Volume 2, Issue 4

Casual observers may view family business as a sub-discipline of entrepreneurship. Although there is considerable overlap of the fields, they consist of two distinct bodies of knowledge. As entrepreneurship is maturing through research contributions, family business is in an emergent stage. We contend that current dominant theories and models that frame family business research studies may result in misleading conclusions due to insufficient systems views. Despite the increase in international and cross-cultural studies, models have failed to address the variations caused by national context, ethnic, religious and other external influences. We discuss China as an example of the inadequacy of models developed within other societal environments.

We are living in a time where innovation and technology are dominant economic and societal change agents that warrant special consideration and attention in entrepreneurship research. This article highlights one recent technologically driven phenomenon that is not only reshaping how people communicate and collaborate but significantly changing traditional organizational structures and improving business processes. The business community has coined this phenomenon as Social Business and predicts its impact to be similar to the Industrial Revolution. This article attempts to engage the research community by suggesting to add Social Business as an important and future area of our research agenda.

Investigations of socioeconomic assimilation among immigrant and ethnic minority groups are often limited to analyses of labor market outcomes only. This study investigates the relationship between self-employment, as one overlooked indicator of socioeconomic integration, and segmented assimilation. Using 1980, 1990, and 2000 census data this research examines how length of residence in the US and nativity affect ethnic minority group differences in: 1) self-employment trends as a percentage of all men and women; 2) changes in these percentages from 1980 to 2000; and, 3) the odds of being self-employed compared with US-born non-Hispanic Whites. Drawing from segmented assimilation theory, findings demonstrate a mainstream assimilation trajectory as measured by self-employment participation for most ethnic minority groups, although there is some evidence that Filipino men may follow a downward assimilation trajectory. The delayed assimilation hypothesis associated with the “ethnic entrepreneurship” paradigm is not supported. Findings also reveal differences in self-employment participation by gender; however, women’s segmented assimilation trajectories are not markedly different from that of men with one exception: foreign-born Filipinas demonstrate mainstream assimilation. Evidence presented in this study encourages the use of self-employment as one aspect of socioeconomic assimilation.

The understanding of entrepreneurship is very much guided by the data available to study the people and processes that comprise this most important activity. This paper reviews existing entrepreneurship databases, provides detail on their methodologies, makes observations as to their strengths and weaknesses relative to their usefulness to entrepreneurship researchers, and, in some cases, proposes way to improve them. A hierarchy of these databases is presented that groups the databases into categories based on their overall usefulness. The paper also makes recommendations about what types of data entrepreneurship research would provide the most benefit to this field of study.