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Entrepreneurs have been traditionally epitomized as rugged individuals garnering creative forces of innovation and technology. Applying this traditional, limited, and narrow view of entrepreneurship to ethnic firm creation and growth is to ignore or discount core cultural values of the ethnic contexts in which these firms operate. It is no longer possible to depend solely on human capital theory and household characteristic descriptions to understand the complex and interdependent relationships between the ethnic-owning family, its firm, and the community context in which the firm operates. This paper addresses the complex dynamic of ethnic firms with three purposes: (a) to provide a cultural context for the three ethnic groups composing the National Minority Business Owner Study; (b) to extend the Sustainable Family Business Theory, a dynamic, behaviorally-based, multi-dimensional family firm theory, by clarifying how it accommodates ethnic firm complexities within their cultural context, and (c) to derive implications for research, education and consulting with worldwide applications.

This paper presents U. S. prevalence figures and their relationship to various family business definitions offered in literature to date. The percentage of households that own at least one family business where its owner or manager resides in the residential family/household was 13.8%. Results yielded a 10.0% prevalence rate for households having a business that qualified for this 1997 National Family Business Survey.The level of prevalence was shown to be associated with gender, ownership/management, involvement of family members, and generation of owner. These findings are useful for refining family business definitions. This paper also offers implications for future research, teaching, and practice relative to family businesses.

Family businesses are vital but understudied economic and social units. Previous family business research is limited relative to its definitions, sampling, and resulting empirical evidence. This paper presents an alternative methodological approach to the study of family businesses with the potential for allowing multiperspective and detailed analyses of the nature and internal dynamics of both the family and the business and the interaction between the two.

This futuristic commentary reviews family business research since its beginning more than 30 years ago. Prior to 2000, disciplinary roots, professional organizations, and early milestones are identified. More recent books, journals, and special issues are noted, and conceptualizations, theories, and databases are compared and contrasted. Lastly, current and future research paths or directions are identified and discussed, and researchers are challenged to move ahead into new and different research arenas.

JOURNAL OF SMALL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 422We here review and critique prior research on minority entrepreneurship, paying particular attention to the contributions and limitations of deployed sampling techniques and research methodologies. As based on this review, we then introduce the 2003 and 2005 National Minority Business Owner Surveys-a comprehensive and primary data collection effort that used varied methodologies to secure in-depth information about random national samples of African American, Korean American, and Mexican American populations as well as a comparison sample of nonminority business owners. We present the initial business ownership profiles developed with these recent data, in part, as a benchmark of the U.S. entrepreneurial experience, and compare the profiles with those presented in prior research. These profiles document similarities and differences across the four groups and provide an empirical foundation for understanding the origin of those similarities and differences. No longer can we ignore the in-depth study of minority businesses and their owning families nor can we simply assume that all businesses are the same, regardless of minority status or ethnicity.

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