The Sustainability of Social Capital within Ethnic Networks

This paper examines informal networks that support the British Asianbusiness community. Ethnic communities have been crucial to facilitatingthe economic development of their migrant members, as they make thetransition from economic refugees to citizens. The basis of thisinformal support is the notion of social capital offered to kinsmen whoarrived with finite resources. However, as successive generations havebecome more integrated with the wider community reliance on theseresources is forecast to decrease. Research has shown that subsequentAsian generations are developing complex relations in their attitudesand reliance towards their ethnic community (Janjuha-Jivraj and Woods,2002) it is still an area that is very active in providing crucialinformal business support. There is however, a distinct difference inattitudes between first and second generations in terms of acceptingbusiness support from the ethnic community. This issue is furthercompounded by difficulties among external support agencies inpenetrating ethnic businesses. This leads to the following questions: ? What forms of social capital are evident and how important are they in sustaining relationships within the religious-ethnic community? ? How crucial is the ethnic community in providing an infrastructure to offer support. This paper is based on a network of businesses that are members of a sub-group across Greater London. It is anticipated that the findings will help to unravel the impact of migratory bonds on community members. This in turn will provide useful information for service providers when considering how to successfully target ethnic businesses.