Categorising and labelling entrepreneurs: Business support organisations constructing the Other through prefixes of ethnicity and immigrantship

Abstract

This article demonstrates how Swedish support organisations approach and target immigrant entrepreneurs in terms of categorisation and labelling. In their strategic positioning, and as a result of framing and communicating specific target groups for their activities, organisations simultaneously produce and reproduce categories of clients. We argue that despite its emancipatory intent, the process of categorisation runs the risk of reproducing an inferior Other. Adding prefixes in labelling entrepreneurs may replicate the societal hierarchies that business support initiatives were designed to counteract. This article questions the basis of business support for minority entrepreneurs and is a contribution to wider debates concerned with exposing the constructed nature of entrepreneurship.

Keywords

business support categorisation ethnicity immigrant entrepreneurship labelling

Introduction

Business support is an issue of contemporary interest for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners alike (Andersson and Johansson, 2012; Down, 2012; Ram et al., 2013). Support is offered both to the general population of businesses and to minority entrepreneurs of different kinds, assumed to be in need of specialised support. In addition to addressing labour market problems, policies targeting specific groups are also motivated by efforts to create social inclusion and combat exclusion (Beckinsale et al., 2011; Edwards et al., 2010; Ram et al., 2013; Sonfield, 2014). Entrepreneurial support aimed specifically at ethnic minorities originated in the United States with the 1953 Small Business Act. Elsewhere, however, there was a considerable time-lag, almost four decades in the case of Sweden – the focus of this article – where even as late as the 1990s Najib (1996) could point to an urgent need for support explicitly targeting the special needs of the ‘immigrant entrepreneur population’.

Thus prompted, a number of initiatives and organisations have assumed this task, targeting specific groups of entrepreneurs, be they women, immigrants or ethnic minorities. With this came a separation of entrepreneurs into different categories labelled by ethnicity or gender. Although unintentional, this practice of differentiating and targeting specific groups of clients has the effect of reinforcing a divisive norm of the entrepreneur as a white male belonging to the majority population (Ahl, 2004; Berglund and Johansson, 2007; Essers, 2009; Sundin and Tillmar, 2010). As Ogbor (2000) shows in his analysis of the entrepreneurial discourse, the notion of the entrepreneur is in itself ‘discriminatory, gender-biased, ethnocentrically determined and ideologically controlled’, sustaining not only prevailing societal biases, but serving as a tapestry for unexamined and contradictory assumptions and knowledge about the reality of entrepreneurs (p. 605). When support organisations attach prefixes to the entrepreneurship label in denoting their clients, this norm is highlighted.

In this paradox of support and differentiation, specialised support efforts designed to empower entrepreneurs simultaneously a potentially problematic prefix. The self-defeating contradictions of ethnically labelled support are sharply evident in Miles’ (1993) observations on the social process of racialisation, the artificial creation of a distinct category of human being fit only for exclusion: ‘an Other that is so different from Us that They should either “belong” elsewhere or should be denied resources and rights available to the majority’ (p. 12). Thus, while ethnic support has a positive aim, its essentially inclusive intention is compromised by the exclusionary label that renders some entrepreneurs as the Other (Ahl, 2002; Nilsson, 1997).

By producing and managing categories of difference (Czarniawska and Höpfl, 2005), support organisations inadvertently create an artificial divide between the entrepreneur with a prefix and one who is simply an entrepreneur, a border between the normal taken-for-granted entrepreneur and the deviant with special support needs (Kamali, 2000). As Gastelaars (2002: 15) rightly claims, ‘although it could be argued that “inclusion and exclusion do not necessarily entail prejudice (negative preconceptions) or discrimination (unjust decisions),” one should realise that “prejudice and discrimination are often built into the … schemes of differentiation”’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 257).

Support organisation categorising and labelling practices do not occur in a vacuum but rather within and as reproductions of discourses on entrepreneurship, ethnicity and immigrantship. The notion of entrepreneurship is, for example, a highly malleable political construct that is used by political actors to legitimise particular courses of action; it is a potent means of perpetuating an omniscient neo-liberal political rationality (Perren and Dannreuther, 2013). Publicly funded initiatives to support ethnic minority entrepreneurship fit snugly within this neo-liberal consensus (Kloosterman and Rath, 2003; Ram and Jones, 2008). They have been a feature of the small firm policy agenda in the United Kingdom, for example, since the outbreak of civil unrest in a number of British cities in the 1980s (Ram and Jones, 2008); hence, entrepreneurship has often been promoted as a political solution to tackle disadvantage and maintain urban social harmony. But entrepreneurship policy, whether directed at minorities or the general population, is an inconstant political construct that is at the mercy of political fads and fashions (Dannreuther and Perren, 2013).

In this article, we specifically examine the labelling of foreign or ethnic minority clientele. Our choice of Sweden presents the rather challenging case of a society whose reputation as the very model of social justice belies an everyday reality of racism (Pred, 2000), and whose business support for ethnic minorities is both underdeveloped and under-researched (Engstrand, 2010; Hjerm, 2004). By examining the labelling practices of Swedish support organisations, we aim to bring fresh insights into an ongoing enterprise discourse on inclusion and exclusion (Ogbor, 2000). Underpinning this research is the conviction that the business support approach to entrepreneurs with foreign backgrounds has a profound impact on their categorisation and labelling and their exclusion as part of the Other.

