Research on ethnic enterprise emerged in the United States as part of an attempt to explain the historical differences in business activity between blacks and other ethnic groups. In Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan argued that “the small shopkeeper, small manufacturer, or small entrepreneur of any kind played such an important role in the rise of immigrant groups in America that its absence from the Negro community warrants at least some discussion.”1 Glazer and Moynihan offered some brief, possible explanations, but the first extended treatment came with the publication of Ivan Light's now classic comparison of Blacks, not with Jews, Italians, or Irish, but with immigrants—Japanese, Chinese, West Indians—whose racial characteristics made them equally distinctive; the argument developed an imaginative variant of the Weber thesis, showing that it was ethnic solidarism, not individualism, that gave these immigrants an “elective affinity” with the requirements of small business.
