03/02/2014 The place of neighbourhood in entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship, home and neighbourhood

03/02/2014
The place of neighbourhood in entrepreneurship:
attitudes, resources & sorting in more deprived contexts
Nick Bailey
University of Glasgow
Entrepreneurship, home and neighbourhood
Home as physical site
•Premises
•Flexibility
•Convenience
•Work/life balance
•Financial asset
Sorting
Neighbourhood as
locational resource –
‘space’
•Land, premises
•Market access & demand
•Market awareness
•Infrastructure
•Business services
•Image or reputation
Neighbourhood selection
•Home/nhd trade-off
•Business/non-business
factors
Labour market
Self-employment vs other
Neighbourhood as social
resource – ‘place’
•Social capital
•Trust, collaboration
•Knowledge, innovation
•Resources, support
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Importance of the neighbourhood
•
Globalisation and importance of neighbourhood
– ‘Systemic model’ (Kasarda and Janowitz 1974)
• Attachment to specific place - social and emotional links
• Length of residence – continuum
– ‘Elective belonging’ (Savage et al 2005)
• Attachment to type of place - identity
• Middle classes only – binary divide
•
Implications for importance of the nhd for
entrepreneurship
•
Evidence for continuing importance of length of
residence and of continuum
– Including in deprived neighbourhoods
Varying importance of the neighbourhood
•
Subjective view of boundaries and of neighbourhood
characteristics
•
Place of the neighbourhood varies over life-course
and by income/class
•
Importance of personal characteristics rarely
measured in neighbourhood studies
– Residential history (Livingston et al 2010)
– Personality (Nieuwenhuis et al 2013)
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Deprived neighbourhoods & entrepreneurial choice 1
•
Attitudes to entrepreneurship
– Dangers of cultural explanations
– Evidence on differences in attitudes
• Work commitment; educational aspirations
– Link from attitudes to outcomes
• Education – Gorard et al (2012)
• Reflection of experience, geographic disadvantage,
institutional discrimination
Deprived neighbourhoods & entrepreneurial choice 2
•
Self-efficacy
– Social gradient and claims about compounding effects
of neighbourhood (Wilson 1996)
– If self-efficacy is context-specific, need to focus on that
aspect
•
Informal entrepreneurship (Evans and Williams 2006)
– Informal unpaid work, illegal work, self-provisioning
– Agency of poor often unrecognised (Lister 2004)
– Finite resource?
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Deprived neighbourhoods, environment & resources
•
Financial resources
– Weak through composition
– Evidence on institutional discrimination unclear for UK
(Kempson and Mackinnon 2002; Sanderson 2006)
•
Social networks, social capital
– Relative importance of strong versus weak social ties
for entrepreneurship
– Deprived neighbourhoods seen as having bonding but
not bridging capital (Forrest and Kearns 2001)
– Bonding capital delivers resources but from outside
deprived neighbourhoods (Bailey et al 2013)
Deprived neighbourhoods, sorting and attachment
•
Debates about inter-regional migration and
‘rootedness’ of entrepreneurs (Reuscke 2013)
•
More difficult to connect to residential mobility
– Image and lifestyle of some nhds may be attractive to some
entrepreneurs – ‘elective belonging’?
– Obvious disadvantages for deprived neighbourhoods of image,
safety, ...
– Potential cost advantages - housing-neighbourhood trade-off but may result in very low commitment to or engagement with
the area (Pinkster 2013)
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Changing relationships with the neighbourhood
•
Place of the neighbourhood varies across countries
– In part due to housing and welfare systems
•
Change within the UK driven
– Shift to private renting
– ‘Austerity’ and welfare reform
•
Future place of the neighbourhood may be weaker,
esp. for low-income, working-age groups
Conclusions
•
Neighbourhood remains important in daily lives but
importance for entrepreneurship potentially very
varied
– For whom does the neighbourhood matter and under
what circumstances?
– Issues in measuring neighbourhood context
•
Deprived neighbourhoods offer few advantages for
entrepreneurialism and some possibly disadvantges
– But culture not one of them
•
Entrepreneurship important for more deprived
neighbourhoods, esp. if we recognise informal
activities
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