Recent research shows that the foreign born utilize both local and long-distance social relationships to become entrepreneurs, affecting immigrants’ chances at upward mobility and their contributions to economic development. Scholars have yet to assess how African American entrepreneurs take part in similar types of geographically dispersed business communities. Using multi-level social network analyses and OLS regressions to compare the geography of buyer-supplier ties originating from one immigrant neighborhood and one African American neighborhood in Chicago, this article highlights a unique mechanism that places African Americans at a disadvantage compared to immigrants: a lack of geographic diversity in African American social capital. Immigrant entrepreneurs’ social networks, unlike African Americans’ networks, connect the foreign born to more people in different places, enabling them to circumvent the limitations of their local communities and accrue more business assets. Contrary to existing research, many foreign-born business owners in this study relied on intra-national rather than local or transnational social ties. These findings challenge researchers to reevaluate the geographic foundations of immigrant and African American entrepreneurship and reexamine how ethnic minority entrepreneurship affects patterns of social stratification and economic development.

中文翻译：

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既非这里也非那里？少数民族创业的新地理如何使非裔美国人处于不利地位

最近的研究表明，外国出生的人利用本地和远距离的社会关系成为企业家，影响了移民向上流动的机会及其对经济发展的贡献。学者们尚未评估非裔美国企业家如何参与类似类型的地理分散的商业社区。使用多层次社交网络分析和 OLS 回归来比较源自芝加哥一个移民社区和一个非裔美国人社区的买家-供应商关系的地理分布，本文强调了一种独特的机制，该机制使非裔美国人与移民相比处于劣势：非裔美国人社会资本缺乏地域多样性。移民企业家的社交网络，与非裔美国人的网络不同，将外国出生的人与更多不同地方的人联系起来，使他们能够绕过当地社区的限制并积累更多的商业资产。与现有研究相反，本研究中的许多外国出生的企业主依赖于国内而非本地或跨国的社会联系。这些发现要求研究人员重新评估移民和非裔美国人创业的地理基础，并重新审视少数民族创业如何影响社会分层和经济发展的模式。