Strategic Change Volume 31, Issue 4
Minority Groups in Entrepreneurship, Part II Pages 357-477 July 2022
Guest editors: Carla Susana Marques, Vitor Braga, João J. Ferreira, and Helen Lawton Smith
This special issue challenges stereotype images of entrepreneurs by exploring how minority groups contribute to the economic growth of local, regional, and national economies. It includes studies about the characteristics, context, networks, motivations, and obstacles of minority groups in entrepreneurship (women, younger, senior/retired people, migrants/immigrants, disabled people, minority ethnic, and the LGBT community).
In Part I of this special issue, published in March 2022, in the seven papers, the twin focus was on gender and entrepreneurship and immigrant entrepreneurship. Part II comprises a further seven articles: three are literature reviews—on Minorities Groups in Entrepreneurship, ethnic entrepreneurship, and Entrepreneurs with disabilities; a fourth is a qualitative study of ethnic entrepreneurs, the fifth is a study focused on LGBT entrepreneurs, the sixth is on senior entrepreneurs and the last about focuses on religious minority entrepreneurs.
The selected papers cover various concepts and theories related to minority groups in entrepreneurship. At the same time, different methodological approaches such as survey, panel data analysis, case study, and literature review have been employed in the papers. The papers examine minority groups’ entrepreneurship in diverse research contexts, involving the firm’s and higher education institute contexts. They use empirical evidence from various geographical locations, from Europe to Asia.
Part II begins with a literature review on Minorities Groups in Entrepreneurship. The authors Carlos Sampaio, Luís Farinha, João Renato and António Fernandes use a bibliometric approach mixed with Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to respond to this question: Putting the Magnifying Glass on Minorities Groups in Entrepreneurship: What Can We Observe? The results show that the themes “entrepreneurship” and “performance” appear to be interconnected, whether we are dealing with migrant or female entrepreneurship initiatives associated with creating family micro businesses.
The second paper, by Naveed Yasin, is entitled, Green grass or hot sands? A comparative study of immigrant Punjabi-Pakistani entrepreneurs in London and Dubai compares one immigrant community’s business start-up experiences in ethnic enclaves within London (UK) and Dubai (UAE). The primary data was collected through 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews (10 from each country) identified through personal contact networks and snowball sampling approaches. This study helps to address the dearth of empirical cross-national studies in immigrant entrepreneurship and provides impetus to the mixed embeddedness model.
Paper 3by José Afonso Guerra Fernandes, Carla Susana Marques, Rui Silva and Humberto Martins is titled Ethnic entrepreneurship: A bibliometric review and future research agenda. It offers a systematic literature review that identifies and develops a more comprehensive picture of ethnic entrepreneurship while inspiring new research paths. They conclude that ethnic entrepreneurship is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon affecting different communities and territories.
In Paper 4, the theme of understanding the context and the antecedents of the entrepreneurship of minorities has attracted researchers’ interest in recent years, even though few studies have focused on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transvestite, Transsexual or Transgender (LGBT) minorities. André Cavalcanti and João Ferreira, in their study The Entrepreneurial Orientation of LGBT Brazilian Start-ups: Context and Antecedents, identify the context and the antecedents of the entrepreneurial orientation of LGBT minority entrepreneurs through a qualitative study deploying semi-structured interviews with six Brazilian entrepreneurs belonging to this minority community.
Paper 5 by Te Klangboonkrong and Ning Baines presents a systematic literature review on, Disability entrepreneurship research: Critical reflection through the lens of individual-opportunity nexus. The review framework is based on the individual-opportunity nexus of entrepreneurship, owing to its distinct impact on general entrepreneurship research. The paper explores and critically reflects on its implications for disability entrepreneurship.
Paper 6 titled Senior and Technology Entrepreneurship: An analysis for OECD countries by Sara Fernández-López, David Rodeiro-Pazos, Guillermo Andrés Zapata Huamaní and María Jesús Rodríguez-Gulíasargues argues that the ageing of the population has led to direct effects on economies and tensions in social security systems. Policymakers have seen senior entrepreneurship as an option for reducing unemployment and delaying the retirement age. The paper explores technological and senior entrepreneurship relations, analyzing if age influences technological entrepreneurship and determining factors for senior and non-senior groups are different.
Paper 7 by Muhammad Salman Khan presents a study about Conflict, Displacement and economic revival: The case of the internally displaced minority entrepreneurs in Pakistan. It attempts to know how social capital is linked to microenterprise development, which is crucial to Pakistan’s survival and economic revival of internally displaced religious minority entrepreneurs. It focuses on the link between entrepreneurship and social capital in contexts with poorly designed or inexistent enterprise development policies for post-conflict rehabilitation of permanently displaced households.
In conclusion, the collected articles in this special issue provide a state-of-the-art selection of current research in entrepreneurship in the different minority groups (women, younger, senior/retired people, migrants/immigrants, disabled people, minority ethnic, and LGBT community). As the variety of articles in this special issue demonstrates, they capture and reflect difficulties and opportunities faced by minority groups in different international contexts and the crucial contribution made by these minority groups to the economic growth and development of local, regional, and national economies.
These, in turn, will pose essential questions for policymakers and practitioners and offer significant opportunities for researchers and scholars. From the fourteen studies in this Special Issue, some future lines of research emerge:
- The need for further studies on the entrepreneurial mindset of each of these minority groups.
- Studies contributing to understanding the importance of the context and support of the places and regions hosting these groups can play in the creation and growth of start-ups, mainly migrants/immigrants, focusing on a new type of migrants: entrepreneurs whose numbers have been rapidly increasing worldwide.
- Identify the impacts of the support policies and strategic programs for these groups and understand how the entrepreneurs can take advantage of these support policies/strategies and how they adapt to the challenges of the digital and green transitions.
- Longitudinal studies illustrating the evolution of several indicators over time and make temporal comparisons. It would be pertinent to compare the behaviour of these entrepreneurs and the role and impact they play in economic and social growth.
- Exploration of new methodologies, such as living labs, which allow an in-depth knowledge of the entrepreneurial behaviour and the entrepreneurial ecosystem hosting these minority groups of entrepreneurs.
Website: Minority Groups in Entrepreneurship, Part II: Strategic Change: Vol 31, No 4 (wiley.com)