Prior to in-depth examination of six cases, we outline previous research, showing how analysis of entrepreneurial labelling is confused by the use of different and inconsistent prefixes organising the article as follows. We commence by contextualising the Swedish approach to minority business support; the Swedish approach to labelling business support initiatives is then discussed. This is followed by a theoretical assessment of categorisation and labelling. Next, the methods are discussed before the findings, based on six case studies, are presented. The discussion and conclusions review the implications of the arguments.

A brief history of immigrant enterprise support in Sweden

Official accounts of the history of migration to and from Sweden began about the turn of the 19th century when many Swedes migrated to America (SCB Report, 2004, 2008, 2009). Immigration has exceeded emigration since 1930. After the end of the Second World War, when Swedish industry and public sector were in a phase of growth and needed labour, people from the Nordic countries and Europe came to Sweden to work (SCB Report, 2008). During the 1970s, labour immigration was gradually replaced by refugee and family immigration (SCB Report, 2004).

Today, the Swedish population of almost 10 million citizens comprise some 1.5 million born outside of Sweden (SCB Report, 2013). Immigrants hail from over 200 countries, but the most common countries of birth besides Sweden are Finland, followed by Iraq, Poland, Yugoslavia and Iran. Of the immigrants, 18% are from the Nordic countries, 19% from the European Union (EU), 16% from non-EU European countries, 30% from Asia, 9% from Africa, 5% from South America and 3% from North America and Oceania (SCB Report, 2013).

Ethnic minority enterprise in Sweden increased after the Second World War, but entrepreneurship was largely restricted to foreigners up until the 1970s (Nordlund, 2001). In the 1990s, ethnic minority enterprise boomed (partly due to inclusion in the official statistics of Swedes with parents, one or both, born outside Sweden (Nordlund, 2001)). Compared with support systems in countries where ethnic minority entrepreneurship has a longer established presence, the Swedish system is understandably somewhat underdeveloped. This reflects Sweden’s relatively late adoption of the entrepreneurial model of economic policy favoured since the early 1980s by the countries of the neo-American sphere (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Hjerm, 2004; Slavnic, 2013). Almost from the outset of the 1980s, it was recognised by policy-makers in these countries that minority firms made up a substantial proportion of this newly significant entrepreneurial population and that mutual benefits for the state and for entrepreneurs themselves might accrue from providing various forms of enabling support. Critical attention has subsequently focused on the essentialist criteria employed for determining eligibility (Ram et al., 2006), and one of our main tasks here is to evaluate how far Swedish support practices can learn lessons from the experience of predecessors.

As with many other European nations, the emergence of immigrant-origin firms in Sweden took place some time after their rise in the United States and United Kingdom, a time-lag inevitably reflected in the development of support practices. According to Kloosterman (2000), these entrepreneurial leads and lags are explicable largely with reference to international variations in labour market regulation, the deregulated regimes of the Anglo sphere offering far more opportunities for small firms than the European social democracies, with their much tighter state controls on both employment and self-employment. On this dimension, the nations of Esping-Andersen’s (1990) ‘Scandinavian social democratic welfare model’ lie towards the furthermost extreme, away from the neo-liberal Anglos. Until the end of the 1980s, Sweden’s social democracy was ‘universally admired and widely envied’ (Judt, 2010: 367), or, as Harvey (2005) argues, ‘Nowhere in the Western world was the power of capital more democratically threatened in the 1970s’ (p.112). Yet, gradually retreating from this position in the 1980s, Swedish policy-makers increasingly promoted the advantages of small-scale private enterprise (Artern and Johannisson, 1992), a rhetorical shift which became more concrete with the election of a Conservative government in 1991. Although the neo-liberal thrust falls some way short of the Anglo-American realm, the Swedish political-economic environment has become progressively more friendly for small firms (Blyth, 2002; Hjerm, 2004; Slavnic, 2013), including ethnic minority firms.

Prefix confusion and enterprise policy categorisation in Sweden

Placed in their wider context, Swedish labelling practices can be seen as one version of a general procedure varying sharply and often confusingly from country to country. Even at the most basic level, there is a lack of international agreement about which term to use as a general descriptor (Chaganti and Greene, 2002; Kloosterman and Rath, 2003), with Sweden and the Netherlands prominent among those favouring ‘immigrant entrepreneurship’ (Slavnic, 2013), while in the United States and United Kingdom ‘ethnic minority entrepreneurship’ is preferred (Ram and Smallbone, 2003). Such a usage would be highly problematic in Sweden, where the word minority refers to five legally sanctioned national minorities (Sami, Sweden Finns, Tornedalers, Jews and Roma). Consequently the immigrant label is more widely used, although not unquestioned (Peralta, 2005).

