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Analyses the factors influencing South Asian entrepreneurial expansion in Great Britain and the validity of conventional wisdom which attributes its success to cultural factors. It suggests that entrepreneurial growth depends positively on educational attainment, personal savings invested at start‐up, hard work in the initial stages, and the delegation of responsibilities to non‐family members. Further analysis indicates that later entrants into business gained relevant prior work experience and focused on serving non‐Asian customers, which may have contributed towards their success. The pursuit of constant product and technological improvement and employee training have also influenced growth. There is strong evidence that entrepreneurs with larger‐sized businesses have developed international linkages and focused on one key business area.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the sustainability of an emergent West African business quarter in Manchester, UK. Comparisons are drawn with developments among other ethnic groups. The research is placed in the context of international literature on ethnic entrepreneurship.

The research is primarily qualitative, using semi‐structured interviews and conversational life histories with a sample of West African retail businesses and a comparative group of other local businesses. Some use is made of quantitative information from census and other public data sources.

New West African enterprises appear, over the last few years, to have stabilised the declining retail district of Moston Lane in north Manchester. These new businesses are however confined to few sectors: food stores, hair and beauty salons, cafes, Internet cafes and clothing shops. These developments may parallel the success of longer established retail quarters in Manchester and elsewhere. However, most of the businesses may not survive long, having provided a temporary living, and some entrepreneurial experience, for their owners.

Limited sample size and short time frame make results exploratory rather than definitive. The research provides however a base for future investigations.

The businesses studied provide economic opportunities for some immigrants with limited labour market opportunities.

Immigrants are helped to maintain the integrity of their culture through the purchase of appropriate goods and services.

This paper provides the first consideration of a specifically African retail quarter in Britain, adding an additional ethnicity to the roster of identifiable geographic business locations.

This paper contributes to our understanding of the intersection between entrepreneurship and family businesses by examining the business aspirations of immigrant entrepreneurs from five different ethnic minority communities in the UK. It explores differences in the entrepreneurs' antecedents that might explain differences in their aspirations and examines the interaction between aspirations and business behaviour and outcomes. It finds that despite the importance of the family in their businesses, ethnic minority entrepreneurs have diverse aspirations. It is possible to distinguish between those with business‐first, family‐first, money‐first and lifestyle‐first aspirations. Their educational and family background affects entrepreneurs' aspirations, as does their stage on the family life cycle. Differences in aspirations are related to the nature of business, the way in which it is managed, the recruitment of professional managers and entrepreneurial performance. Our findings highlight the diversity in aspirations among family business owners and the complexity of the interaction between ethnicity, culture, class and entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate aspiring immigrant opportunity (AIO) entrepreneurs' start-up location decisions.

The authors used conjoint analysis to explore 1,264 location decisions nested within 79 highly educated, first-generation AIO entrepreneurs.

The authors found that although government support positively influences business location decisions, network support decreases the perceived benefits of government support for AIO entrepreneurs. Furthermore, locations with high costs of doing business are unattractive to AIO entrepreneurs, but financial capital access through ethnic and nonethnic sources in these locations enhances the appeal of high-cost locations.

The generalizability of the findings to AIO entrepreneurs should be considered with caution. Future research should longitudinally examine immigrant opportunity entrepreneurs' location decisions and their implications for their start-up and community-level performance outcomes. The authors also encourage replication of the study.

The findings of this study have implications for AIO entrepreneurs who intend to make start-up location decisions. Also, government policymakers can use the findings of this study to better attract AIO entrepreneurs to different locations.

By integrating ethnic enclave theory and location theory, this research contributes to theory and practice about immigrant opportunity entrepreneurs' start-up location decisions which are currently underexplored in the immigrant entrepreneurship literature.

This study aims to investigate the trends in existing studies in the field of ethnic entrepreneurship in the context of growing markets in terms of definitions, theories, themes, methodologies and settings.

This study used bibliometric analysis and used Publish or Perish software with Google Scholar as the database. A total of 183 articles published in 122 journals from 1988 to 2018 were selected. This study used systematic data to reveal trends in growing markets and qualitative inductive analysis to define relevant themes within the topic.

The results show that ethnic entrepreneurship is defined as involving immigrants from developing countries. From a theoretical point of view, socio-cultural theories, socio-economic theories and combinations of both have been used to explain the phenomenon. Six research themes have been developed indicating potential explorative and exploitative research themes. This study identified the dominance of the qualitative approach in ethnic entrepreneurship research and found that the typical research subjects are Asian immigrants, especially Chinese, in developed countries. The articles reviewed were mainly conducted in developed countries (68.85%) and a lesser portion in developing countries (13.66%), particularly Asian countries.

This study provides future directions for research on ethnic entrepreneurship, such as gender studies of ethnic entrepreneurs and factors affecting the opening of new businesses in new locations.

