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Sociology Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 671–693. Printed in the United Kingdom © 2001 BSA Publications Limited

Metaphors of Spatiality and Networks in the Plural City: A Critique of the Ethnic Enclave Economy Debate Pnina Werbner School of Social Relations Keele University ABSTRACT This paper considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the United States regarding ethnic entrepreneurship which has come to be known as the ‘ethnic enclave economy hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, ethnic enterprises and their workers benefit from clustering. The current consensus seems to be that the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided. In denying this critique, this paper draws on Lefebvre’s theorisation of space and on industrial cluster and actor network theories to argue that the dominant interpretation of the notion of an enclave has been misconceived. Hence the need is to begin to theorise what ethnic enclave economies really are, beyond the spatial metaphor in which the hypothesis was first grounded, in order to interrogate generative processes of ethnic business formation. KEYWORDS

economic enclaves, ethnic entrepreneurship, social networks, urban space

The city as text: visible imaginaries of the plural city

Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Havana, Little Italy – one kind of imaginary that the conjunction of cultural plurality and urbanism often evokes is that of a colourful mosaic of ethnic cultures, visible in the urban landscape.1 In such imaginaries, immigrant quarters evolve their own special character.2 In the Asian neighbourhoods of Manchester, Birmingham or Southall, for example, women walk around in saris or traditional shalwar kamiz, elderly men with hennaed beards make their way to local mosques or gurdwaras, while delicatessens sell aromatic spices and exotic vegetables. In Asian commercial centres, the little Indias or Pakistans of Britain, jewellery stores exhibit the finely intricate gold work typical of subcontinental tastes, while North Indian restaurants and takeaways display their signs of another place: Darbar, Shere Khan, Sanam Sweethouse. The plural city is in one sense an aesthetic space of contrasting lifetstyles.3 Another kind of imaginary which the plural city evokes is one of pathology or malaise. This is the darker side of the multicultural exoticism of the first trope – the

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dark, mean, poverty-stricken streets of a black or brown underclass, no-go areas of urban violence and decay, or hidden sweatshops. Immigrant ghettos are often constructed in the sociological imagination as places of poverty and deprivation, poor housing stock, overcrowding, disadvantage.4 They contrast with the gilded ghettos of prior immigrants who have made it – there, and yet are now invisible.5 Hence, while poverty and violence are visible dimensions of plurality, wealth and success are often invisible, assimilated or hidden behind conventional bourgeois façades. There is another kind of visibility in the plural city, one which leads me to the main focus of the present paper. This is the visibility of ethnic enterprise. Little Havana in Miami, Chinatown in New York City, Koreatown in Los Angeles, are characterised by high concentrations of ethnic businesses. As sites of consumption, the aesthetics of Chinese food serve a crucial economic role. Wong reports (1982: 38–9) that: ‘In the Chinatown area of New York City, 5,000 Chinese work in 250 restaurants within five blocks. Outside Chinatown, the number of Chinese restaurants in the greater New York area probably totals approximately 4,500.’ 6 Significantly for the argument to be presented below, these Chinese restaurants support a large number of Chinese vegetable farms in New Jersey and Long Island, as well as Chinese trucking companies, grocery stores, noodle factories, construction companies, interior decorators, and import–export firms (Wong 1982:39). The figures for Little Havana in Miami reveal a story of dramatic expansion. Between 1977 and 1982, a mere five-year period, the number of Cuban-owned firms in the Miami District increased from 7,336 to 20,795 (Sanders and Nee 1987:749); a virtual tripling which was generated through internal capital formation and small business loans from the federal government. This growth ‘so intensified intraenclave competition in sectors such as construction and wholesaling that numerous older firms have been losing their previous market-shares’ (p. 749). In other words, the competitive edge of Cuban firms resulted in a displacement of earlier, nonCubans. Ecological theories of the plural city evoke imaginaries of spatial invasions and retreats. Immigrants ‘invade’ new areas, displacing earlier populations.7 There is a ‘flight’ of white residents from the cities to the suburbs or a counter-movement of gentrification. In the Marxist versions of these theories, capital determines real estate value and hence social class.8 Blacks are an all too visible economic threat to the property market in a racist society. Immigrants ‘colonise’ city spaces. The war trope is a more dynamic one than the mosaic or underclass trope. It implies constant movement and change, the creation and destruction of ethnic enclaves; the building of fortresses to keep them out.9 It is, nevertheless, like the other two tropes, a highly spatialised metaphor of the city. Instead of maps depicting neatly bounded spaces, we can draw maps with arrows, or a series of maps showing change over time (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1 The pattern of movement of Asians in South Manchester