Throughout much of Europe since the 1980s, entrepreneurship has been widely canvassed as a solution to problems of economic and social integration (Blackburn and Ram, 2006; Hjerm, 2004; Perren and Jennings, 2005; Ram et al., 2006). This rationale has stimulated extensive interest in different ways of supporting entrepreneurs, with differentiated support targeting entrepreneurs from minority groups (Stevenson, 2001) rapidly gaining ground in the United Kingdom since the 1980s (Ram, 1998) (although falling back under the 2010 coalition government). In Sweden, such policy development has been somewhat time-lagged and has taken a different direction. Although the 1980s has been described as ‘the decade of the SMEs’ (Lindmark and Johannisson, 1996), it was not until the mid-1990s that policy interest was paid specifically to immigrant entrepreneurs, with an official Government Report (Najib, 1996), outlining a twofold approach of directing support to immigrant entrepreneurship together with reducing barriers and creating an improved business climate through consulting and credit activities. The report coincided with the establishment of the first explicit support measure targeting immigrant entrepreneurs, with the initiation of the Internationella Företagarföreningen i Sverige (IFS). In 1997/1998, the government decided on a new integration policy, in which mainstreaming rather than separate provision became the general policy. In what followed, integration policy was included in traditional policy areas, forming a general approach to supporting entrepreneurs with foreign backgrounds (Stevenson, 2001).

Today, policies towards entrepreneurship, labour and the wider economy are intertwined, and the notion of immigrant entrepreneurship has become a political solution to integration (Engstrand, 2010). A plethora of support initiatives directed at foreign-born entrepreneurs have emerged since the mid-1990s. Efforts vary widely in geographical focus and in rationale, but what they all have in common is an interest in entrepreneurs with a foreign background or belonging to a minority group. Most of these support efforts include one of the following: (1) human capital-based support such as counselling and education, (2) improved opportunities for financial support or (3) support for networking and social capital (Engstrand, 2010).

Categorisation and labelling – a theoretical framework

The central argument of this article is predicated on the recognition that the practice of categorising people is a crucial activity in organising (Bowker and Star, 1999; Diedrich et al., 2011; Diedrich and Styhre, 2008). Categorisation works to simplify organisational life, relating categories to actions as a way of avoiding time-consuming decision making. It is a process whereby ‘things are sorted out’ (Bowker and Star, 1999) and thereby organised and defined (Diedrich and Styhre, 2008). Even if classifications, here used synonymously with categories, are social agreements, they are not permanently institutionalised but based on what is socially legitimate and has proven practical functionality (Bowker and Star, 1999).

Central to the thrust of this article is that to categorise means to accentuate differences. In other words, when representatives of an organisation categorise something or someone, they decide whether it is different or similar, putting one category of things, such as entrepreneurs, in relation to the Other, such as immigrant entrepreneurs.

Following Jenkins (2008), we also make an analytical distinction between social categorisation and group identification, allowing the former to denote the process of ascription taking place outside and across an ethnic boundary, whereas the latter is used for processes of ascription taking place inside or across an ethnic border. Whereas identification is essentially voluntaristic, categorisation is related to power relations and to the ability of one group to impose its categories of ascription upon others so that ‘a group is a self-conscious collectivity, rooted in processes of internal definition, while a category is externally defined’ (Jenkins, 2008: 56). Hence, social categorisation concerns the identification of others as a collectivity (Brubaker, 2004). The power relations of a particular context might bring about the result that the Other’s definition may be more consequential and influential than the group’s own definition (Jenkins, 2008: 57).

Jenkins’s (2008) framing of different contexts in which categorisation takes place is also relevant for present purposes. In focusing on support organisations, we take an interest in a practice that, with Jenkins’s terminology, could be termed ‘social policy’. Jenkins (2008) argues that social policy may have unintended consequences, in the sense that targeting a part of the population – perceived to have certain specialised needs – ‘may call into existence a new social category or strengthen an existing categorisation’ (p. 71). At the same time as the identification of a certain group as a ‘case’ may contribute to making them worthy of specific resources, it may also identify members of the category as ‘socially deficient or lacking in some fashion’ (Jenkins, 2008: 71), further labelling them as troublesome.

The development of fixed immutable categories could give rise to metonymies, which are creations of etiquettes and labels that, once directed at an individual, make the person synonymous with the category as well as with its associated values no matter how unique he or she may be (Brune, 2004). This means that categorisation and labelling are processes that can actually create and recreate behavioural patterns and perceptions of individuals; it also suggests that the labelled person is imprisoned in their category or label. Pred (2000) discusses implications of ‘metonymical magic’ in terms of racism, when an individual belonging to a racialised population is made as one with the entire population (p. 63).

In this article, we are particularly interested in how categories are constructed in processes of ascription (Cornell and Hartmann, 2007). For this, the notion of labelling serves our purpose well. Labelling is used to denote characteristics and to distinguish between similarities and differences (Becker, 1963). By focusing on acts of labelling, attention is turned to power relationships and to how actors with power use labels to influence how certain categories of people are regarded and treated (Moncrieffe and Eyben, 2007). An effect of acts of labelling is that individuals may be determined or even influenced by the terms and characteristics associated with the label (Becker, 1963). Furthermore, in situations of altruistic intent, labelling can have negative effects, such as stigmatisation and discrimination (Moncrieffe and Eyben, 2007).

In summary, Sweden is following other developed economies in seeking out ways in which to inveigle its growing immigrant population into a culture of enterprise. A growing number of initiatives are targeting minority groups with the aim of offering support to nurture ambitions to start or develop small firms. The processes that attend the labelling of such groups are rarely remarked upon; yet, they can have profound effects on the way in which immigrant and other groups are constructed and perceived by the wider population. This neglect leaves researchers and policy-makers in a ‘treacherous bind’ which involves managing the tension of ‘how [they] can work with inadequate racial and ethnic categories that are to hand, whilst also finding ways of identifying and disrupting the ways in which the same categories can “essentialise”’ (Gunaratnam, 2003: 29). Our objective addresses this tension by examining how different kinds of approaches and strategies to target entrepreneurs in practice involve processes of categorising and labelling.

