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This chapter seeks to engage with and extend the current debate in the literature of ethnic entrepreneurship. It critiques the concept of ethnic entrepreneurship and its theoretical underpinnings. It argues that research in ethnic entrepreneurship bears little reflection of the current changes and new realities in the composition of modern societies. Based on qualitative primary data from interviews combined with secondary sources of data, it suggests that the term ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’ is discriminatory and creates a narrative of Othering in the discourse of entrepreneurship, thus, portraying entrepreneurship as a western phenomenon. It argues that it is contradictory to think entrepreneurship is fundamentally contextual, socially and culturally embedded, and then define enterprise with ethnic bias. The concept of ethnic entrepreneurship propagates entrepreneurial Othering and a reductionist view of non-western forms of entrepreneurship. What constitutes ethnic enterprise should not be based on the identity of the owner. The ethnic enterprise is not confined to a geographical boundary; and the ethnic economy and the mainstream economy are not mutually exclusive. In this era of superdiversity and globalisation, researchers are encouraged to rethink the concept of ethnic entrepreneurship and embrace difference without Othering.

The literature of ethnic ownership economies descends from middleman minority theory, a subject it continues to include. However, ethnic economy literature now more broadly addresses the economic independence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in general, not just of middleman minorities (Light & Bonacich, 1991, pp. xii–xiii).¹ This expansion releases the subject from narrow concentration upon historical trading minorities, and opens discussion of the entire range of immigrant and ethnic minority strategies for economic self-help and self-defense. Partial or full economic independence represents a ubiquitous self-defense of immigrants and ethnic minorities who confront exclusion or disadvantage in labor markets. Ethnic economies permit immigrants and ethnic minorities to reduce disadvantage and exclusion, negotiating the terms of their participation in the general labor market from a position of greater strength. Unable to find work in the general labor market, or unwilling to accept the work that the general labor market offers, or just reluctant to mix with foreigners, immigrants and ethnic minorities have the option of employment or self-employment in the ethnic economy of their group. Although ethnic and immigrant groups differ in how well and how much they avail themselves of this defense (Collins, 2003; Light & Gold, 2000, p. 34; Logan & Alba, 1999, p. 179), none lacks an ethnic economy.²

The concept of experience economy states that customers seek experiences whether from products and services. Tourism is at the forefront of the experience economy because tourists are looking for staged experience encompassing the four realms (entertainment, educational, esthetic and escapism). The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the effects of the experience economy on tourists’ word-of-mouth (WOM) in Chengdu cuisine through satisfaction and memory.

In total, 397 valid data were collected from the tourists who have experienced the ethnic cuisine in Chengdu. A partial least-square structural equation modeling technique was used to examine the research model.

The empirical results indicated that esthetic is the antecedent of the other three realms of experience economy; esthetic, educational and entertainment experiences influence satisfaction; four realms of experience economy influence memory; and satisfaction and memory ultimately influence WOM.

The findings of this study provide practical implications for operators of ethnic restaurants in designing their restaurants and menus, travel agencies in planning the tour itinerary and governments in using ethnic cuisine for destination marketing.

This study is a pioneer in studying the experience economy in the ethnic cuisine. It has identified the relationships between four dimensions of experience economy of ethnic cuisine, tourist satisfaction, memory and WOM toward ethnic cuisine in a tourist destination. It has also integrated the senses of Chinese cuisine (“sight,” “smell” and “taste”) into the measures of esthetic experience for studying experience economy in ethnic cuisine.

The purpose of this paper is to employ enclave economy in the perspective of economic sociology to explain the existence and process of the Thai enclave in Hong Kong.

In-depth interviews and case studies are employed in relation to Thai restaurant and grocery shop owners and employees in Hong Kong.

This study is an attempt to explain the clustering of Thai ethnic small businesses in Kowloon City through a discourse on the ethnic enclave economy. The Thai migrant enclave in Hong Kong is explored with dimensions of segregation, namely evenness, exposure, clustering, concentration and centralization (Massey and Denton’s, 1988). This study suggests that these Thai enclave businesses have two differentials compared to the findings of Zhou (1992) in Chinatown restaurants in New York.

The findings provide evidences for social workers, migrant associations and policy makers in developing ideas of ethnic business enabling. There should be wide range of supporting and welfare policies for the empowerment of migrants and minority ethnic groups. An immigrant enclave should no longer be regarded as a ghetto for many business chances can be found there.

Two ethnic economy development differentials are developed. First, ethnicity similarity between the minority group and the majority ethnic enables ethnic business accessing earlier to an interethnic clientele from wider society. Second, internal factors of the ethnic enclave and external factors of the wider society have constrained the diversification of ethnic business.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the motivations and dynamics of Polish small business owners who are living and working in the United Kingdom several years after Poland’s enlargement to the European Union.

The data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 39 Polish migrants, residing in the Cardiff area, in 2008 and 2011. During the 2008 data collection period, 20 interviews were completed, and during the 2011 data collection period, 19 interviews were completed.

The findings highlight that migrants become entrepreneurs for a variety of reasons, blurring the lines between cultural and economic entrepreneurship as well as between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship. The findings also highlight the changing motivations of the ethnic entrepreneurs over time, particularly when the demand for their product is unsustainable.

The generalisabilty of the research is limited because of the small sample size. In addition, the lack of Polish language skills of the interviewer may have influenced the sampling of the Polish community.

The findings from this article will have an impact on the wider ethnic entrepreneurship literature, migration-based policy and the cultural integration of migrants in the long-term.

This article contributes to the wider literature on ethnic entrepreneurship through considering the migrants’ motivations throughout their entire entrepreneurial period and how these motivations may evolve over time.

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.

Entrepreneurship, business creation and self-employment are a common pattern for immigrants’ incorporating themselves into Western receiving societies. Sociologists in North America and Western Europe have devoted much energy to explain how poor unskilled immigrants have become business-owners, thereby creating what are often referred to as ‘ethnic’ economies or ‘ethnic’ niches. This scholarship is usually dominated by two key orientations. First, it is predominantly of a socio-economic nature, with comparatively little attention to the cultural implications of business; and second, it is embedded in an ‘ethnic’ approach, according to which ethnicity (broadly defined as individuals’ belonging to a specific social groups) is a key explanatory factor. By contrast, this chapter aspires to shed light on ‘mixed cultural competencies’ in entrepreneurship: this points to the way business relies upon the in-betweeness of entrepreneurs and their capacity to successfully conciliate ethnic and non-ethnic resources. It does so through the ethnographic description of a small number of shops held by German-Turkish businesspeople situated in multiethnic neighbourhoods of Berlin.

The purpose of this paper is to offer the economic theory of clubs as a potential unifying paradigm for the study of ethnic economies and social capital.

The paper examines the basic concepts of club theory, and reviews the empirical literature. It then applies club theory to the notion of social capital within the context of ethnic communities. It is argued that although various sociological frameworks of social capital and social networks have provided powerful descriptive models of ethnic and immigrant population behaviors, social capital needs to be examined from an economic perspective to increase prescriptive capabilities.

Using club theory the paper conceptualizes the benefits derived from an ethnic grouping – among which social capital can be considered the most important – as a “club” good, supplied at the co‐ethnic level and demanded by the various key stakeholders within an ethnic community. While these benefits are at least partially non‐rivalrous, they have clear characteristics of excludability and therefore form a “pseudo‐public” good. Four propositions are then offered regarding the behavior of ethnic entrepreneurs who draw from these important ethnic resources.

This paper offers a new way to examine social capital within ethnic communities. It also provides an economic foundation to begin analyzing optimal economic and social structures within these communities.

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.

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.