ABSTRACT
The portrayal of the family as a vital support mechanism is a notable feature of the literature on ethnic minority enterprise. Indeed, the family is seen as a veritable generator of entrepreneurial activity among immigrant-origin communities. By implication the family is a provider of crucial business resources not available to ‘ethnic majority’ enterprise. As such, it confers a competitive advantage over mainstream businesses, which in most other respects might be assumed to have the upper hand. One of the most emphatic statements of this relationship is proffered by Sanders and Nee (1996), who portray immigrant-origin business in the USA as rooted in the social capital derived from the kind of traditional close-knit family solidarity which, it might be thought, no longer plays a central part in mainstream modern urban society. At first sight, this seems a plausible explanation. In contemporary Britain as in the USA, ethnic minority entrepreneurs display a remarkably high profile among the ranks of the business-owning class, with self-employment rates among the South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) population, for example, standing at least 60 per cent higher than that of the white population (Barrett et al., 2001).
