Ethnic entrepreneurship and the question of agency: the role of different forms of capital, and the relevance of social class

ABSTRACT

The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship has focused on structural factors, group characteristics or a combination of both when explaining the entry and/or success of different ethnic groups in/to self-employment. While the active involvement of individuals has often been noted, agency has been under-theorised, and frequently conflated with what are considered as ‘cultural’ factors. This article explores the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship by looking at how entrepreneurs access and mobilise different kinds of resources. Using a forms-of-capital approach, the article draws on qualitative data from the U.K. and Spain, and looks at how entrepreneurs mobilise cultural, social and economic resources in structural contexts that include constraining as well as enabling features. Our findings show that the entrepreneurs are active agents who play an important role in shaping ethnic businesses. However, their agency varies significantly depending on the extent to which entrepreneurs have access to different kinds of resources, which is closely linked to their socioeconomic position. The article contributes to the literature through its direct engagement with the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship, and by highlighting the relevance of social class in entrepreneurial processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic entrepreneurship
• structure
• agency
• forms-of-capital
• social class

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Monder Ram, Oliver Bakewell and Paul Edwards for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Maria Villares-Varela http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0137-7104

Notes

1. Structure is understood here as the social context that constrains entrepreneurs’ opportunities and/or enables them to act in particular ways, while agency is defined in terms of actors’ ability to make informed decisions about how to act in different scenarios.

2. The concept of ethnic entrepreneurship, commonly used in the U.K. context (Smallbone 2005; Villares-Varela, Ram, and Jones 2017), is employed here as an umbrella term for discussing business ownership among migrant and ethnic minority groups. More broadly, the term entrepreneurship is used interchangeably with that of self-employment and does not denote a particular kind of self-employment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission, European Research, Technological Development and Demonstration Program (RTD), project ‘The Chances of the Second Generation in Families of Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Intergenerational and Gender Aspects of Quality of Life Processes (EthnoGeneration)’, http://www.ethnogeneration.org/ethno/imprint.htm.