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This study utilizes Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus to investigate the networking strategies of Asian and Black knowledge workers in the London Insurance Market. It also examines the factors contributing to the success or failure of these strategies. The trading activities of the London Insurance Market are underpinned by interdependent relations among its participants. It provides an appropriate context for examining the networking strategies adopted by Asian and Black workers to accelerate their careers.

This research employed a qualitative methodology, gathering data from 24 participants through semi-structured interviews. Participants were selected using purposive, convenience, and snowball sampling methods. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data and develop aggregated concepts from the identified themes and subthemes.

The London Insurance Market accords great importance to networking. Interpersonal connections significantly influenced career progression, often overshadowing educational attainments. Asian and Black workers faced systemic nepotism and limited access to influential networks in this field. Participants strategically used their interactions to overcome these challenges and advance their careers. Many believed that their careers had a better chance of progressing through informal networks than through formal channels such as Human Resources. Some participants declined to engage in the commonly accepted networking practices, choosing alternative ways to further their careers.

Findings underscore the need for implementing specific organizational policies to address systemic biases and nepotism, particularly in front-office recruitment. Such policies could include prioritizing merit-based hiring practices and developing targeted initiatives to reduce the underrepresentation of minority ethnic workers in front-office positions. By adopting these measures, organizations can create more equitable career advancement opportunities and leverage the full potential of their diverse workforce.

This study contributes to the existing literature on minority ethnic workers' careers, networking theory and workplace diversity. It provides insights into the networking strategies of Asian and Black workers within the London Insurance Market, revealing that these strategies are dependent on contextual factors. The study also highlights the pervasive practice of nepotism deeply ingrained in the habitus of the London Insurance Market and which acts as a barrier for gaining access to influential networks.

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 paper contributes to the development of an enhanced understanding of the breakout strategies of immigrant entrepreneurs within a transnational context. It develops a dynamic notion of breakout by placing it within a wider understanding of immigrant entrepreneurial strategy characterised by multifocal embeddedness within transnational space.

This study adopted a qualitative research methodological approach. In-depth interviews were completed with 30 first- and second-generation UK-based Nigerian entrepreneurs and key informants, to provide data on business growth strategies of individual immigrant entrepreneurs in the context of opportunity structures across host, home and third countries.

Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurs adopted distinctive entrepreneurial strategies related to the complex and diverse transnational context within which they were embedded. Findings demonstrated how the realisation of diversification and differentiation strategies was particularly influenced by locational and spatial strategies, the specific contextual embeddedness of the entrepreneur and generational differences across entrepreneurs.

Conceptualising immigrant entrepreneurship from a standpoint of transnational, multifocal embeddedness produces a complex and multi-layered understanding of business breakout as a dynamic process. Drawing together the unifocal, bifocal and multifocal dimensions of embeddedness with findings on the breakout strategies being pursued by immigrant entrepreneurs, an original typology is presented which identifies different approaches to breakout across varied contexts. This has significant policy and practice implications for the content, targeting and access of business support and wider social issues, relating to the identities, social mobility and integration of immigrant entrepreneurs.

Based on qualitative data from a large study exploring Muslim experiences in the workplace, this chapter explains how Muslim dress standards inform identity and are influenced by US cultural ideals about self-presentation and perceived anti-Muslim hostility. Theoretical sampling was used to find 25 men and 59 women, 32 of whom are veiled. These individuals worked at major corporations as numerical minorities or held professions where they encountered non-Muslims regularly. Informed by theories of orientalism and social identity, findings examine hegemonic representations of organizational power and describe how men could employ masculine practices to navigate anti-Muslim discourse and foster a sense of belonging at work. Within immigrant-centered workplaces, women face cultural backlash for appropriating Western styles deemed immodest. While working outside their community, women who wore hijabs emphasized their femininity through softer colors, makeup, or “unpinning” their veil to offset the visceral reaction to their hijab. Thus, adapting to workplace dress expectations is structured by intersections of gender, religion, and workplace location. This chapter illustrates how Muslim dress strategies indirectly reflect how Western standards of dress, behavior, and self-expression determine qualifications and approachability within workplace structures, marginalizing Muslims and reproducing racial and gender hierarchies.