Methodology and method

Our research interest in the processes that lead to the labelling of minority entrepreneurs prompted us to deploy a methodological approach informed by debates on the constructions of identity categories and labels (Jenkins, 2008). For present purposes, a constructionist approach that sees categories and labels as socially constructed (discourse) through language and embedded in power relations is useful. We commence with the view that categories and labels are multiple and constructed in ongoing practices and everyday speech. Following Haraway (2013), we also argue that such constructions are fluid, contextual and dynamic. The methods include readings of policy documents, research literature, statistical data and, as a main basis for this article, interviews with policy officials and representatives of support organisations. The identification of relevant support organisations was a complex task. Many support providers offer a range of activities to all types of businesses; few confine themselves to a particular ethnic group or to immigrants. We used a variety of methods to identify organisations that provided business support for foreign-born persons, including Internet searches, commercial information such as advertisements directed towards the entrepreneur population or the public and discussions with representatives of other business support organisations as a kind of snowball sampling.

In total, 31 interviews were held with people involved in business support provision and policy (see Table 1). In all, 14 of these interviews were conducted with people from the six chosen case organisations, including CEOs, managing directors, senior business advisors and other formal representatives. The number of interviewees varies from case to case, depending on the organisation’s size and scope. In this study, we focus largely on the overall formal strategies and rhetoric of the organisation; as such, it is possible that individual organisational members, such as advisors, in their everyday practices do not enact the categorising and labelling practices of the employing organisations (Durose, 2009; Mole, 2002). The other 17 interviews were conducted with representatives of organisations within the business support provider organisational field. The interviews were semi-structured in character and lasted between 1 and 2 hours. All interviews were recorded and summarised or transcribed (see Table 1).

Table 1.

The empirical material.

Case organisations	Actors in the field	Documents
14 interviews with representatives of the six case organisations. Recorded and transcribed.	17 interviews with representatives of other organisations in the organisational field of business support and support policy. Recorded and summarised.	Brochures, Web pages, e-mails, training material, advertisements and more.

The analysis of the empirical material, including the choice of cases to include as illustrations of different types of approaches to categorising and labelling entrepreneurs, was an iterative process: empirical materials and analyses inspired by different theoretical perspectives were utilised in a stepwise development of a framework.

Initially, the analytical approach suggested by Asplund (1970) was helpful, in the sense that we strived to interrogate various aspects of different support approaches in order to understand the phenomenon. In a subsequent exploration of the interviews, we took inspiration from the discourse analysis approach developed by Bacchi (1999, 2009). In analysing the interviews with representatives of support organisations, we aimed, first, at understanding how the support organisations represented the ‘problem’ they were addressing. Hence, in analysing the mission of the support organisations, we considered both what was explicitly expressed and what was implicit in the communication. Bacchi (2009) argues that it is impossible to a full understanding of the discourse without recognising silences. Silences are also discussed by Hearn and Parkin (2001), who argue that they are a fundamental part of institutions expressing the characteristics of institutions, normalities and taken-for-granted ways of thoughts and practices. In relation to business support organisations, Swedish-born entrepreneurs become the standard towards which foreign-born entrepreneurs are compared (de los Reyes and Kamali, 2005). This is an unspoken or silent practice. What we focused on was to grasp silences as normalities and understand how they were reproduced within business support organisation communication efforts. By breaking the silence, we strove to question taken-for-granted expressions, and, by making the familiar unfamiliar, we aimed at creating an understanding of the ‘mystery’ of business support and the consequences of categorisation.

In a third step, different ways of positioning approaches vis-à-vis one another were worked out, finally resulting in the construction of a three-piece typology of approaches, through the iterative process of reading empirical materials and theoretical texts, aiming to include the variety of approaches identified in the empirical material but still offering a way of structuring the approaches into an analytical frame. For the sake of analysis of consequences related to the types of approaches, as well as of clarification of what consequences the approaches may entail, each has been afforded a descriptive label:

The immigrant prefix approach;

The ethnicity approach;

The generalist or non-prefix approach.

The three types of approaches are to be viewed as a way of structuring the material and the discussion. The approaches are thus, not always mutually exclusive. Empirical cases are linked to an approach type based on the predominant approach in each case; six cases were chosen to illustrate empirically the three types of approaches to supporting and categorising entrepreneurs with a foreign background. The six cases were chosen strategically, based on their capacity to highlight a particular approach to business support. We do not claim to provide a complete map of the field. Rather, we identify different approaches and discuss them in relation to ways of categorising and labelling the target group. Thus, the choice of cases is exemplary rather than representative.

Approaches to supporting entrepreneurs

We identify three approaches to business support, which we use to analyse the case material. The immigrant prefix approach targets immigrants by using the label to determine eligibility for support. In the ethnicity approach, the target group is defined in terms of ethnic origin, usually in respect of ownership of a firm (Kloosterman and Rath, 2001; Ram and Smallbone, 2003). The generalist or non-prefix approach caters to target foreign-born entrepreneurs as part of a broader ambition of supporting small firms per se.

Two empirical cases have been chosen to exemplify each approach, and in Table 2 we set out the three approaches and six cases to provide an overview of the basic premises of each case and to highlight their core features.

Table 2.

