Outsiders' business: A critical review of research on immigrant entrepreneurship

In the Netherlands, a significant proportion of the immigrant population has established itself as self-employed entrepreneurs in the past few years, a process which has caught the attention of researchers. This article critically examines the output of these researchers. It is concluded that although research in the Netherlands has brought to light a number of interesting facts, it has not contributed a great deal to our understanding of immigrant entrepreneurship. The harvest is one-sided, local and theoretically not very far-reaching. Research on immigrant entrepreneurship has been dominated by social scientists, who show a great deal of interest in ethnocultural characteristics and processes of ethnocultural incorporation. In so doing, they reduce immigrant entrepreneurship to an ethnocultural phenomenon existing within an economic and institutional vacuum. It is suggested that researchers seek linkages with the latest developments in international theory-building and that they pay more systematic attention to the structural changes in the urban economy and the institutional framework of the welfare state within which entrepreneurs operate.