ABSTRACT
In North America, Western Europe and Britain there is an established and substantial literature on ethnic enterprise. (For overviews see Waldinger et al. 1985; Boissevain et al. 1986; Min 1987; Light and Karageorgis 1994; Portes 1997; Light 1998.) This literature has long argued that as alien immigrant groups were blocked from opportunities for getting ahead in the society of settlement, many were left only with the restricted options of finding work in the ethnic enclave economy, or were herded into a narrow ethnic business niche, the most obvious being the provision of goods and services to co-ethnics (themselves employed in undesirable jobs in the mainstream economy). The literature also argued that in so doing, immigrant groups frequently relied on the use of cultural resources, i.e., their skills, values, networks and solidarities, some of which were transmitted intact from the country of origin and the reactive resources developed within the country of settlement.