Overview of the three types of approaches and the cases used to exemplify them.

Approach	Name	Owner	Funding	Mission	Target group
The immigrant prefix approach	Association of Immigrant Entrepreneurs (AIE)	Both a foundation supporting ‘immigrant entrepreneurs’ and organised as a part of a state-owned support company, providing specialised support to foreign-born persons.	Publicly funded (state, region, municipalities)	Business support in terms of counselling in different languages as well as financing. Particular expertise in immigrant entrepreneurship.	Primarily but not exclusively entrepreneurs with foreign background who are running a business or are interested in start-up.
	Suburban Invest (SI)	Limited company owned by other limited companies.	Private equity (limited companies).	Venture capital company. Invests in promising companies that are owned and operated by entrepreneurs with immigrant background.	Entrepreneurs with an immigrant background.
The ethnicity approach	Somali Business and Information Centre (SBIC)	Owned by a publicly and privately funded institution. Part of a regional partnership promoting early and effective introduction of newly arrived and asylum seekers from Somalia.	The European Social Fund (ESF), different state, regional and local public organisations.	Business support in Swedish and Somali. Social and societal information. Employment service.	Unemployed Somalis in Sweden. Persons with an interest in entrepreneurship.
	Your Choice (YC)	A municipal project organised as part of a larger regional project supporting women’s businesses.	Municipality, the local business development unit, regional bodies.	Identify and support persons who want to start a business in the recently deregulated local care sector.	Anyone who wants to start a business in the sector, explicitly targeting women and persons with ‘different ethnicities’.
The generalist or non-prefix approach	Entrepreneurship and Integration (EI)	A project organised by the local unit of a nationwide support organisation, here called Centre for Nascent Entrepreneurs.	Privately owned companies in the region finance the regular operations of the host organisation. The project is funded mainly by the municipality.	Business advisory services, free of charge. Network support, including banks, insurance companies, accountants, advertisement bureaus and other support organisations.	Nascent entrepreneurs in general. Local branch established in a neighbourhood where many of the inhabitants are foreign-born.
	Regional Centre for Entrepreneurs (RCE)	Locally established foundation consisting of representatives from local business and municipalities.	A mixture of public (municipal funds) and private financiers (local businesses).	Traditional business support to nascent entrepreneurs.	Nascent entrepreneurs in general.

The immigrant prefix approach

The two cases chosen to illustrate the immigrant prefix approach differ to a large extent. While the first, the Association of Immigrant Entrepreneurs (AIE), is a fairly long-established part of a state-owned body, the second, Suburban Invest (SI), is a private venture capital firm supporting foreign-born persons deemed to have entrepreneurial potential. What the two organisations have in common is their denomination of ‘immigrants’ as their explicit target group.

AIE

Originally established as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the 1990s by immigrant entrepreneurs with personal experience of discrimination, AIE is now subsumed within a state-owned support body. Its main aim is to stimulate ‘… entrepreneurship among immigrant groups, to improve the skills of the individual immigrant entrepreneur and to work to improve the climate for immigrant businesses’. With regard to labelling, target clients are described as both ‘foreign-born’ and ‘immigrant’ entrepreneurs. Essentially, AIE’s work is predicated on the assumption that the competitive position of these ‘new Swedes’, disadvantaged as they are by language barriers and ignorance of Swedish regulations, is weak in comparison with the native-born. With the typical client visualised as a man in his 40s from the Middle East with modest needs for funding a start-up in the trade or service sector, special attention is paid to the provision of cultural and linguistic skills by support staff with knowledge of the immigrant’s own language and culture. Overall, AIE’s strategy can be summarised as a drive to become the main alternative to mainstream support, one directly geared to the particular circumstances of the immigrant entrepreneur.

SI

Since shortage of financial capital is repeatedly identified as a stumbling block for immigrant firms (Ram and Smallbone, 2003), SI appears as a welcome intervention, a venture capital firm specifically oriented to investing in start-ups by persons with an immigrant background. As with AIE, this organisation is run by persons who are themselves foreign-born entrepreneurs. The company originated in response to an observed mismatch between the powerful success drive of many immigrant entrepreneurs and a struggling business experience blighted by a lack of the necessary networks, experience and capital. Essentially, SI was born to tap into underused potential.

For the most part, SI is concerned with growth-oriented ‘fast-trackers’ (Storey, 1994): ‘Our interest is to develop people who develop businesses to earn a lot of money… The basic tenet is to do business and make money through investments’. According to the CEO, the very choice of name deliberately signals a concern for social inclusion and change:

We have chosen to call the new company [Suburban Invest]. Identification with [the Suburb] has a strong signal value and evokes emotions. We want to reverse the prevailing view, open up to change and tolerance, and use the name [of the suburb] in a context where it is associated with entrepreneurship and drive. But it is important to point out that the name is a symbol. This is not about a neighbourhood – our entrepreneurs can come from all parts of the region and Sweden.

Undoubtedly the key feature of SI is its immigrant exclusivity, its offer of investment to immigrant entrepreneurs only: ‘We support only immigrant entrepreneurs. If you are not an immigrant entrepreneur, [it] doesn’t matter how good you are. This is not the right place’. The client receiving support and investment must act in relation to ‘their own immigration-related, but also other entrepreneurial, experiences’. In sum, the entrepreneur supported by SI is an ‘immigrant entrepreneur with entrepreneurial talent’, or, as the company’s CEO describes it, ‘I think that, in general, people facing any form of exclusion, with all that that entails, build strength that we believe that we can capitalise on’.