Industrial clusters and the dialectics of urban space

In different ways the three imaginaries outlined above – of the visibly exotic, pathological, predatory or competitive immigrant or black settlement area, all bear upon the significance of space in theorising the special features of ethnic groups and their economic activity. Broadly speaking, I intend to argue, first, that space is a critical but not determining factor of ethnic enclave economies; and, second, that space needs to be conceptualised not as territory or circumscribed locality but as networked and socially produced through the manufacture and flow of distinctive goods between nodal points, vertically as well horizontally organised. Such a complex notion of space accords with recent debates underlining the significance of urban space in social theory. In response to earlier attempts by sociologists such as Saunders to de-emphasise the centrality of space in urban studies (Soja 1997:24), sociologists such as Soja argue for a need to recognise the ‘complex relation between social process and spatial form, as well as spatial process

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and social form’, a relation which he labels ‘the socio-spatial dialectic’ (p. 20). Much of the debate has been inspired by Lefebvre’s theorisation of space as socially produced and meaningfully constructed (Lefebvre 1991).10 Rather than territorially circumscribed, Lefebvre (1991:77) argues that social spaces contain: the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information. Such ‘objects’ are not only things but also relations. As objects, they possess discernible peculiarities, contour and form. Social labour transforms them, rearranging their positions within spatio-temporal configurations …

Social spaces interpenetrate, intertwine and overlap, attaining ‘real’ existence ‘by virtue of networks and pathways, by virtue of bunches or clusters of relationships’ (Lefebvre:86; also 88). Multiple, overlapping markets ‘attain their concrete form by means of a network’ embodied materially in city scapes and structures (p. 86). Yet ‘they retain their distinctiveness’ (p. 342) through distinctive chains of commodities which may be conceived of as ‘formants’ of space (p. 342) activated by human labour. On the one hand, the argument proposed here rejects the notion of the ethnic enclave economy as a territorially circumscribed place. At the same time, by retaining a stress on the spatial dimensions of the ethnic enclave economy, I hope to guard against a tendency in many analyses of ethnic entrepreneurship to focus on the single, isolated business as the primary unit of comparison, at most connected to workers and customers.11 Unlike Wirth’s proverbial urban individuals, ethnic businesses are embedded in inter-firm relations which produce social space by trading in particular goods and commodities. My argument accords with recent theorisations of industrial clusters. Industrial clusters are networks of small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) interconnected within a single industrial sector both spatially and economically. A recent issue of World Development edited by Schmitz and Nadvi (1999) gathers together studies of industrial clusters in Asia, Latin America and Africa, manufacturing clothing, shoes, surgical instruments and agricultural products. Industrial clustering is, however, also a prominent feature of the most sophisticated hi-tech sectors: Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the City of London are some of the outstanding examples of a tendency of SMEs within a single industry towards spatial clustering. A key advantage of the industrial cluster model is that it focuses on change: on trajectories and processes rather than static conditions. Schmitz, Nadvi and their colleagues consider the circumstances in which clustering boosts industrial growth and competitiveness. Clustering is particularly important, they propose, in the early phase of a firm’s life, ‘helping small enterprises to grow in riskable steps’ and to compete in broader, even global markets (Schmitz and Nadvi 1999:1503). This is because firms can limit themselves to a specific product, requiring only limited investment of human (i.e. knowledge) and financial capital. Internal specialisation is

