ABSTRACT
Does self-employment contribute to immigrants' ‘integration’? This question has been hotly debated in the literature on ethnic economies. Entrepreneurship is now a major trend among many immigrant minorities in Western countries and the question of its impact on their incorporation in the host societies is therefore central. However, as this essay will show, no clear-cut conclusion seems to have been reached. Reviewing the literature on the topic reveals that the relationship between self-employment and integration is interpreted in very different ways. This essay constitutes an attempt to understand the existence of such different approaches to this issue. It is argued that the reasons for so divergent takes lie in the fundamentally intermediary nature of business activities. Trade, it is suggested, is an activity that may connect people of different backgrounds but that does so in a minimal way, so that contradictory interpretations of the phenomenon are always possible. This essay illustrates this aspect of business both through ethnographic descriptions of immigrant entrepreneurs and through a review of the literature on so-called ‘plural societies’.