The ethnicity approach

The two organisations chosen to exemplify the ethnicity approach have quite different predispositions. The first one, here called Somali Business and Information Centre (SBIC), was founded explicitly to support members of this specified ethnic group. The second organisation, Your Choice (YC), is a publicly funded project whose remit is sectorally and geographically delimited and which explicitly targets women and persons from different ethnic groups on the grounds that diversity, and ethnic diversity in particular, can be a useful resource in care service provision.

SBIC

Set up in 2012 to offer business support specifically to the Somali community, SBIC is backed by a range of funders from the European Social Fund down to the local County Administrative Board. SBIC is well aware of the mixed entrepreneurial potential of its client community, illuminating this on its website, ‘[a]t some places in the world, this ethnic group is considered as successful entrepreneurs. In other places, [they are] a poorly integrated group’ (SBIC website). Business advice, offered in both Swedish and Somali, is grounded in culturally aware practices designed to bolster self-esteem through recognition of the community’s cultural exceptionalism. In contrast to those support initiatives addressed to migrants, SBIC categorises its target group as representatives of an ethnic collectivity. In effect, SBIC works on the belief that business support is most effective when the minority group is seen as distinct from majority society.

YC

The mission of the project YC is to provide support through networking, training and counselling to persons who want to start their own business in the recently deregulated care sector located in a mid-sized Swedish municipality. Based on the assumption that there is an unmet market demand for ethnically diverse services, YC’s publicity material explicitly encourages women and foreign-born persons to start businesses in the sector: ‘[a]ll those who are interested in entrepreneurship in the care sector, both women and men; we address people with different ethnic backgrounds’. Going beyond Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of social capital, YC employs the term ‘ethnic capital’ to denote a latent market resource, which entrepreneurs can exploit through a business venture.

The generalist or non-prefix approach

The two cases in this section confirm that it is possible for business support to effectively target a selected group without resorting to any labelling prefixes.

Entrepreneurship and Integration

Entrepreneurship and Integration (EI), established in 2009, targets entrepreneurs in a suburb of a medium-sized city in Sweden, a neighbourhood widely known for its large ethnically diverse percentage of foreign-born residents. The project is organised by the Centre for Nascent Entrepreneurs (CNE), a municipally funded body launched to target former business owners in their home country who, in Sweden, could be assumed to ‘know entrepreneurship but be unfamiliar with the Swedish system, language, and conditions’ – or, in other words, to lack country-specific human capital. Outreach to clients occurs weekly through a locally sited advisory office, itself co-located with municipal job-search centres. Consistent with the non-prefix approach, EI’s target group is nascent entrepreneurs in general, which in practice has produced a 50/50 mix of foreign- and native-born clients from 2009 to 2012.

To avoid labelling, EI’s advertising omits any direct reference to ethnicity or migrancy, but, because it is written in Swedish, Arabic and Somali, clearly targets non-Swedish speakers. Its promotional material consciously includes imagery of men and women from various immigrant groups, thus not depending on whiteness or masculinity for validity. At the same time, where necessary, interpreters and extended appointments are available.

Regional Centre for Entrepreneurs

Regional Centre for Entrepreneurs (RCE) is a mixed public/private-funded foundation offering training and support to nascent entrepreneurs in one of Sweden’s larger cities. Its rationale is that all entrepreneurs face common barriers, notably lack of knowledge, networks and finance. RCE is there to solve problems connected to entrepreneurship in general and, instead of articulating prefixes such as immigrants, it aims to be perceived as mainstream. Its strategy is to ‘meet the individual entrepreneur’ as a broad and general category. According to one of RCE’s advisers,

I think it’s a little embarrassing to constantly ask our clients: ‘Where are you from?’ I see them as self-employed, and then the prefix is rather uninteresting. It is uninteresting to categorise them as anything else than self-employed. I do not know where to draw the line. For me it’s about helping people in developing good ideas.

RCE’s efforts are directed at ‘good business ideas’ rather than at differentiated entrepreneurial sub-categories: ‘There’s a lot of talk about integration but all these efforts divide people. In the end they create new categories and create segregation. Let’s start right there. We have “immigrant entrepreneurship”, “female entrepreneurship”. We barely see the good ideas.’

Discussion

Although the six cases are different, they implicitly share an impulse to create a distinction between what is considered normal and abnormal. Organisations using the immigrant prefix approach label their clients so as to construct a separate and homogeneous category of immigrant entrepreneurs. In the ethnicity approach, where the immigration situation is eclipsed by the client’s ethnic profile, the support body’s labelling tends to coincide with the group’s own self-identification. In contrast, the generalist non-prefix approach targets the foreign-born as part of the general population of entrepreneurs, and no prefixes are used even when differences are noted.

Categorising immigrants

In the case of SI, practice is shaped by a kind of balancing act between supporting immigrants and creating profitability, combining immigrants with entrepreneurial talent in an attempt to convert the image of the category into a more positive one, to associate the prefix immigrant entrepreneur with capitalising on an untapped resource. In the AIE case, the mission is to counteract the bias against immigrants and to work for more equal opportunities between persons with foreign backgrounds and the majority.

