ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a conceptual framework for the analysis of the degree and form of embeddedness in the state economy of marginal minority group. Based on the experience of Israeli Arab entrepreneurs, it analyses some of the difficulties that minority entrepreneurs encounter in their attempts to break barriers of marginality and ethnicity and to participate in both minority and majority business cultures, politics and information networks. The chapter also offers the concept of 'over-embeddedness' to characterise those entrepreneurs whose commitments to kinship groups prevent them from exploiting opportunities in inter-ethnic markets. It describes the concept of 'under-embeddedness' to characterise those entrepreneurs who fail to translate their wide and complex networks into an economic advantage in the markets, owing to lack of understanding of the Jewish business culture or absence of capability to improve their positions in economic exchange networks.
