Small Israeli peripheral businesses: spatial and ethnical embeddedness

Abstract

The adoption of Neoliberal policies raises the question on whether small businesses in the Israeli Northern periphery are successful in breaking the barriers of peripherality and ethnicity in developing their businesses. It is argued that peripheries create heterogeneous ecosystems for entrepreneurs. In our research, the main division within the periphery is between Arab and Jewish entrepreneurs. We compare the strategies used by Arab and Jewish entrepreneurs to overcome these barriers. This study is based on a stratified and systematic sample of 192 Jewish and 76 Arab entrepreneurs. Participants were asked about their embeddedness in various business linkages. The results were analyzed on a planar order. From the results most small businesses are low-tech and locked in intra-ethnic and peripheral linkages. They rely mainly on local linkages of support and recruitment of labor. Arab entrepreneurs specialize in construction materials in the Arab market, and Jewish entrepreneurs mainly develop agro-food and tourism industries for the national markets. Arab entrepreneurs rely on bonding linkages in addition to their efforts to penetrate Jewish peripheral markets. Jewish entrepreneurs tend to bypass the less rewarding Arab market by focusing on Jewish peripheral markets in an effort to develop the larger markets at the core.

Résumé

L’adoption des politiques néolibérales soulève la question de savoir si les petites entreprises de la périphérie nord d’Israël parviennent à franchir les barrières de la périphéricité et de l’ethnicité dans le développement de leurs activités. L’argument est que les périphéries créent des écosystèmes hétérogènes pour les entrepreneurs. Dans notre recherche, la principale division au sein de la périphérie est entre les entrepreneurs arabes et juifs. Nous comparons les stratégies employées par les entrepreneurs arabes et juifs pour surmonter ces obstacles. Cette étude est basée sur un échantillon stratifié et systématique de 192 entrepreneurs juifs et 76 entrepreneurs arabes. Les participants ont été interrogés sur leur ancrage dans divers liens commerciaux. Les résultats ont été analysés dans un ordre planaire. D’après les résultats, la plupart des petites entreprises sont de faible technologie et enfermées dans des liens intra-ethniques et périphériques. Elles s’appuient principalement sur les liens locaux de soutien et de recrutement de main d’oeuvre. Les entrepreneurs arabes se spécialisent dans les matériaux de construction sur le marché arabe, et les entrepreneurs juifs développent principalement des activités agroalimentaires et touristiques sur les marchés nationaux. Les entrepreneurs arabes s’appuient sur des liens d’attachement en plus de leurs efforts pour pénétrer les marchés périphériques juifs. Les entrepreneurs juifs ont tendance à contourner le marché arabe, moins rémunérateur, en se concentrant sur les marchés périphériques juifs dans le but de développer les marchés plus importants à la base.

Keywords:

• Small entrepreneurship
• ethnic barriers
• peripheral barriars
• socio-spatial linkages

Mots-clés:

• Petit entrepreneuriat
• barrières ethniques
• barrières périphériques
• liens socio-spatiaux

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arnon Sara

Dr. Arnon Sara used to serve as the head of the department of sociology at Tel Hai College in Israel. Her publications focus on educational sociology, the status of the national periphery mainly peripheral entrepreneurship, environmental behavior and methodological issues in social science.

Shamai Shmuel

Shamai Shmuel is a Prof. emeritus at the Tel Hai college and Shamir Research Institute, University of Haifa. He served as the head of the education department and as a vice president of the college. He lead the applied research in the Northern periphery of Israel for many years. His main research focuses on sense of place and frontier/periphery and regional development and on the Druze acculturation in Israel.

Greenberg Zeev

Dr. Greenberg Zeev is a Senior Lecturer at Tel-Hai College and part of the Institution for the research of the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea in University of Haifa. His studies are on organizational change in rural areas, Extension neighborhoods, new immigrants to rural area, economics and entrepreneurship. He is the head of the Human Services Department. He served as an advisor to various committees of regional municipalities in northern Israel and the Ministry for Development of the Negev and Galilee, dealing with re-defining and re-structuring rural communities. He received the Council for Higher Education Award for Social Involvement in 2016.

Izhak Schnell

Prof Izhak Schnell is a Prof. Emeritus of the Geography and Human Environment Department at Tel Aviv University. He served as the head of the department, as a president of the Israeli Association of Geographers and as the representative of the Israeli Academy of Science to the International Geographical Union. He got the Israeli association of geographers prize for contribution to research. His research focuses on social geography-Human involvement in globalized spaces including entrepreneurs’ socio-spatial embeddedness, environmental geography-human exposure and response to health risks in cities, and cultural geography-the interpretation of cartographic and artistic representations of space.