Perhaps the most transformative aim of both these bodies is their commitment to challenging unfavourable stereotypes in a society where negative characteristics are typically associated with the constructed immigrant category (Hall, 1997). In particular, the mere mention of immigrant entrepreneur is invariably suggestive of small-scale businesses operating in immigrant niches rather than successful entrepreneurship (Najib, 1999; Ram et al., 2008).

In striving for an alternative image, both our case study bodies are forced to battle against a strong headwind because the prefix ‘immigrant’ is not just any prefix but also a metonymy and so, an etiquette and label that once attached to a person, makes them synonymous with the category as well as with its associated values (Pred, 2000). Labelling here serves to confirm that everyone in a specific category has the same problems and, therefore, that the category is entitled to a certain (lower) position in society, or in Pred’s (2000) words, the development of ‘metonymical magic’ (p. 63). Individuals categorised and labelled ‘immigrants’ when seeking business support in Sweden become synonymous with the categorised group and automatically associated with the category – and stereotype – as a whole. With the use of the ‘immigrant’ label to denote a category of entrepreneurs, ‘the single standout becomes the stand-in for all Others’ (Pred, 2000: 63).

Because the immigrant entrepreneur is produced as a non-normal entrepreneur, the label immigrant Other is made to represent the entirety of the entrepreneur’s existence. Different types of difficulties and problems that entrepreneurs with foreign backgrounds may face to differing degrees, or may not face at all, add up to become the characteristics of an immigrant entrepreneur stereotype – and that of the immigrant as deviant from the majority (Becker, 1963).

The demarcation of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Swedish context is, with Jenkins’s (2008) frame, a form of categorisation that is analytically separable from group identification. Characteristics of the group ‘immigrants’ are produced by organisations aiming to help them. With Jenkins (2008), we also identify that power and authority are fundamental to all kinds of categorisation where categorisation diverges from group identification. Although both organisations used here as examples were initiated by persons who themselves have foreign backgrounds, categorisation is more prominent than group identification. There is no active self-positioning in the sense that ‘we as immigrants face this dilemma’, but rather a them-positioning of ‘those “immigrant entrepreneurs” who have not yet made it are in need of help’ and thus these Others are produced by means of clientisation (Kamali, 2000), as a group of ‘immigrant clients in need of support’.

Categorisation into ethnic categories

The YC case separates those with ‘ethnic competencies’ from those who have none thus, presenting ethnicity as a resource. Simultaneously, the resource perspective also produces difference, albeit implicitly. The nature of ethnicity is not defined in the case of YC; nonetheless, when proposing that there is a demand for diversity – for something different than is currently in place – otherness is attached to those entrepreneurs who accept the challenge of meeting this demand. Although vague, the signal here is that ethnicity is a resource that is capable of exploitation.

In the case of SBIC, Jenkins (2008) would regard this as group identification rather than categorisation because the initiative of delimiting the services to the Somali community group is made by group members themselves. The SBIC strategy – of ethnic demarcation – is based on the assumption that there are specific ethnic and cultural characteristics that distinguish groups and have obvious similarities to how ethnic entrepreneurship is discussed in the United States and the United Kingdom (Volery, 2007; Waldinger et al., 1990). ‘Ethnicity equals strength’ in this approach, a tool for handling and dealing with effects related to group experience of otherness from the majority population. What is particularly germane to this article is how the resource perspective has two different sub-categories. On the one hand, we can refer to an internal resource perspective based on the ethnic group and its behaviour in itself, and, on the other, we can refer to an external resource perspective, which is linked to societal beliefs, such as the benefits and opportunities related to ethnic diversity (Schölin, 2007). Previous research has primarily focused on the internal perspective, whereas the external perspective is not extensively discussed. However, Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) argue that the contemporary focus on ethnic entrepreneurship should be related to how ethnicity is reduced to a commodity, more or less bought and sold by individuals or organisations, which in turn is based on notions of authenticity, of the idea of well-defined and non-changing cultures and ethnicities.

One effect of the ethnicity approach in the Swedish context is that the client is categorised as a representative of an imagined collective. In this way, the strategy has homogenising and differentiating implications in that the constructed otherness from an assumed majority is consolidated. The result of the categorisation is, similar to the categorisation into immigrantship, that the client is always different, an assumed ‘Other’ in relation to the majority population, in order to receive support. The difference to the construction of immigrantship is that here the focus is on ethnicity and not on the experience or status of being ‘immigrant’.

To summarise, the ethnic categorisation and labelling of the ethnic entrepreneur in Sweden is based on the explicit idea that the ethnic actor is not only an entrepreneur; instead, the actor is an ethnic one and, in that sense, Other. It is also important to point out that an uncritical ethnic perspective may lead to over-optimistic interpretations and a disregard of structural discriminatory factors related to ethnicity and minority positions (Bonacich, 1993).

The generalist approach: avoiding labels

The generalist approach is a strategy that avoids using prefixes to label entrepreneurs. The strategy is sensitive in this sense to the exclusion that the norms of entrepreneurship bring about, using alternative means to approach persons in the target group rather than labelling them. By explicitly avoiding categorising their clients as immigrants in need of integration, the RCE organisation tries to downplay assumptions, images and stereotypes associated with the immigrant prefix and at the same time construct an image of RCE as a ‘proper’ business support organisation: a support organisation that supports ‘real entrepreneurs’. The ideas presented to underlie RCE’s unwillingness to categorise can be understood in the light of the idea of the entrepreneur as a contemporary hero (e.g. Essers, 2009).

