Max Weber insisted that followers grant charismatic authority, but he did not address the cultural prerequisites that enable leaders to acquire it from them. Prophecy is the royal road. When a prophetic tradition has taught people to expect saviors in times of crisis, believers are primed to award charismatic authority to someone who resembles their expectation. The case of Donald Trump illustrates the importance of prophecy on the bestowal of charismatic authority. Within the Republican Party, two distinct prophetic traditions validated Trump’s salvific mission, thus enabling him to acquire power of command. Adhering to Biblical prophecy, conservative Protestants identified Donald Trump as God’s agent in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ. Also within the Republican Party, adhering to developmental economics, secular conservatives identified Donald Trump as a heroic entrepreneur whose vigor would restore America’s greatness. Because of Trump’s striking resemblance to Batman, the comic superhero’s many fans also had prior ideational access to Trump’s salvific mission. In the United States, the messianic prophecy of a tough-guy entrepreneur can derive from sacred culture, academic culture, popular culture, or from all three. The confluence produced a voter bloc primed to award charismatic authority to Trump.

Self-employment in the informal sector keeps poor people alive, but it rarely enables them to exit poverty. To exit poverty through self-employment, poor people require monetary and non-monetary resources which they overwhelmingly lack. To escape this dilemma, the owners of survivalist business firms need to band together in order to assemble a minimal resource base on the strength of which they can together upgrade their partnership. Because resources are scarce in poverty populations, this task is exceptionally hard to accomplish. Rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs) can enable individuals to exit poverty through self-employment, but ROSCAs only work in the most-resourced, upper tier of a poverty population. In the lower tier, Grameen model banks inject organizational, educational, and financial resources that enable impoverished individuals to exit poverty by upgrading a survivalist business.

Review of “Entrepreneurs and Capitalism since Luther: Rediscovering the Moral Economy” Lexington Books, 2020. 180 pages. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793621306/Entrepreneurs-and-Capitalism-since-Luther-Rediscovering-the-Moral-Economy Ivan Light, Ivan Light Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Leo-Paul Dana Leo-Paul Dana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 1, September 2021, Page e4, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab015 Published: 22 February 2021 Article history Received: 20 January 2021 Accepted: 26 January 2021 Published: 22 February 2021

'Undercapitalised' conventionally refers to firms at risk of failure because owners lack requisite human and financial capital. Are firms 'undercapitalised' when owners lack social and cultural capital? Answering the question directs attention to owners who, abundantly equipped with human and financial capital, fail in business anyway. When we have ruled out adventitious causes, such as business cycle, technology change, even luck, we are left with 'incompetence' to cover all such failures. However, 'incompetence' is a label, not an explanation. To illustrate the distinction, this paper introduces a case study of Donald Trump's much-studied career in independent business. Deficits of social and cultural capital explain Trump's repeated bankruptcies and meagre lifetime earnings.

In Entrepreneurs and Capitalism since Luther: Rediscovering the Moral Economy, Ivan Light and Léo-Paul Dana study the history of business, capitalism, and entrepreneurship to examine the values of social and cultural capital. Six chapters evaluate case studies that illustrate contrasting relationships between social networks, vocational culture, and entrepreneurship. Light and Dana argue that, in capitalism’s early stages, cultural capital is scarcer than social capital and therefore more crucial for business owners. Conversely, when capitalism is well established, social capital is scarcer than cultural capital and becomes more crucial. Light and Dana then trace moral legitimations of capitalism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, the Gilded Age, and finally to Joseph Schumpeter whose concept of “creative destruction” freed elite entrepreneurs from moral restraints that encumber small business owners. After examining the availability of social and cultural capital in the contemporary United States, Light and Dana show that business owners’ social capital enforces conventional morality in markets, facilitating commerce and legitimating small businesses the old-fashioned way. As their networks become more isolated, elite entrepreneurs must claim and ultimately deliver successful results to earn public toleration of immoral or predatory conduct.

This study addresses the diversity of extant models and theoretical interpretations of the immigrant entrepreneurship phenomenon. Combining an extensive literature review with the use of Bourdieu's theory of social practice, we develop a general model of immigrant entrepreneurship that identifies four different entrepreneurial paths, each characterised by a specific combination of personal resources, network embeddedness, individual habitus, and targeted opportunities. Through the interpretative lens of this model, foreignness can represent either a liability or a competitive advantage for the immigrant, depending on the entrepreneurial context and strategy. The proposed model provides useful insights into the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship for academics, entrepreneurs and policy makers, offering a comprehensive framework which does not invalidate the extant models, but rather integrates them into a larger perspective.

Our study investigates social mechanisms that facilitate the reproduction of an entrepreneurially oriented community structure. We combine qualitative and quantitative data collection, analysis, and interpretation to compare the entrepreneurial attitudes and activity of two matched groups comprising Memons and Non-Memons in Karachi, Pakistan, and to identify the social mechanisms that support the dynamics of intergenerational entrepreneurship support. Findings unveil interdependence among family, community, and ethnic capital, as contextual expressions of social capital that are manifest at different levels of the ethnic social system. We propose a model of the recurrent reproduction of entrepreneurial values, resources, activities, and structures.

