Ethnic Entrepreneurs examines how diverse groups, including indigenous communities in Latin America and Latino communities in the United States, have become visible and valuable as agents of economic development in Latin America in recent years.

With a focus on a diverse group of Latino entrepreneurs in the Houston area, Valdez explores how class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape Latino entrepreneurs' capacity to succeed in business in the United States.

Indigenous groups are not often recognized as driving forces in the push for economic development. However, in development efforts across Latin America, governments and corporations have begun to see ethnic cultural difference as an advantage. Ethnic Entrepreneurs explores how diverse groups historically seen as obstacles to development have become valuable to state and regional development initiatives. From collaboration between a Maya organization and Walmart to a UN-sponsored program that recruits diasporic Latinos, states and corporations are pursuing strategies that complement regional neoliberal shifts. This book examines how ethnic difference is produced through development policy, breaking down the micropolitics of identity and development. It uncovers surprising convergences between ethnic community businesses and corporate social responsibility practices and illuminates how formulations of ethnic difference influence not only changing cultural identifications, but also the political and moral projects that shape Latin America.

Professor Dana and his colleagues have carefully and successfully put together a collection of chapters on ethnic minority entrepreneurship from all parts of the world. The book comprises eight parts and 49 chapters. Undoubtedly, given the massive size and content of a 835-page book, it is fair to ask, is it value for money? The answer is unequivocally yes! A further comment on the content of the book should probably reassure potential readers and buyers of the book. . . This collection is undoubtedly rich, creative and varied in many respects. Therefore, it will be of great benefit to researchers and scholars alike. . . I will strongly recommend this book to researchers, students, teachers and policy-makers. Aminu Mamman, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research The volume presents an impressive panorama of studies on ethnic entrepreneurships ranging from Dalits in India to Roma entrepreneurs in Hungary. B.P. Corrie, Choice From a focus on middle-man minorities in the 1950s, the study of minority ethnic entrepreneurship has evolved into a vast undertaking. A major ingredient in this expansion is the massive population movements of the past thirty years that have created ethnic minority communities in almost all advanced economies. From New York to San Francisco, from Birmingham to Hamburg, from the Chinese in Canada, to the Turks in Finland, to the Ghanians in South Africa to the Lebanese in New Zealand, more than twenty chapters in this volume treat small-scale ethnic entrepreneurship and the cultural and institutional resources which support it. At the other end of the spectrum, the ethnic Chinese have created ever larger multi-divisional enterprises in the host societies of Southeast Asia. At the mid-point of the spectrum, analyzed in an elegant paper by Ivan Light, is the recently identified transmigrant entrepreneur accultured in two societies but assimilated in neither whose special endowments have provided the lynchpin for for much of the international trade expansion in the global economy over the past decade. And Dana and Morris provide us with much more Afro-American entrepreneurship, caste and class, the theory of clubs, women ethnic entrepreneurs, minority ethnicity and IPOs. In the quality of its contributions and in the reach of its coverage, this Handbook attains a very high standard. Peter Kilby, Wesleyan University, US The new Handbook of Research on Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship, edited by Léo-Paul Dana, constitutes a major contribution to the literature on ethnic enterprise. Unlike previous work, which tended to focus on one country or one region of the world, this book is global in scope. You will find chapters on America, Europe, and Asia, as well as integrative essays that review important principles and concepts from the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship. I particularly appreciate the historical and evolutionary framework within which the contributions are situated. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone who has an interest in immigration and entrepreneurship or ethnic entrepreneurship more generally. Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina, US This exhaustive, interdisciplinary Handbook explores the phenomena of immigration and ethnic minority entrepreneurship in light of marked changes since the mid-twentieth century and the advent of easier, more affordable travel and more open and integrated national economies. The international contributors, key experts in their respective fields, illustrate that myriad ethnic minorities exist across the globe, and that their entrepreneurship can and does significantly influence national economies. The contributors go on to promote our understanding of which factors make for successful entrepreneurship, and, perhaps more importantly, how negative political consequences that members of successful entrepreneurial ethnic minorities might face can be minimized. This extensive collection of current research on entrepr

In the past few years, a considerable number of immigrants have established their own businesses. In doing so, they have contributed in many ways to the economic development of American and European metropolitan areas. Some businesses have been incorporated into the mainstream, while others have stayed on the economic fringes and got engaged in the informal economy. The starting point of this book is that a proper understanding of these businesses is served by focusing on the embeddedness of immigrant businesses in their economic, politico-institutional and social environments from a multi-disciplinary perspective rather than confining the attention to ethnic-cultural or economic sociological aspects only.

A comprehensive analysis of racial disparities and the determinants of entrepreneurial performance—in particular, why Asian-owned businesses on average perform relatively well and why black-owned businesses typically do not. Thirteen million people in the United States—roughly one in ten workers—own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.

Intersectionality and Ethnic Entrepreneurship brings together a group of eminent and up-and-coming young scholars who apply an intersectional perspective to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship. Against the traditional approach’s emphasis on ethnicity and its primacy, which tends to conflate ethnicity with other social groupings (i.e., social class), considers their effect as an additive or secondary consequence only (i.e., gender), or ignores their influence altogether (i.e., race), the studies in this volume recognize that multiple dimensions of identity intermix to condition entrepreneurial outcomes. Starting with the premise that systems of oppression and privilege, specifically capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, are endemic to the American social structure, the works in this volume recognize that these interlocking systems of inequality condition the life chances of entrepreneurs from diverse social locations differently, even among members of the same ethnic group. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.