Transnational Family Networks and Ethnic Minority Business Development: The Case of Vietnamese Nail-shops in the UK

Purpose To understand the role played by transnational family networks in ethnic minority business development. Methodology/Approach The Vietnamese nail care sector is taken as a case study. The research involved interviews with 10 owner-managers and 4 key informants involved in this industry in London. The analysis draws on concepts of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ network ties (Granovetter, 1973) and ‘mixed embeddedness’ (Kloosterman et al, 1999) to explain why the Vietnamese continue to enter such a competitive sector. Findings The results highlight the importance of transnational family networks within all aspects of the business and suggest that these links can sometimes provide a fertile source of new business ideas, but can equally limit innovation. The presence of innovative and well-educated members within the entrepreneurs’ ‘strong-tie’ network appeared to encourage more successful business development and diversification. Research limitations/implications The research challenges the traditional ‘strong/weak’ ties thesis and suggests that while it has some general value, in the context of groups from more collectivist societies and with family links overseas, it is necessary to take account of the human and social capital resources of the extended family rather than just those of the individual entrepreneur. Practical implications To maximize the potential of these links it suggests that business advisors need to undertake a comprehensive audit of entrepreneur’s networks and assist them in assessing how their family ties can best contribute to the development of the business. Originality/value This paper focuses on a new community (the Vietnamese), and sector of study (transnational family networks) both of which have received little attention in the entrepreneurship literature

A Framework for Integrating Transportation Into Smart Cities

In recent years, economic, environmental, and political forces have quickly given rise to “Smart Cities” -- an array of strategies that can transform transportation in cities. Using a multi-method approach to research and develop a framework for smart cities, this study provides a framework that can be employed to: Understand what a smart city is and how to replicate smart city successes; The role of pilot projects, metrics, and evaluations to test, implement, and replicate strategies; and Understand the role of shared micromobility, big data, and other key issues impacting communities. This research provides recommendations for policy and professional practice as it relates to integrating transportation into smart cities

Growth in Cities

Recent theories of economic growth, including Romer (1986), Porter (1989) and Jacobs (1969), have stressed the role of technological spillovers in generating growth. Because such knowledge spillovers are particularly effective in cities, where communication between people is more extensive, data on the growth of industries in different cities allows us to test some of these theories. Using a new data set on the growth of large industries in 170 U.S. cities between 1956 and 1987, we find that local competition and urban variety, but not regional specialization, encourage employment growth in industries. The evidence suggests that important knowledge spillovers might be between, rather than within industries, consistent with the theories of Jacobs (1969).

Regional development: contribution of evolutionary biology

This paper tries to set out a potential of application of some evolutionary biology concepts to the issue of regional development. The objective is to show that employment of these concepts or at least inspiration by them may enrich some theories of regional development and enhance the explanatory framework of regional evolution.First, the views of institutional economics and geography on evolutionary biology contribution are summarised, then some evolutionary concepts are applied to the path dependence concept e. g., in effort to find a possible way of classification of this phenomenon. However, we discuss some other evolutionary concepts, as coevolution, adaptation, preadaption, general approach to comprehension of evolution, etc. in connexion with some chosen theories and problems of regional development.Regional development ; evolutionary biology ; path dependence ; theories of regional development

Business Sector Profiles for Cambridge, York and Norwich. Historic Cities Project Task 4

The Historic Cities project is examining the potential impacts of transport demand management strategies on several case study 'historic' cities in England. These cities are York, Cambridge and Norwich, all of which have the following characteristics; they are cities which pre-date motorised transport, and thus tend to have city centres dominated by narrow streets; - they are all members of the Historic Towns Forum; - they have a high architectural and historic heritage, and attract many tourists each year; - they have severe congestion and congestion related problems; - the city authorities are faced with the problems of maintaining the environmental quality of the city, while allowing the most efficient use of the transport infrastructure. The Historic Cities project is examining how transport restraint policies, particularly parking, pricing and road-space reallocation, can contribute to the last bullet above. It is examining this via a series of surveys and modelling of the city traffic patterns under different policies. The main 'tasks' (work packages) are as follows; 1 Travel choices; using a stated preference experiment on mode choices from various traffic demand policies; 2 Traffic effects; Modelling of policies in the various cities using network traffic models; 3 Environmental effects; using the outputs from (2) 4 Urban economy effects; using a survey of businesses 5 Public attitudes; using a survey of resident's attitudes and anticipated responses; Task 4 in the Historic Cities project is examining the perceived and predicted effects on the urban economy from four transport instruments that attempt to restrain car use. It is thought that a major barrier to the implementation of these projects is their detrimental impacts on the local economy. This task examines whether this hypothesis is correct by examining the impacts on, and attitudes of, businesses in the case study cities. This paper presents background information on the cities, building up a business profile of each. The data sources are mostly published information, although city specific business databases were analysed to obtain a cross classification of the business profile. This is the first of a series of Working Papers on Task 4. The next Working Paper will outline the survey of firms that was undertaken, its initial results. It will use the business sector profile to determine how generally representative the samples are of the cities business sectors

Affective Cities: Scenes of Innovation II

Full Program ScheduleInternational Association for the Study of the Culture of Cities (IASCC); Centre Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant; York University; Centre for Social Innovation; University of Waterloo Conference Centr

The fluctuating record of economic regeneration in England's second-order city regions, 1984-2007

This study examines how far and in what way ‘Our cities are back’, as claimed by England’s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. City regions are defined on a consistent functional basis and allowance is made for discontinuities in the jobs time-series. These provincial city regions are found to have suffered relatively less than London in the early 1990s recession, but then recovered more slowly to achieve their greatest rates of growth in 1998- 2002 and only then did the Core Cities outpace the rest of their city regions. Employment growth slowed after this, though their population recovery continued

City flight migration patterns in the East Midlands

This paper investigates migration to and from the Three Cities of Derby, Leicester and Nottingham. It investigates whether these cities lose more migrants than they gain from more rural parts of the city-regions and the extent to which these flows impact on the demographic profiles of the Three Cities

Historic Cities Project Task 4 – The Business Surveys: Questionnaire Design, Implementation and Initial Analysis.

The Historic Cities project examined the potential impacts of transport demand management strategies on three case study ‘historic’ cities in England. These cities are York, Cambridge and Norwich, all of which have the following characteristics: - they are cities which pre-date motorised transport, and thus tend to have city centres dominated by narrow streets; - they are all members of the Historic Towns Forum; - they have a high architectural and historic heritage, and attract many tourists each year; - they have severe congestion, and congestion related problems; - the city authorities are faced with the problems of maintaining the environmental quality of the city, while allowing the most efficient use of the transport infrastructure. The focus of the project was how transport demand management policies, particularly parking, pricing and road-space re-allocation, can contribute to the last bullet above. Task 4 in the Historic Cities project examined the predicted effects on the urban economy from a work place parking levy and road user charging. It is thought that a major barrier to the implementation of these instruments is the perception that they will have detrimental impacts on the local economy. This task examines whether this hypothesis is correct by examining the impacts on, and attitudes of, businesses in the case study cities. This working paper describes the survey work that was undertaken and presents the initial analysis of the results. It has the following sections: Section 1: introduces the research; Section 2: describes the policies to be studied; Section 3: describes the development and rationale for the questionnaire; Section 4: describes the sampling process; Section 5: presents the initial analysis of the results; Section 6: gives a summary and conclusions. This is the second Working paper that summaries the Task 4 study. The first working paper (537) outlined the business sector profile for each city. A third working paper (552) will present multi-variate analysis of the dataset