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This chapter explores economic development and entrepreneurship among Aboriginal¹ people in Canada as a particular instance of Indigenous entrepreneurship and development activity worldwide. In turn, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and the economic development that flows from it, can be considered a particular sub-set of ethnic entrepreneurship. What makes Indigenous entrepreneurship a particular and distinct instance of ethic entrepreneurship is the strong tie between the process and place – the historic lands of the particular Indigenous group involved. With Aboriginal populations there is also often a strong component of “nation-building,” or more correctly re-building. This is in contrast with instances of entrepreneurship associated with ethnic groups that have migrated to new places and are pursuing economic opportunities there in ways that distinguish them from the non-ethnic population.

This chapter concerns the degree to which leader personality is specific to the geographical region in which leaders work or more generically global. In samples from several different countries (N = 11,969), we show that top leaders are significantly different from the general population on dimensions of occupationally relevant personality, but rather similar among themselves. In general, top leaders are more emotionally stable, and much more competitive, ambitious, outgoing, and well-informed than the average person. We then examine our top leader cohorts on a culture by culture basis, and find distinct cultural differences. We close by discussing implications for the selection, development, and coaching of top leaders.

In this paper, we discuss a new information processing model of culture and leadership (Hanges, Lord, & Dickson, 2000). First, we review the older cognitive categorization approach that has been used to explain the relationships between culture, preferred leadership attributes and follower behavior. Then we present a new model based on the connectionist theory of information processing. This model focuses on the connections between concepts in a cognitive network, rather than discrete schemas. Finally, we use the new model to suggest strategies that managers might use to manage a diverse workforce.

Leading off the book, and the first paper in this section, is, “The Ethnic Ownership Economy” by Ivan Light. This survey paper hardly needs an introduction, because the author is one of the foremost scholars in the field of ethnic economics and entrepreneurship. Ivan Light can be argued to be one of the founders of fields concerned with ethnicity on the strength of his groundbreaking early study Ethnic Enterprise in America (1972). Over the subsequent years he has remained on the cutting edge of research, and the survey paper included here clearly reflects that fact. In this paper, the author reviews and summarizes a significant body of sociological research concerning ethnic economies. He offers three challenges for future research: the first is to examine how the ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurs differ from non-immigrant entrepreneurs, the second is to investigate how immigrants tend to differ in the bundle of resources when compared to their indigenous counterparts, and the third is to study how in multi-ethnic societies non-immigrant entrepreneurs and immigrant/ethnic minority entrepreneurs operate out of social networks with minimal overlap.