This article presents an overarching review of the evidence regarding enterprise diversity. It discusses the context of ethnic minorities and women in enterprise and summarises research evidence relating to their relative access to finance, market selection and management skills. Policy within the field of diversity and enterprise is characterised by a number of tensions and unresolved questions including the presence of perceived or actual discrimination, the quantity and quality of ethnic minority and women-led businesses, potential market failure in the support provided to diverse enterprises and the substantive uniqueness of ethnic minority and women-led enterprises. Particular implications for policy and practice as well as directions for future research are discussed.

This article assesses recent developments in the research and practice of migrant entrepreneurship by examining the powerful contribution that the perspective of ‘mixed embeddedness’ has provided to this field. We identify key themes emerging from mixed embeddedness, particularly in relation to the role of the institutional and market contexts, and highlight areas that could strengthen the perspective, such as (1) the role of regulation, (2) the incorporation of racist exclusion and (3) gendered structures of migration and labour market processes, (4) market ghettoisation and (5) greater sensitivity to historical context. We also consider the extent to which growing interest among practitioners in supporting migrant enterprise has been influenced by developments in the academic domain.

What form is small business activity taking among new migrants in the UK? This question is addressed by examining the case of Somalis in the English city of Leicester.We apply a novel synthesis of the Nee and Sanders' (2001) `forms of capital' model with the `mixed embeddedness' approach (Rath, 2000) to enterprises established by newly arrived immigrant communities, combining agency and structure perspectives. Data are drawn from business-owners (and workers) themselves, rather than community representatives. Face-to-face in-depth interviews were held with 25 business owners and 25 employees/`helpers', supplemented by 3 focus group encounters with different segments of the Somali business population.The findings indicate that a reliance solely on social capital explanations is not sufficient. An adequate understanding of business dynamics requires an appreciation of how Somalis mobilize different forms of capital within a given political, social and economic context.

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The case-study method has a long and respected history in the mainstream management literature. The philosophy and implications of the case-study method have received considerable attention and there are a number of standard texts on the approach. The method is also gaining acceptance, along with other qualitative methods, within the small business and entrepreneurial research community. Yet there has been little discussion of the distinctive philosophical consequences of applying the case-study approach in this area. This article will address this gap by mapping the paradigms adopted by small business and entrepreneurial case-study researchers. This will provide a platform upon which to explore the consequences of the paradigmatic position that researchers adopt.

Small firms are saturated with the ideology of the family. For some, the notion of the `family firm' conjures up an image of harmony at the workplace; moreover, it is seen to serve as an important source of flexibility. Others, however, view it as little more than a cover-up of exploitative practices which are believed to be dominant in small firms. Using an ethnographic approach, this article explores in detail how the notion of the family is actually operationalised at the level of the workplace. Participant and direct observation methods were used to examine the role of the family in management organisation, recruitment and workplace control. We argue that the family is crucial to the understanding of the pattern of social relations within small firms, but it is more complex and contested than commonly portrayed. The `family' was found to be both a resource and constraint; management benefited from the `flexibility' afforded by familial ties, but the family also imposed obligations which contradicted economic rationality. The diffuse nature of such arrangements meant that `negotiated paternalism', rather than autocracy or harmony, more accurately depicted the family at work.

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