Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.

This paper sets out to better understand the role of ethnic boundary dynamics in immigrant entrepreneurship, in particular in terms of intersections at the boundaries between 'ethnic' and 'mainstream' economies, internal differentiation within ethnic community boundaries, and the socially constructed nature of ethnic boundaries more broadly. To better account for these dynamics, we develop a Barthian perspective on immigrant entrepreneurship, building on and integrating Fredrik Barth's work on entrepreneurship, ethnic boundaries, and spheres of value. A Barthian perspective shifts the analytic focus from the ethnic group to entrepreneurial activities and, by implication, to the ethnic boundary dynamics that these activities generate. We draw on ethnographic research conducted among immigrant Mennonite entrepreneurs in Belize, and identify three boundary dynamics among the Mennonites: bridging the boundary between Mennonite ethnicity and the wider Belizean society, stretching the boundaries of individual Mennonite communities, and allying across the boundaries between Mennonite communities. In developing a Barthian perspective, the contribution of our paper lies in developing a comprehensive framework for understanding the role of ethnic boundary dynamics in immigrant entrepreneurship, thereby also responding to calls for more micro-processual approaches to understanding the 'mixed embeddedness' of immigrant entrepreneurs in their ethnic community and the wider society contexts.

No abstract

Safety culture is often understood as encompassing organizational members' shared attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values associated with safety. Safety culture theory development is fraught with inconsistencies and superficiality of measurement methods, because the dynamic and political nature of culture is often ignored. Traditionally, safety culture is analyzed by survey-based approaches. In this paper we propose a novel, systemic, interdisciplinary approach for investigating safety culture that combines multi-agent system modeling with organizational ethnography. By using this approach, mechanisms of emergence of safety culture from daily practices, operations and interactions of organizational actors can be modeled and analyzed. The approach is illustrated by a case study from the aircraft maintenance domain, based on existing ethnographic data. Using the proposed approach we were able to reproduce and explain emergent characteristic patterns of commitment to safety in the maintenance organization from this study. The model can be used for theory development and as a management tool to evaluate non-linear impacts of organizational arrangements on workers' commitment to safety.

Communication problems are acknowledged as hazardous eventualities affecting operations negatively. However, a few systematic attempts have been made to understand the pattern of communication issues and their contribution to safety events. In this paper, we present the AVAC-COM communication model and taxonomy based on the cybernetics approach and a literature review. The model elements and taxonomy variables regard the actors, signals, coders, interference, direction and timing, predictability, decoders, and channels. To test the applicability and potential value of the AVAC-COM framework, we analysed 103 safety investigation reports from aviation published between 1997 and 2016 by the respective authorities of Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The overall results of the 256 cases of communication flaws detected in the reports suggested that these regarded more frequently Human-Media and Human-Human interactions, verbal and local communications as well as unfamiliarity of the receivers with the messages transmitted. Further statistical tests revealed associations of the region, time period, event severity and operations type with various variables of the AVAC-COM taxonomy. Although the findings are only indicative, they showed the potential of the AVAC-COM model and taxonomy to be used to identify strong and weak communication elements and relationships in documented data such as investigation and hazard reports.