Beyond the enclave? Break-outs into mainstream markets and multicultural hybridism in ethnic firms

Abstract

The literature on immigrant entrepreneurship has richly described the characteristics and peculiarities of ethnic businesses catering to enclave markets. However, several indications suggest that immigrant-owned firms are increasingly entering mainstream markets and changing both their internal structures and their external networks with resource providers. One of the most substantial changes, which has been overlooked by researchers, consists of the appearance of what we define as 'multiculturally hybrid firms', which are firms that rely on inter-ethnic managerial or labour resources to carry out their activities. Therefore, in this paper we provide an understanding of the variables that affect the recourse to solutions of multicultural hybridism in the entrepreneurial teams and personnel of immigrantowned firms. We conduct our empirical analyses on data collected through interviews on a sample of 130 immigrant entrepreneurs in Italy. Our results show that multicultural hybridism is mainly driven by the size of the founding team, the business's maturity, the entrepreneurs' host-country language competence and by entrepreneurs' motivation by individual goals rather than community goals. This research advances our knowledge about immigrant entrepreneurship by focusing on firm-level dimensions such as the diversity of entrepreneurial teams and employees, which are increasingly relevant in our multicultural societies.

Super-diverse migrants—similar trajectories? Ghanaian entrepreneurship in the Netherlands seen from a Mixed Embeddedness perspective

“…This might even be the case for highly educated migrants. Arrighetti, Bolzani, and Lasagni (2014) observed that so-called multicultural hybrid firms which deployed "ethnically diverse human resources at the management and personnel levels" stand a greater chance of survival which may indicate that they indeed are able to gather richer information by bridging distinct networks. Our logistic regression analysis indicated that the length of stay is a significant factor in determining the chances for survival of the Ghanaian businesses.…”

Challenges and issues facing ethnic minority small business owners

“…Thus, it might be felt that the market opportunities within the mesosphere, do not just relate to markets for products, but in encompassing the labour market, opportunities to access skills and knowledge should also be considered. Evidence from Italy suggests that as discussed above language skills are a key factor in the use of labour from a variety of cultures along with management experience (Arrighetti et al, 2014).…”

“…Thus, a perspective may be that opportunities in the mesosphere don't just relate to customers, but also in acquiring labour with diverse skills (Bates, 2011;Arrighetti et al, 2014).…”

The Importance of Cross-Cultural Capabilities for Chinese Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Australia

“…Linguistic distance is an important element of psychic distance, and it has separate and complex influences on modes of entry (Cuypers, Ertug, & Hennart, 2015). Essentially, language skills have been identified by several researchers as an important capability for immigrant entrepreneurs to start up businesses (Brenner, Menzies, Dionne, & Filion, 2010;Mora & Dávila, 2005), move from ethnic markets into the mainstream market (Arrighetti, Bolzani, & Lasagni, 2014), and enter global markets (Sui et al, 2015). With large psychic distance and cultural distance, immigrant entrepreneurs are likely to require greater capability to adapt to culture.…”

“…An individual's cognition can be explored with reference to self-assessed capabilities, which some researchers group into specific capabilities (Ucbasaran et al, 2008), such as social skills that are also crucial to entrepreneurs (Hartog, Van Praag, & Van Der Sluis, 2010). To immigrant entrepreneurs, who move to a new country, a local language skill seems important for them to access resources and move within the labour market (Arrighetti et al, 2014). Skills, which often refer to specific abilities, can be either broadly or narrowly construed, while ability is a relatively stable broad characteristic of individuals (Bird, Schjoedt, & Baum, 2012).…”