David Fitzgerald Leah Muse-Orlinoff University of California-San Diego
How do immigrant entrepreneurs build and maintain their business networks, particularly outside of their ethnic and migrant communities? To what extent do these network formation processes--and the resulting network structures-- differ according to the legal status of the entrepreneur? This project studies how actors embed economic relationships in social structures. The methodologies and theories of social network analysis are applied to immigrant entrepreneurship. Specifically, a combination of ethnographic and quantitative network data will be used to study the process of network formation and the business networks of immigrant entrepreneurs from the Mexican state of Yucatán who live and work in San Francisco, California. According to Yucatecan local government assessments approximately 10,000 migrants from that community migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area between 1995 and 2008 and significant numbers of Yucatecans from other communities reside in or around San Francisco. Yucatecan-owned businesses exist in these neighborhoods and the demand for Yucatecan foods and goods while new has created nascent businesses entrepreneurs. This study will examine six-business networks of Youctecan restaurant owners over a one year period. The major hypothesis is that new immigrant entrepreneurs tend to actively embed themselves into the economic and social fabric of their receiving society.
Broader Impact. This study offers a new empirical perspective on the incorporation of immigrant communities into the economic life of receiving societies and the role of government policies in microeconomic activity. Project findings will help us to understand how identifies immigrant business enterprises create social and economic ties across groups from ethnic backgrounds and national origins.
First-generation immigrants who dream of starting small businesses must determine what resources they need and then figure out how to obtain them. In the process, they build relationships with people from outside their ethnic and national communities. Through these relationships, first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs catalyze the social and economic incorporation of their communities into the United States. I conducted research with Mexican migrant entrepreneurs in San Francisco, California, to better understand how people from newly settled, predominantly undocumented, low resource immigrant communities start and maintain small businesses. While much of the existing scholarship on ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship convincingly demonstrates that small business owners seek and obtain resources including money and information from other members of their ethnic or national communities, the research I have done with funding from the National Science Foundation indicates that pioneer entrepreneurs seek capital, information, and assistance from contacts outside their national community when they are setting up their businesses. There are two primary explanations for this pattern. For one thing, the money and know-how needed to run a business simply do not exist in an immigrant community which has only been in the United States for a decade and half and in which many people work in low-paying jobs and are not legal residents of this country. Another reason why pioneer immigrant entrepreneurs try to find resources from people outside their communities is because they want to appeal to as broad a customer base as possible: the economic incentives for creating an ethnically heterogeneous business network are strong incentives for entrepreneurs to develop relationships with as diverse a group of vendors, investors, customers, and advisors as possible. Applying the theories and methods of social network analysis to the study of immigrant entrepreneurship, I identify three specific outcomes of pioneer migrant entrepreneurs’ business-development processes which indicate that pioneer immigrant entrepreneurs catalyze social and economic incorporation into receiving community: The importance of institutional relationships. Pioneer entrepreneurs who establish strong and lasting relationships with community organizations or institutions report better business outcomes, in term of business longevity and profitability. Pioneer entrepreneurs who do not have relationships with institutions report greater economic instability and less access to information which might assist them in their business operations. The role of strong cross-ethnic ties. Pioneer entrepreneurs who only have know or work with people from their particular ethnic or national community have less access to information and resources than those pioneer immigrant entrepreneurs who actively seek out non-co-ethnic partners, investors, advisors, employees, or vendors. Non-co-ethnic ties are of particular importance for undocumented entrepreneurs who are unable to obtain funding from formal institutions such as banks or credit unions and who consequently must rely on other people to act as proxies or intermediaries. Changing forms of community influence. As pioneer entrepreneurs develop ties with people within and outside their ethnic communities, their structural position changes[1] and they develop new forms of influence over the flow of resources in their networks. For instance, within their ethnic communities, pioneer entrepreneurs can affect the way other community members enter the labor market and may become advocates for particular social or political causes. Because pioneer entrepreneurs connect ethnic and non-co-ethnic networks they can also exert control over the kind of information or resources exchanged between these networks. Pioneer entrepreneurs can and do create particular notions of what a certain cultural product (food, for example; Matus 2011) "should" be through their business dealings with non-co-ethnic customers. In so doing, they create and disseminate concepts of ethnicity, authenticity, and identity in the broader receiving community. Findings from this project challenge the notion that immigrant entrepreneurs operate in a bounded or ethnically homogenous community. While they may initially do so for business reasons, my research indicates that these ties become the basis for strong community relationships that immigrant entrepreneurs rely on outside of business reasons. In so doing, first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs catalyze the social and economic incorporation of their communities into the United States. [1] Pioneer entrepreneurs develop ties with a lot of people from their ethnic community. These entrepreneurs can then decide who to share resources or information with, who to connect, or who to exclude or deny resources to. This form of influence over the flow of resources within a network is measured by a concept known as centrality, and over the course of their business’ lifespan pioneer entrepreneurs have higher measures of centrality (influence within their ethnic/national networks). On the other hand, successful pioneer entrepreneurs also report many ties to people outside their ethnic/national communities. In this way, pioneer entrepreneurs act as brokers, or the actors who connect two otherwise unconnected networks. Brokers are influential network actors because they control the flow of information between networks. These measures have also been referred to as "bonding" and "bridging" social capital (Putnam 1995).
