'Breaking in' and 'breaking out': a Weberian approach to entrepreneurial opportunities
Title:
'Breaking in' and 'breaking out': a Weberian approach to entrepreneurial opportunities
Author:
Engelen, Ewald
Appeared in:
Journal of ethnic and migration studies
Paging:
Volume 27 (2001) nr. 2 pages 203-223
Year:
2001-04-01
Contents:
Immigrant entrepreneurship has become a fashionable research topic. Most studies betray a distinct Anglo-American bias - first in their emphasis on social capital and ethnic networks, second in their disregard for the institutional dimension, and third in their implicit economic liberalism. Instead, a more neutral conceptual framework is needed to aid comparative research. To do so this paper endorses a Weberian approach to entrepreneurial opportunities. Following Weber, I define market co-ordination as voluntary exchange and markets as a distinct product space delimited by the level of substitutability of the goods in question. This de nition makes it possible to distinguish between different political-economic regimes at the macro level and between different types of markets at the micro level. However, 'breaking in' is only one part of the story. Recently, the attention given to innovative strategies of immigrant entrepreneurs - or 'breaking out' - has waxed. As it stands, this type of research is severely biased towards spatial strategies as well as toward assimilationist premises. Hence, here too a more neutral map is needed. Following Michael Porter's in uential analysis of competitive processes, I construct a much broader list of innovative practices. Finally, I try to demonstrate the relevance of Weber's economic sociology for the study of immigrant entrepreneurs by presenting some hypotheses on the types of markets and the sorts of strategies that seem to be relevant for immigrant entrepreneurs.
Journal description