Simultaneously, the generalist approach is a colour-blind strategy based on an idea of emphasising individualism rather than group membership or characteristics. The colour-blind generalist approach is based on the notion that all individuals are equal or unique, and by ignoring group membership, the organisation creates an image of equal business support. Colour-blindness is often combined, however, with more or less meritocratic aspects of individualism, hard work and promising ideas rather than emphasising specific immigration-related and ethnicity-related problems or possibilities. Therefore, this approach may be interpreted as providing support to help individuals through encouraging them to assume that hard work alone will reap rewards.

The generalist and colour-blind strategies can also be discussed in terms of avoidance of recognition of social problems such as racism, xenophobia and intolerance, phenomena linked to the development of opposing self-images. The colour-blind strategy can be based on the perception that the organisation is open-minded and tolerant, but in practice it may be – indirectly – the opposite. That is to say, the organisation speaks of tolerance, but does not enact it in practice. It can result in a kind of decoupling between the image and the actual activities of the organisation.

With EI, the case is somewhat different. Here, the strategy is to attend to what is identified as a problem of integration and poor opportunities for foreign-born entrepreneurs that prevents them from becoming successful entrepreneurs in Sweden. This means making interaction possible through availability where the target group is assumed to live, as well as by advertising in a less stereotypical way than is customary. Simultaneously, in offering only general support, the EI effort still runs the risk of downplaying difference and of not being able to deal with structurally related issues. When the client is in need of financial support, for instance, the clients with a foreign background are directed to AIE – and so indirectly produced as ‘Other’ and ‘immigrant’.

Conclusion

This article makes two contributions to conceptual debates to research in business support in general and business support to immigrant and ethnic minority entrepreneurs in particular.

First, the article focuses on an under explored side effect of the general and expanding interest in increasing the levels of entrepreneurship. In supra-national as well as national and regional development policy and debates, entrepreneurship is often presented as an important factor for promoting growth, as well as a means of resolving wider societal problems (Perren and Jennings, 2005). In this article, support for entrepreneurs with foreign backgrounds in Sweden has been specifically targeted as it is framed as a solution to economic issues and integration deficiencies as well as labour market exclusion. However, these entrepreneurs are also framed as in need of support, and the approaches of support organisations in targeting entrepreneurs with foreign background are – as we have demonstrated using six cases from Sweden – quite diverse. In selecting and targeting clients, different approaches to categorisation have been illustrated, along with different ways of labelling clients – sometimes producing prefixed entrepreneurship. As demonstrated, the process of categorisation must be discussed in relation to the specific context – here, Sweden – and the history of concepts used. Accordingly, we would like to see further studies of the same phenomena but in other contexts, especially those such as the United Kingdom or the United States, where the tradition of special solutions is stronger than in Sweden.

Second, by discussing the construction of clients of business support organisations in terms of categorisation and labelling, we have aimed to contribute to the debate over the purposes and consequences of specialised enterprise policies aimed at those defined as socially and economically excluded (Blackburn and Ram, 2006; Down, 2012). While support initiatives and categorisation of entrepreneurs are based on laudable purposes, in practice the resulting categories and labels run the risk of reproducing the societal hierarchies they aim to counteract. In line with our earlier observations on multiple identities, we might suggest that prefixed entrepreneurship should be replaced by support groups based on economic criteria such as sector or growth orientation (Ram et al., 2006). But the lessons from studies on ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Durose, 2009; Mole, 2002) suggest that it is also important for business support providers on the front-line to use their local knowledge to engage with hard-to-reach communities and businesses. A degree of customisation, therefore, might be appropriate in certain circumstances. Given also that that the majority of small migrant-origin firms are acknowledged to be motivated more by survivalist considerations rather than the chase for profits and growth (Ram and Jones, 2008), there would also seem to be room for support groups aimed at local and community welfare. By acknowledging and fostering such enterprises as small shops in urban retail deserts, enterprise support could recognise the vital community support role of migrant enterprise. In any case, whether backing economic winners or helping to uphold community vitality, enterprise support needs to abandon the paternalistic labelling that has hitherto defined its approach to immigrant and ethnic minority firms.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Susan Marlow for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Lena Högberg’s part in the project has been financed by Sweden’s innovation agency via HELIX VINN Excellence Centre (2014-03143) and REMESO, FORTE Centre of Excellence (FAS/FORTE : 2006-1524).

Author biographies

Lena Högberg is Senior Lecturer in Business Administration and researcher at HELIX VINN Excellence Centre and REMESO at Linköping University in Sweden. She has published on organising and sensemaking in cross-sectorial collaboration and small business support. Her current research focus is doing ethnicity, gender and entrepreneurship in the public sector.

Tobias Schölin is Assistant Professor in Entrepreneurship and researcher at Sten K Johnson Centre for Entrepreneurship at the School of Economics and Management at Lund University in Sweden and is currently working in a project on immigrant entrepreneurship financed by Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. His main research interest is immigrant entrepreneurship and the importance of the family for self-empolyment and entrepreneurship.

Monder Ram is Director of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CRÈME) at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include ethnic minority entrepreneurship, employment relations in small firms and small firm policy.

Trevor Jones is Visiting Professor at the CRÈME at the University of Birmingham and is one of the UKs most experienced researchers in ethnic minority entrepreneurship.

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