PurposeThis paper outlines ways in which struggling ethnic minority entrepreneurial service ventures and their owners might respond to unforeseen economic and social shocks. Interviews with owners of Bangladeshi Curry Houses in the United Kingdom — whom historically have lower performance rates compared to other ethnic minority businesses in the country — reveal that the entrepreneurs' response strategies undertaken to survive and remain in the business despite the challenges faced from operating in a turbulence environment.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted depth phone interviews with owners of Bangladeshi Curry Houses in London during January and February of 2021. The Gioia methodology was applied to the interview scripts to identify which crisis themes exist.FindingsDespite no advanced educational training, Bangladeshi owners have applied all of the different crisis management techniques present in larger companies: retrenchment, persevering, innovation, and exit. Although the results show that government schemes aimed at helping small businesses have contributed significantly to their survival, concerns regarding the post-health crisis situation remain challenging and threatening for their growth and survivability.Originality/valueThe results indicates that the ethnic minority owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are less likely to plan for the future operations; furthermore, they tend not to have formulated a strategy for dealing with an external shock hence affecting and threatening their performance and competitiveness in the marketplace.

This paper's main intention is to contribute a comparative study of entrepreneurship literature. More specifically, attention is provided to concentrate towards the entrepreneurship practices of developing economy. In analysing entrepreneurship literature for food industry the concept of food adulteration is introduced. Food adulteration is considered to be a national problem for Bangladesh (developing economy). It is considered food adulteration acts (institutions) in Bangladesh to be very old, which lowers the effectiveness of law against the situation and thus the ill-practitioners (unproductive and destructive entrepreneurs) are getting away with the crime committed. Suggestion of time to time revision of the food adulteration act considering the current situation would assist to handle the situation better, yet all the steps taken to tackle the situation has failed and food adulteration is named as "silent killer" for the society (Daily Sun, 2012 and The Daily Star, 2012). The paper also identifies innovative, productive and ethical entrepreneurship practices can be beneficial for both social and economic development of a country; hence attempts to search for evidence to provide solution for food adulteration crisis through the same entrepreneurial approach.

Purpose: This paper attempts to compare and identify impact of health and safety provisions and how they are perceived among profit and non-profit organisations.