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thus one feature of industrial clusters (p. 1505). Another is their internal heterogeneity, with medium and large firms emerging and playing an important role in these clusters (p. 1503). Hence we have argued (Werbner 1999, Basu and Werbner, in press) that evaluations of ethnic entrepreneurial success have to take into account the whole cluster, not just its most outstanding firms, since these owe their success to their embeddedness in the cluster. This is as true of Caribbeans or African Americans in the popular music industry as it is of Chinese or South Asians in the fashion and textile trades (see Basu and Werbner, 2001). Ethnic entrepreneurs follow each other into an economic enclave in ‘entrepreneurial chains’ (Werbner 1990a, 1990b) or, as Schmitz and Nadvi put it, ‘the enterprise of one creates a foothold for the other, [so] that ladders are constructed which enable small enterprises to climb and grow’ (1999:1506). New entrants allow established firms to expand, often by moving to a higher supply level or subcontracting. As early as 1920, Alfred Marshall (cited in Schmitz and Nadvi 1999:1504) argued that: the agglomeration of firms engaged in similar or related activities generates a range of localized external economies that lowers costs for clustered producers. Such advantages include a pool of specialized workers, easy access to suppliers of specialized inputs and services and the quick dissemination of new knowledge.

In addition, a cluster of firms may also engage in purposive joint action, particularly when it faces an external crisis. Industrial clusters depend crucially on the existence of trade networks and market channels (Knorringa 1999:1588), and on relations of trust and co-operation between producers and traders or buyers. They depend on a penumbra of ancillary services. Hence the ‘space’ of industrial clusters is ultimately networked and uncircumscribed, despite critical territorial concentrations. The ethnic enclave economy hypothesis

The Ethnic Enclave Economy hypothesis (EEE) reflected a renewed interest in industrial clustering. Conducted primarily on the pages of the American Sociological Review, the debate has been characterised by misreadings and distortions of the original hypothesis. In its original form, as published in the American Journal of Sociology, the hypothesis was inspired by the phenomenal growth of Cuban enterprises in Miami in the 1970s. Wilson and Martin (1982:138) argued that the immigrant enclave economy tended to ‘reproduce the crucial features of the centre economy’, that is, of large conglomerate corporations engaged in both manufacturing and distribution, of mutual servicing through internal supply; although, as they point out, whereas centre firms achieve vertical and horizontal integration with a single firm, in the ethnic enclave the structuring is achieved by co-ordinating a cluster of firms (Wilson and Martin 1982:136, 138). Studies of Cuban businesses in Miami (Wilson and Portes 1980; Wilson and Martin

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1982; Portes and Bach 1985) revealed very high levels of vertical integration between Cuban construction firms, and a tendency for these firms to draw upon the Cuban service sector.12 This organisational structure, it was argued, generated multiple advantages for the ethnic group both in terms of profits, which were invested within the enclave rather than beyond it, and in terms of the labour opportunities generated by the enclave, which again were multiplied as a consequence of internal trading. This so-called multiplier effect meant that each transaction ‘rippled’ beneficially through the enclave. Moreover, as the enclave expanded, Cuban labour reaped the benefits either through promotion or through openings created for new firms. This way of representing Wilson and Martin’s argument, which stresses the organisational pathways linking ethnic firms, based on vertical integration (of supply channels between manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers) and horizontal integration (mutual servicing), has not been the key aspect of the hypothesis which was taken up in the ensuing debate. Instead, the focus has been almost entirely on labour earnings and opportunities. A survey of employees within the spatially defined Miami enclave over a period of time showed that they fared better than co-ethnics13 who had gone to work in the general labour market, beyond that enclave (Wilson and Portes 1980). Wilson and Portes also found that non-American educational qualifications or work experience in Cuba were rewarded better in the Miami enclave. The ethnic enclave hypothesis thus recast exploitative sweatshop labour as an apprenticeship – ethnics learned the tools of trade in order to set up in their own business (Waldinger 1993:444). This implied that split labour market theory did not apply to ethnic enclave economies. Whereas in the secondary, casual labour market wages and job satisfaction were low, this was not the case for employees in the ethnic enclave, even when their jobs were unskilled and menial, and their initial wages relatively low, and even if the firms they worked for could be classed as part of the secondary sector (Portes and Bach 1985). In later research, however, Sanders and Nee (1987, 1992), found that Cubans living and working in the enclave earned lower wages than those living outside it. This, it was argued, refuted the ethnic enclave hypothesis. The rejoinder from Portes and Jensen (1987, 1992) was that the enclave was never defined in residential terms and, indeed, some of the more successful Cuban owners of ethnic firms in the enclave lived outside it, in more salubrious suburbs. The earnings of Cuban enclave employees living elsewhere were above average (Portes and Jensen 1987:770). Nevertheless, in responding to the criticism, Portes and Jensen retained the original stress on the spatial dimension of the ethnic enclave defined as an area in which immigrant enterprises concentrate (p. 769). Recasting the Ethnic Enclave Economy (EEE) hypothesis as exclusively about workers’ wages has, I propose, distorted its insights. For example, Ivan Light and his colleagues argue that since a substantial proportion of those employed in the ethnic economy are self-employed individuals, neither employers nor employees, the EEE