Migration network theory addresses the cumulative causation of migration as a result of reduced social, economic, and emotional costs of migration pursuant to the formation of migration networks. Because it introduces a sociological dimension, network theory improves the mechanical and economistic “push and pull†conceptions that prevailed earlier, including world systems versions thereof. Nonetheless, existing treatments of migration networks overlook the role of those networks in expanding the immigrant economy at locations of destination. The migration network performs this role when it supports migrant entrepreneurship, a phenomenon of variable but often great importance. Existing literature also ignores cultural differences that affect the efficiency of migration networks in both relocating population and generating new firms. In the last decade, immigration research has refocused on the issue of migrant networks in both contemporary and historical migrations (Bozorgmehr, 1990; Fawcett, 1989; Boyd, 1989; Morawska, 1989: 260; Wilpert and Gitmez, 1987). A long-standing concern (Tilly, 1978; Choldin, 1973: Light, 1972), migrant networks became of renewed interest when researchers sought to connect macro and micro determinants of immigration. Micro determinants begin with solitary decision-makers who operate independent of group memberships (Lee, 1966; Lewis, 1982: ch. 8; Sell, 1983). Often placed in a world systems context, macro influences impact masses of people whose responses are not thought to depend upon migration chains (Burawoy, 1976; Portes and Walton, 1981; Clark, 1986: ch. 4; Sassen-Koob, 1989). Spanning continents and decades, social networks connect individuals and macroscopic push and pull influences. True, at any stage of a migration, some people arrange their relocation on their own and without any help from migration networks. These are unassisted migrants. However, more individuals migrate when once networks have formed (Portes and Boron, 1989: 607-608). These networks organize their departure, travel, and settlement abroad. For this reason, the network itself emerges as an actor in the migration process. Although based on already familiar ideas, Massey’s formula of “cumulatively caused†migration drew together and focused current thinking about migration. According to Massey (et al., 1987; 1988, 1989), migrations forge networks which then feed the very migrations that produced them. Therefore, whatever macrosocietal political/economic conditions may initially have caused migration, the originating pushes and pulls, the expanding migratory process becomes “progressively independent†of the original causal conditions. In effect, migrations in process self-levitate above the conditions that caused them to begin, leading thereafter an independent existence. Network formation is the reason. Massey (1988: 396) defines migration networks as “sets of interpersonal ties that link migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through the bonds of kinship, friendship, and shared community origin.†Networks promote the independence of migratory flows for two reasons. First, once network connections reach some threshold level, they amount to a autonomous social structure that supports immigration. This support arises from the reduced social, economic, and emotional costs of immigration that networks permit. That is, network-supported migrants have important help in arranging transportation, finding housing and jobs in their place of destination, and in effecting a satisfactory personal and emotional adjustment to what is often a difficult situation of cultural marginality. These benefits make migration easier, thus encouraging people to migrate who would otherwise have stayed at home. Unless migrants are uprooted refugees who lack any choice about departure, only immigration affording them any hope of survival (Bozorgmehr and Sabagh, 1990; Pedraza-Bailey, 1985) potential migrants always have the option of staying home. Given that choice, the reduced cost of migration enhances the number who can and will choose to leave, thus increasing the volume of migration. Second, Massey has made the same case for networks under the assumptions of a risk-diversification model.According to this model, families allocate member labor within the constraint of their own needs and aspirations in a cost-efficient and risk-minimizing way.Many Third World households are economically precarious. Such households face high-risks to their well-being if they select non-migration.Moreover, modernization and development create social and economic dislocations that intensify the unstable and unpredictable economic environment created by the usual risks of drought, crop failure and natural disasters, for rural as well as urban areas.In the absence of other ways to insure against such risks, diversification of family members’ location minimizes overall family income risk. (Massey, 1989: 14-15) Migration is a risk-diversification strategy.International migration is especially effective because international borders create discontinuities that promote independence of earnings at home and abroad. Good times abroad can match bad ones at home, or vice-versa. Even in the absence of earning differentials (ASA, p.15), international migration offers an effective risk-diversification strategy, especially when migrant networks already exist. Migration networks reduce the economic risks of immigration, thus rendering the strategy more attractive from a risk-diversification perspective (Massey, 1989:5-16). Expanding networks “put a destination job within easy reach of most community members†(Commission, p.398) and make migration a virtually risk-less and cost-less alternative labor power investment in the household’s portfolio of labor assets (Massey, 1988).

Many nations invite foreigners to work within their borders, but few welcome them. Those countries that do receive a torrent of immigrants create pressures that analysts expect to intensify as population growth and social unrest mount in the less developed countries of the world. Immigration and Entrepreneurship, now in paperback, offers a comparative analysis of worldwide immigration issues while focusing more specifically on the emerging influence of entrepreneurship as a potent factor in the economic and social integration of immigrants. In linking the common immigrant and settler experiences with the upsurge in self-employment, the contributors to this volume use California as their base of comparison. The state has both a huge and varied immigrant population and an entrepreneurial economy that has facilitated the formation of immigrant-owned firms. The Los Angeles riots of the nineties indicated the volatility of the mix. Aided by ethnic and familial networks, such firms have served as a route of economic advancement. Immigration and Entrepreneurship offers a comparative perspective unique in the literature of immigration by broaching the topic from both global and local perspectives. Whereas most studies examine the experience of a single group or groups in a particular destination economy, this volume emphasizes variations in the way different nations receive immigrants as causes of differences in immigrant behavior. Among the innovative themes discussed by a range of international scholars are the entrepreneurial efforts and tensions in the garment industry in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin; Koreans' enterprise and identities in Los Angeles and Japan; and U.S. immigration policies. The result is a genuinely global methodology.

Immigrants perform better in import/export industries than generally in independent business. The usual explanation addresses their overseas social networks. Extensive network connections abroad enable immigrants to reduce the daunting transaction costs that otherwise bedevil SMEs in international trade. Accepting that prevailing view, this research obtains evidence regarding the actual social network ties that Iranian immigrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles had with trading partners abroad. However, instead of looking at connections between the Iranians and their homeland, we examined instead their social connections with other locations in the Iranian international diaspora. Although preliminary and sketchy, this evidence tends to confirm the importance of personal social contacts abroad, but it also shows that Iranian traders still reported many collection problems overseas and, as a result, had undertaken legal strategies of self-protection.