioners better understand contemporary ethnic entrepreneurship studies.

The purpose of this study is to systematically review the literature on the intersections among family, migration and entrepreneurship in the context of Vietnam. This paper aims to shed light on the current state of knowledge of the research field by highlighting some key bibliographic trends among existing literature, mapping existing knowledge in the field of research and recommending future research agenda.

This study adopts a systematic literature review approach with five steps. A list of 24 papers that are extracted from a pool of 643 papers in the Core Collection of Web of Science and Scopus were selected as the most relevant to the research questions used for further in-depth analysis.

Bibliometric analysis indicates that this research field is considered an infant research stream that is dominated by qualitative empirical studies. Content analysis reveals how Vietnamese migrant families mobilize and use various kinds of cultural, social, human and financial capital for entrepreneurship. They also generate resources to develop family-owned enterprises that are expected to be continued over generations. Five research gaps for future research are identified: functions of family, downsides of networks, the role of transnational and returnee entrepreneurs, gender and methodology.

The choice of a limited number of keywords and access to only two databases (Web of Science and Scopus) are limitations of this study. Furthermore, the selection of the articles for content analysis is subjective although research triangulation is applied in this review.

This research is a pioneering systematic literature review that sheds light on the interconnectedness of family, migration and entrepreneurship in the case of Vietnamese migrant entrepreneurs.

Immigrant groups often pursue entrepreneurial endeavors in their new home country. Even though both immigrant entrepreneurship and organizational identity have received scholarly attention, there has been little systematic exploration of identity strategies pursued by immigrant-owned organizations. In this article, we develop a theoretical framework that draws on the concepts of liability of foreignness and social identity theory in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship. Our framework explores how immigrant entrepreneurs may negotiate identities for their firms through the development of specific identity strategies that confirm or underplay their national/ethnic identities in order to survive in their immediate environment. We develop a model that shows how these confirmations or underplaying strategies work both for firms that have an individualistic entrepreneurial orientation, as well as those with a collective/associative entrepreneurial orientation. We also suggest two contextual moderators to this relationship: (1) the image of the founder's country of origin, and (2) the presence of immigrant networks in the host country, which may alter the effectiveness of identity strategies in terms of organizational mortality outcomes.

Managing people in a multinational corporation most often means, communicating across cultural as well as linguistic boundaries. Through the study of Danish expatriates in Saudi Arabia this paper sets out to investigate the use of language as related to ethnicity and group formation.

Investigating the use of language in international settings, an ethnographic fieldwork methodology relying on longitudinal participant observations and semi‐structured interviews is applied.

The relation between language usage and ethnicity is discussed with regard to cross‐cultural management. Based on a case of Danish expatriates, language can be identified as linked to social strategies of inclusion and exclusion.

The analysis indicates that language use should be conceived as a dynamic process linked to social strategies facilitating categorization of groups in the struggle for resources and recognition. It is recommended that the character of language as linked to social strategies is taken into account in international business. Ignoring the important role of language in multinational corporations may lead to loss of resources and hindrances to organizational and managerial development due to the lack of communication and knowledge sharing.

By applying a process‐oriented theoretical perspective combined with an iterative data collection, new insights into the social dynamics of language use in multinational corporations are provided.