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hypothesis is irrelevant. Whereas in the general labour market ‘there are ten employees for every one self-employed, so that the earnings of the employed largely determine the earnings of the whole group, numbers in the ethnic economy are reversed’. There ‘the self-employed outnumber the employees by three to two’. Moreover, ‘employer firms are only about one-fifth of all minority firms’ and they tend to be rather small (Light et al. 1995:31; see also Light and Rosenstyn 1995). The fact that employees are so few leads Light and his colleagues to reject the usefulness of the EEE hypothesis, cast as an argument about labour. If the majority in the enclave draw no wages, their reasoning goes, what is the point of the hypothesis? Even integration is questioned. Contradicting his own evidence elsewhere (Waldinger 1986: 50), Roger Waldinger denies the very existence of vertical or horizontal integration. There are grounds, he says (1993:446): for rejecting the idea of vertical integration, most importantly the fact that barriers to entry differ significantly along the supply chain. It takes little, to start up a garment shop, a good deal more to begin a textile mill. Not surprisingly, there are many Cuban garment shops but no Cuban textile mills, not many Cuban apparel retailers, and even fewer Cuban apparel wholesalers.

This leads Waldinger to argue that the EEE hypothesis has lost its usefulness (1993:445). He suggests substituting it with the notion of an ethnic ‘niche’ (Waldinger 1996) by which he means the ethnic occupational concentration of professionals (such as Jewish doctors) or ethnic employees within a single firm (such as the local authority). Although ‘niche’ at least has the merit of highlighting the specificity of economic sectors in the formation of ethnic employment clustering, it lacks a conceptualisation of inter-firm trading relations and the external economies these generate. Redefining the Ethnic Enclave Economy

In the face of this blanket condemnation, it would seem that we need to return to the original Wilson and Martin (1982) EEE hypothesis but with a difference, based on much greater awareness of the ambiguities the debate has generated in scholarly discourse. I intend to define the ethnic enclave economy (as distinct from the ‘ethnic economy’ or ‘niche’) much as industrial clusters have been defined, as the networked cluster of ethnic firms producing particular goods, along with the connected ethnic firms and services servicing the cluster. The triadic relation generating an ethnic enclave economy is person/good/networked space. Networks can be represented in spatial terms but the organisation of space is non-uniform; instead, it is functionally related to the nature of the goods produced and marketed. Ethnic enclave economies may be localised or dispersed: in Manchester, the Asian residential cluster, the Asian clothing wholesale cluster and the Asian commercial and restaurant cluster are located in different places. The enclave may involve several

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different ethnic groups positioned differentially in the supply line. It may be characterised by cut-throat horizontal competition between co-ethnics at the same level of supply, or by the very opposite – circles of credit and trust between equals. Once we identify the flow of goods through the network and the external forces bringing new entrants into the trade, we can begin to explain process – the generative trajectories that create the kind of exponential expansion and sudden visibilisation that characterised the growth of the Cuban ethnic enclave economy in Miami or the Manchester-based South Asian fashion industry which I discuss below. Miami is the gateway to South/Central America. It makes sense that a firm producing and exporting sugar-harvesting equipment and other agricultural machinery to Latin America would be located in Little Havana (Portes and Jensen 1987:769) where, presumably, importers from Latin America seek goods and equipment. But why do Cuban construction firms also cluster there? To answer this question we would need to know more about the internal specialisation and differentiation of adjacent types of construction firms in the enclave, and their complementary features which enable them to service particular markets efficiently; what are the supply lines and mutual reciprocities between building material firms, architects, contractors, plumbers and so forth? In other words, the spatial concentration of SMEs is socially produced by the demands of particular products and markets, not merely by labour markets. Nor is the spatial dispersal of ethnic firms all operating within a single industry reason to declare the hypothesis redundant. Retailing, whether of Persian carpets or of the goods sold in off-licences, newsagents and Chinese chippies, is often dispersed within a city. Most long-distance trading in the developing world is based on the control of particular goods. Hausa trading networks in Nigeria, for example, historically traded in cattle or kola nut, while certain stages in the processing of these commodities were monopolised by other ethnic groups, with some areas of competition at the points where the groups traded with one another (Cohen 1969). Such specialisations create spheres of exchanges or markets in specific goods which move through nodes of distribution. These, in turn, organise trans-spatial networks. Like big multinational ‘centre’ firms which respect no boundaries, ethnic enclave economies need not be spatially concentrated at every stage. The goods themselves, their production, processing and movement, determine the visible spaces in which they are ultimately sold to the wider public. Typically, different points of sale have particular features of their own: traders originating from several ethnic groups, selling diverse goods, may cluster side by side in a single mall or bazaar; or, conversely, co-ethnic traders, all selling the same type of good (furniture, clothing, shoes) may cluster together offering a wide range of goods of the same type. The triadic relation between person, networked space and good probes how these are interconnected; why, and in what respects, ethnicity affects the capacity to command both goods and the locations of their production or distribution.

