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In contemporary developed Western societies, structural discrimination often bars ethnic minorities from entering mainstream entrepreneurship and labor markets. Consequently, minorities engage in microentrepreneurship for economic survival and to retain their social identities. Yet despite the economic value of ethnic minority microbusinesses, little is known about the underlying forces that develop fundamental resources which shape their performance. Based on Bourdieu’s forms of capital and the resource-based view of the firm, our study presents a novel culture-induced entrepreneurship model. This model explains how ethnic minority culture shapes the development of human capital resources and how these resources contribute to business performance in communities which are often characterized as “left behind.” Our study challenges the dominant underdog discourse of (cultural) capital deficit among ethnic minority entrepreneurs. © 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This study focuses on enhancing the understanding of how firm internationalization is triggered by investigating how firms cope with the lack of knowledge and networks when entering a foreign market. More specifically we are interested in answering the following research question: How do firms enter foreign markets without market-specific knowledge and market-specific network insidership? To this end, the present study implements a case study of 12 Swedish firms internationalizing into emerging markets. The study found that firms “graft” expert individuals to help firms penetrate foreign markets where they have no prior history or experience. Further, we observed the qualities of a specific type of actor we refer to as a “graftee” by describing grafting actions and showing how these graftees help firms acquire experiential knowledge and network insidership. Our empirical evidence shows that grafting impacts the form and process of internationalization, sometimes enabling an effectuation-driven market entry while, at other times, enabling a causation-driven process. © 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

We explored and found that a set of key resources, that we call human capital resources, play an important role in ethnic minority microbusinesses in an ethnic majority social and economic space. We have also found that these key resources are developed and maintained within the coethnic niche economic space shaped by coethnic cultural value systems. Building on qualitative interview data and drawing on Bourdieu’s forms of capital and the resource-based view of the firm, our study presents a novel microentrepreneurship model that we call the culture-induced entrepreneurship model. Overall, our model provides insights into how ethnic minority culture informs the creation of a set of human capital resources and how these key resources contribute to business performance in regional ethnic minority microbusinesses. Our model also shows relationships between these key human capital resources. © 2023 International Council for Small Business.

Purpose: The authors seek to advance the understanding of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) internationalization at the regional level and examine the role of home market institutions in this process. Design/methodology/approach: The authors analyze hypotheses with data from SMEs in five country markets and from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. A cluster analysis establishes the regional diversification patterns (based on regional diversification scope, speed and rhythm) and a multinomial regression tests the effect of home market institutions on their adoption. Findings: The results offer a refined picture of SME regional diversification by revealing three patterns: intra-regionally focused firms, late inter-region diversifiers and early inter-region diversifiers. They also suggest that the adoption of these patterns is determined by SMEs' home market institutions. Originality/value: The authors develop a nuanced understanding of SME internationalization by building upon and expanding the regionalization rationale in the internationalization patterns literature. Additionally, the authors address the acknowledged, yet rarely investigated, country-level determinants of internationalization patterns. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The possibility that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) mix and match prediction and non-prediction while making decisions during internationalization remains a highly unaddressed scenario. The rare studies considering it do not go beyond domestic effects when contextualizing the decisions that guide SMEs' foreign expansion. This study links SMEs' decision-making strategies to performance and suggests that such a relationship is moderated by the host market's institutional development and the associated institutional voids. The analysis combines primary survey data from 851 SMEs in Brazil, China, Italy, Poland, and Sweden with secondary data retrieved from the World Bank. Besides supporting both independent and synergistic performance effects of predictive and non-predictive strategies, the results indicate that foreign market institutions affect these effects differently and suggest firm size effects worth consideration. Contributions include the expansion of the debate on the relationship between prediction and non-prediction beyond the either-or reasoning that prevails in existing research and the contextualization of SMEs' decision-making strategies in terms of the institutional dynamics that SMEs encounter abroad.

Relatively little is known about how born-global companies (BGs) innovate abroad during their lifecycle or about how the international innovation activities of BGs are related to their social capital. The network concepts of relational, structural, and cognitive social capital are almost completely neglected in the international business literature on BGs' innovation activities according to a dynamic approach. The aim of this research is to study the direct and indirect effects of structural, cognitive and relational social capital on BGs' product innovation by including the mediating role of market and technological knowledge acquisition. We develop a set of hypotheses that we combine and test in a structural equation model. We provide results with theoretical and practical implications for BGs in terms of both social capital and innovation abroad.

Both business networks and institutional forces are relevant to firm internationalization but they have seldom been studied together. We investigate under what circumstances firms are more likely to adopt non-predictive strategy in light of the influence of the business networks, the institutional forces, and the home market background affecting their internationalization. Based on survey data from 758 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from Brazil, China, Poland, Italy, and Sweden, our results support the effects of formal institutional distance and cultural differences on the use of non-predictive strategies by SMEs in internationalization decisions, as well as the contingency effects of business network stability and of having an emerging market background. We integrate research on the liability of foreignness and the liability of outsidership and find that business network stability is critical. It does not moderate the relation between cultural difference and NPS adoption but attenuates the negative relation between institutional distance and NPS adoption, indicating that the liabilities of foreignness and outsidership play different roles in internationalization. © 2021 The Author(s)

Business researchers and policymakers frequently overlook ethnic minority microbusinesses. Yet, together with small and medium-sized organizations, microbusinesses drive both local and national economies. Combining social capital theory with the resource-based view and building upon 43 in-depth interviews, this study proposes a model of ‘compassionate customer service’. In ethnic minority microbusinesses, coethnic culturally sensitive customer service is an important strategic resource for sustainable success, which high street chains lack. A key challenge for ongoing business survival and success is to ensure that future ethnic minority generations sustain coethnic compassionate customer service.(PDF) Compassionate customer service in ethnic minority microbusinesses.