The paper seeks to analyse the constellation of social structures, administrative institutions and hierarchies that sustain the exclusion of the San minority group in Zimbabwe, with a particular focus on how the European expansion in the eighteenth century, the modern state and private property owners have colluded to perpetuate exclusion from accessing forest as their natural habitat. The purpose of this paper is to therefore highlight the various abuses, including those social, administrative legislative frameworks that discriminate against the San minority and it advocates for actions the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent to proposed developments.

Through the modern ethnographic approach, data generation was guided by the principles of indigenous and decolonising research methodologies, which place emphasis on the importance of San people telling their own stories thereby shifting the power of a researcher to the indigenous participants. This is a qualitative study that gives prominence to the descriptions of experiences (phenomenology) and interpretations (hermeneutic) of their survival. The paper employed cultural ecology theoretical framework as a lens through which to see the San’s exclusion from forest resources and how this has tragically shifted their egalitarian lifestyle characterised by reciprocity, sharing and levelling to adaptation to the unfamiliar sedentary farming practices.

The technical implementation of forest boundary demarcation and forcing the San to join sedentary farming form part of the state’s territorialisation that excludes, restricts and disrupts the San minority from accessing forest products. The treatment of the minority group reveals not only the enormous authority of the state to transfer alienation to individuals and companies but also to legitimise the exclusion by establishing laws and policies that safeguard the interests of those favoured by the state. The San, who are already overly dominated by the social administrative structures of the Ndebele and Kalanga tribes, lack systematic and organised responses to their marginalisation.

The San community in Zimbabwe is under-researched and under-theorised particularly in relation to how historically formed postcolonial hierarchies of exclusion and marginalisation manifest themselves in contemporary resource governance. Less is known about how those that are powerful – government officials, private property owners and Kalanga/Ndebele tribes benefit more from the environmental resources than the powerless minority San, whose livelihoods depend on the primary natural resources. The unequal power relations have been demonstrated by the evictions of the minority from wildlife areas that were converted into game parks. The study reveals how indigenous San not only resist exclusion but also develop adaptable strategies through negotiations to improve their situation with social and administrative institutions.

In this chapter, Mousumi De presents the principles and implications of CRT in the context of Asian and Asian American experiences including the perspective, features, strategies, and new directions on how to facilitate the preparation of teacher candidates and work with all teachers to understand the complexity of the Asian and Asian American identity, their racialized experiences, and their sociohistorical, transnational contexts that continue to influence their lived experiences. This chapter highlights the important issues and challenges facing Asians and Asian Americans that have been camouflaged by their stereotypical treatment as model minorities. It also shares the work of many scholars on approaches for promoting diversity and inclusion, such as implementing anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and inclusive history curricula, cultural citizenship education, teaching for social justice, and culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching for addressing the marginalization of Asians and Asian Americans.

The study examines the prevalence and correlates of perceived discrimination across ten Asian American ethnic groups. The goal is to disaggregate an artificially created broad categorization of Asians into subgroups to reveal the existing intragroup differences.

Bivariate and multivariate analyses were based on data from the 2016 National Asian American Survey (NAAS). The exclusion of missing data on all variables used in the analysis revealed a final analytical sample size of 4,276.

Compared to all other Asian American ethnic groups, Cambodians report the lowest frequency of perceived discrimination on all outcome measures. On the contrary, the prevalence of perceived discrimination is highest for Bangladeshis and Indians on lifetime and job-related discrimination and for Indians and Japanese on day-to-day discrimination. Nearly all Asian American ethnic groups are more likely to report one or more types of perceived discrimination than Chinese Americans. The observed relationships disappear for Cambodians, Pakistanis and Japanese but persist for Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Hmong and Indians after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics. Among the socio-demographic controls, gender, birthplace, education and employment status are found to be significant predictors of perceived discrimination.

The findings of the study further the discussion on the importance of disaggregating minority groups and considering their heterogeneous experiences of perceptions of discrimination in the United States.