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A recognition of the importance of ‘hybrid’ networks of persons/objects is at the centre of Bruno Latour’s discussions of the production of scientific knowledge. Actor Network Theory stresses the agency of objects in the determination of cultural and social production (Latour 1993; Callon and Law 1995). Goods are ‘actants’; in the present instance, they effect distribution networks, spatial concentrations and dispersals and the growth of ethnic enclave economies. The enclave is an organised web shaped by the flow of specific (interconnected) goods and services. Although there are similarities in the way different industries are organised, there are also clearly different constraints and opportunities underpinning, say, the manufacturing and sale of aeroplanes, movies, clothes or pop music. Inter-ethnic friendship may ease transactions, but the structure of inter-firm relations is ultimately shaped by the goods produced and marketed. It is thus remarkable that the sociological literature on ethnic enclave economies has tended almost entirely to ignore the objects produced and traded or the networks through which these objects travel. The focus on ethnic employees’ wages and on residential clustering has been entirely divorced from any understanding of the generative economies of inter-firm trading. Hence the final judgement is still out on this potentially fruitful, indeed in my view essential, concept. The insight of Wilson and Martin’s 1982 article was to recognise that the flow of goods within the Cuban ethnic enclave economy moved between different supply levels vertically and that firms at a particular supply level serviced each other, leading to horizontal integration. My own work on the fashion and textile industries in Manchester exemplifies both the collective advantages of ethnic enclave economies and their collective vulnerability in the face of global economic changes. The South Asian enclave economy in Britain

A good deal of research on Asian business in Britain has focused on the most visible businesses: cornershops and newsagents whose owners are visibly Asian, or retailers and restaurants located in ethnic commercial or residential clusters, catering specifically to members of the ethnic group, or selling their exotic wares to the wider public (for example, restaurants and delicatessens). But the vast majority of Asian-owned businesses are, in fact, relatively invisible. They may operate from home or be located in warehouses and back streets. They produce goods and services directed at wider public tastes beyond the ethnic group. The cultural capital needed to be a taxi driver, knitwear manufacturer, newsagent or landlord is not distinctively Asian and, indeed, different ethnic groups have followed one another into these economic sectors without necessarily even changing the name of the firm or the sign on the shop front. Just as the businesses themselves are invisible, so too are the flows of goods and social connections between Asian businesses within the enclave economy.

