Exploring critical issues faced by Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K

Wu, MF

Abstract

Despite the significant contributions of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K. (Lin, 2015), their unique challenges and how they manage these challenges have not been well documented. Extant literature notes that facing challenges hinders acculturation, negatively affects an enterprise's growth (Zolin et al., 2016) and causes stress to the migrant. Immigrant entrepreneurs with limited cross-cultural competencies face additional challenges (Mathews et al., 2015). Furthermore, per literature, co-ethnic enclaves can assist new immigrants by offering financial and advisory support and bringing new opportunities (Zhang et al., 2016; Zolin et al., 2016). Extant literature chronicles local language skills (e.g., Azmat & Fujimoto, 2016; Sui et al., 2015) and cross-cultural intelligence (Aslam et al., 2016; Alon et al., 2016) are essential for easing the acculturative journey of immigrant entrepreneurs.

An exploratory qualitative enquiry for extracting rich contextual data (Babin et al., 2019) using a mono method, semi-structured interview methodology was applied to capture diverse viewpoints. An exploratory, investigative research strategy is best suited when little prior research is available on this topic (Bougie & Sekaran, 2019). Purposive sampling was used along with the snowball method to get suitable respondents (Saunders et al., 2016) till the point of data saturation was achieved (Saunders et al., 2017). In total, 25 interviews were taken until no further information was gathered. Resultant data were coded to recognise themes (Belotto, 2018).

The findings of this research made a significant theoretical contribution to the extant literature on this subject area which has been relatively unstructured so far (Aliaga Isla & Rialp, 2013; Malerba & Ferreira, 2020) . Moreover, current literature does not explicitly address the point of view of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K. and their challenges, which were covered comprehensively in this research. The findings of this study indicated that, despite the documented importance of cross-cultural competencies in literature, Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K. displayed low levels of local language skills and cross-cultural awareness, which increased their challenges.

Moreover, contrary to extant literature (Sullivan & Ford, 2014), ethnic enclaves did not offer adequate entrepreneurial support, business opportunities or networking prospects for Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K. as per the results of this study. It was theorised that ethnic enclaves could potentially be losing their importance as financial and business support structures for newly incoming Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs because of the lack of support being available to them (Kye, 2018).

This lack of support could also be because ethnic enclaves are no longer limited to highly concentrated ethnic business centres in the middle of cities. They have begun to spread out to suburbs due to city centre real estate limitations, making them less unified and easy to access. Further research was recommended for assessing the current role of ethnic enclaves due to these research findings that indicated that ethnic enclaves are no longer the support structures for immigrants as they were earlier (Kye, 2018).

Citation

Wu, M. Exploring critical issues faced by Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.K. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Oct 13, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 13, 2022
• Award Date: Aug 5, 2021