Browsing by Author "Meyer, Michael"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    ItemMetadata only
    Forms of capital, intra-ethnic variation and Polish entrepreneurs in Leicester.
    (Work, Employment and Society, 2011-03) Vershinina, Natalia; Barrett, Rowena; Meyer, Michael; Moguilnaia, Natalia A.
    A study of 10 Polish entrepreneurs operating in Leicester, UK is reported in this article. The concepts of social, cultural and economic capital are used as the lens through which to explore the way the capital they access is employed and converted into entrepreneurial activity. Ethnic entrepreneurship takes place within wider social, political and economic institutional frameworks and opportunity structures and so this is taken into account by differentiating two groups – post-war and contemporary Polish entrepreneurs. The differing origins and amounts of forms of capital they can access are shown as is how these are converted into valued outcomes. Combining the mixed embeddedness approach with a forms-of-capital analysis enables looking beyond social capital to elaborate on intra-ethnic variation in the UK’s Polish entrepreneurial community.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Polish immigrants in Leicester: Forms of capital underpinning entrepreneurial activity.
    (The Leicester Business School Occasional Papers, 2009-08) Vershinina, Natalia; Barrett, Rowena; Meyer, Michael; Moguilnaia, Natalia A.
    In this paper we report a study of 10 Polish immigrant entrepreneurs operating in Leicester, UK. Like Ram, Theodorakopoulos and Jones (2008) we take a forms-ofcapital approach but use Bourdieu’s (1983) social, cultural and economic capitals as the lens through which to explore their pathways to entrepreneurship. This allows us to look beyond studies that generally focus on social capital embodied in family and ethnic networks. By incorporating a mixed embeddedness approach (Kloostermans, Van Leun and Rath, 1999), we identify three groups – traditional, opportunity and opportunist entrepreneurs - based on when they immigrated and the implications of the differing origins and amounts of capital they can access and convert into entrepreneurial activity. The contribution of this paper is to go beyond explaining ethnic entrepreneurship in terms of social capital arising from ethnic group membership and to show the existence of intra-ethnic variation in the UK Polish entrepreneurial community.