Immigrants as small businessmen: a comparative analysis of the extent of selfemployment among Danish Pakistanis, Turks and ex-Yugoslavs.
There has been an increase in the number of immigrants having their own businesses in Western Europe and North America. There are variations in the proportion of self-employed among the different ethnic groups, even with the same length of residence in the new country. It is assumed that these differences may be caused by differences in the social and cultural background of the immigrants.The lifestyle hypothesis of the Danish ethnologist Thomas Hoerup and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus are employed in an analysis of self-employment among migrants from Pakistan, Turkey and former Yugoslavia to Denmark. These three groups arrived in Denmark about the same time in the late 1960s. Migrants from Pakistan and Turkey have been very active as entrepreneurs, while only a small number of the migrants from the ex- Yugoslavia have become self-employed. The majority of the members of the first two ethnic groups came from small rural communities of self-employed farmers, while the majority of the migrants from the former Yugoslavia were skilled and semiskilled industrial wage earners, who were brought up in families with a tradition of wage work. The analysis indicates that the lifestyle/habitus that the migrants bring with them from the country of origin plays an important role in determining whether or not they will consider self-employment or look for waged work.