This study reveals trends in the ethnic entrepreneurship field based on the country in which the study was conducted, the definition of ethnic entrepreneurship, the theories, the research themes, the methodologies, the research setting and the ethnicity studied. It also used the framework of input–process–output to establish a generic road map of the ethnic entrepreneurship research area.

The methodology discussed in this chapter is extracted from a qualitative analysis that explored the entrepreneurship of Mexicans in three cities in the province of Quebec using the conceptualising categories inspired by grounded theory as an analytical tool. The main contribution of the chapter lies in the fact that the methodological decisions that were taken to answer the research question about the process of business creation by immigrants of Mexican origin are explicitly given in detail. The use and limits of the grounded theory methodology in entrepreneurship studies are discussed. The data collection procedures, the corpus of information that was analysed, the characteristics of the people who participated in the study, as well as the instruments and techniques used to understand the data are described. The chapter details the prior considerations for the selection of the study territory and the particular limits of the research. This is rarely done in studies of immigrant entrepreneurship.

The conceptual framework of Multicultural Hybridism is adopted to reflect the emerging themes of transnationalism and superdiversity in the context of ethnic minority migrant entrepreneurs breaking out of their ethnic enclaves into mainstream economy. It is constructed as an extension of Mixed Embeddedness theory (Kloosterman, 2006), given that ‘Multicultural Hybrid’ (Arrighetti, Daniela Bolzani, & Lasagni, 2014) firms display stronger resilience with a higher survival rate than enclaved businesses (Kloosterman, Rusinovic, & Yeboah, 2016). With further integration of incremental diversification typology (Lassalle & Scott, 2018), the current study adopts Multicultural Hybridism as a lens to explore the opportunity recognition capabilities of transnational, migrant entrepreneurs who are facilitated by the hybridity of opportunity recognition (Lassalle, 2018) from linking host-country and home-country cultures. The hybridity of opportunity recognition focuses on access to markets and resources between transnational ethnic and local multicultural mainstream markets. Through the theoretical lens of Multicultural Hybridism, interviews with 16 Birmingham-based Chinese migrant entrepreneurs have been analysed to shape a dynamic understanding of the multifaceted concept of breakout in a superdiverse and transnational context. The multilayered interpretation of breakout provides an enhanced understanding of the diversity of hybridism between transnational ethnic and local multicultural mainstream markets. This is seen from the perspectives of firm growth and social integration in the current locations and future spaces of transnational migrant entrepreneurs. It goes beyond the narrow imagination of breakout as an economic assimilation process, avoiding the singular conceptualisation of the host-country mainstream market as the only breakout destination for transnational ethnic entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze Brazilian entrepreneurial communities in Florida, through the capitals theory approach.

By adopting a comparative case study approach, the researchers conducted 80 in-depth interviews with Brazilian entrepreneurs in two different communities – Pompano Beach (Miami area) and Orlando, Florida. Data triangulation was performed through interviews with community stakeholders, secondary sources of data and surveys.

Authors propose a framework of 27 contexts, based on immigrant entrepreneurs’ capital provisions. Evidence points to different evolutionary paths of the two communities of Brazilian immigrants that were compared. Some of these contexts were found in other ethnicities from extant literature, which shows that it might be generalizable to other cases.

The limitations relate to the fact that the comparative study was conducted in one ethnic group. Nevertheless, the paper brings insights to support future studies on immigrant and ethnic entrepreneurship as a building block for future comparative studies on other immigrant communities.

The work presents a guideline for future entrepreneurs in Florida.

Implications of practice will arise after further studies in the contexts of economic, human and social capital. The cases of successful immigrant communities enlightened by the capitals theory might be useful to newly born ethnic enclaves.

The originality of the paper lies on the comparison of two entrepreneurial communities of the same ethnicity in Florida, showing different behaviors due to the internal and environmental factors. Moreover, the Brazilian entrepreneur’s particularities add up to the general theory of immigrant or ethnic entrepreneurship.

This study considers an under-explored pathway of immigrant business expansion beyond contemporary models of ethnic entrepreneurship.

We push against dominant theories of immigrant adaptation and small business, such as assimilation theory, to explain a rise of franchised small businesses among Indian Americans. We combine two cases on Indian American small business ownership, based on years of qualitative fieldwork each.

Indian Americans have forged a new path of immigrant business growth beyond either enclave or middleman minority businesses. The growth of franchised stores by immigrants remains underexplored in the immigration and work literature. Their growth in the industry signals a type of mobility, by moving more into corporate models of business ownership and performance. Yet, their success has depended on many of the same mechanisms that define lower end, informal ethnic businesses, such as a reliance on ethnic social capital for information and financing, strategies to avoid racism, co-ethnic labor, and the like.

Like any qualitative study, it is limited by its lack of breadth. But, given that it combines two cases, it compensates for this challenge more than otherwise.

This chapter furthers the argument that immigrant mobility does not necessarily mean assimilation and in fact can represent a collective response against assimilationist tendencies. This continued collective strategy to mobility is all the more necessary in the face of neoliberal economic models that place greater burdens on individuals.

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.