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There are, of course, some very visible wealthy British Asian businessmen in a variety of sectors, from steel, computers and pharmaceuticals to food, clothing and the internet. But most Asian businesses are small or medium sized. The only way to identify them is to trace the goods they manufacture and sell through their stages of production and marketing. For example, an Asian clothing manufacturer typically uses cloth, cotton, trimmings, labels, plastic wrappers, boxes, industrial sewing machines, technical support, hangers and rails, premises, office equipment, transportation facilities – and he can choose to buy these from other Asian firms in the enclave. He is very likely to sell the clothes he manufactures to an Asian wholesaler who, in turn, sells them to an Asian market trader or shopkeeper. In Manchester, where the incidence of trading between Asian firms in the clothing and knitwear industry has been in the past remarkably high, firm profits have benefited other firms by providing them with sales, work and custom. In the long run, this has allowed the whole enclave to expand. By the same token, however, firm bankruptcies ripple negatively through the enclave. Prior to 1999, it is conservatively estimated that the predominantly Asian fashion industry in Manchester had an annual sales turnover of approximately £500,000,000, even before retailers were counted. The North West as a whole had far greater sales, with Rochdale, Bolton and Preston being major centres of manufacturing. In Manchester City there were around 150 knitwear manufacturers employing some 1,500 workers with a combined turnover of approximately £75 million, and an estimated 300 manufacturers, mostly making skirts and trousers, with combined sales of £180 million. The major wholesalers-cum-importers between them had sales of some £200 million, and, in addition, there were at least fifty small wholesalers with a combined turnover of £50 million.14 Most of the manufacturers are of Pakistani Punjabi origin,15 but among the large wholesalers are several Indian Punjabis. In addition the city has a concentration of grey cloth textile importers, mostly Gujeratis, as well as fabric and yarn importers and various ancillary services. The number of workers employed in all these firms has been estimated to be circa 10,000, most of them inner city residents with few formal educational qualifications. Not all workers are Asian, but Asians who want to work in the enclave are given preference by Asian firm owners. The fashion industry in Manchester in many ways resembles its counterparts elsewhere in the world, but it also has some special features which I have discussed in my monograph (Werbner 1990a) and in a series of articles (Werbner 1984, 1987, 1990b). In particular, a complex edifice of manufacturing and wholesaling relies on the custom of an army of self-employed Asian peripatetic market traders who operate from their homes where they store their goods. The markets they work are widely dispersed throughout Greater Manchester and beyond, in the Lake District, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Conversely, market traders from well beyond Manchester shop in the Manchester wholesale clothing district. For over forty years,

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ever since Asians displaced small Jewish firms in the Manchester clothing industry, the reliance on markets has meant that the enclave has retained its autonomy, with very few manufacturers producing for the high street stores or mail order firms. Market traders rarely surface in survey or census statistics – they remain a kind of invisible presence. Yet they have critically underpinned the Manchester clothing ethnic enclave economy. They would normally be classified in censuses at the lower end of the class spectrum – as unskilled self-employed – yet many of them are quite wealthy. Indeed, it is from among these unskilled self-employed traders that largescale manufacturers, wholesalers and importers with millions of pounds in annual sales have emerged (most notably, in Manchester, Joe Bloggs and Rajan Trading). Manufacturers have hitherto relied on wholesale cash and carry firms to purchase their goods. Entry into the trade has been through entrepreneurial chains, and new influxes into the enclave have come in response to economic recessions and the closing down of factories in the region. New entrants compete with old timers propelling them into higher levels of supply. In time, this has created the vertical interconnections in the enclave. Entrepreneurial chains are generated not only by the exchange of know-how but by the extension of credit to newcomers, as wholesalers try to expand their range of new customers. Indeed, the whole enclave is financed through credit which flows from wholesalers and importers to retailers, and from manufacturers to wholesalers. In sum, Asians in Manchester dominate the cheap end of the fashion trade, catering primarily to markets or small shops rather than high street stores, although there are noteworthy exceptions. The dominance of Asian trading, initially somewhat hidden (since most traders were market traders operating from home) came to be tangibly inscribed in the city landscape during the 1980s. An arc of Asian wholesale firms emerged, stretching immediately adjacent to the High Street retailing district for about a mile and a half (see Figure 2). Interspersed with and surrounding the wholesale district was a further arc of small-scale manufacturers who mainly concentrated in specific locations, especially in areas of converted warehouses and old mills. Although most firms bore neutral or English names, the owners were predominantly South Asian, the majority Punjabis. Gujeratis concentrate in the textile trade. There is a fundamental difference between the fashion industry and the textile trade in greycloth (plain cotton, unprinted, which is the main commodity traded by Asian textile merchants) in the way both capital and knowledge are utilised. The textile trade is highly capitalised but no merchant can stock the full range of cottons the market demands. Moreover, temporary shortfalls in capital require mutual guarantees, usually provided within circles of mutually trusting merchants. Hence, relations of trust and credit are paramount in the textile trade and essential for its smooth operation. It is a gentleman’s trade: merchants work from offices equipped with telephone, fax and e-mail. Social relationships between merchants sustain at all

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Figure 2 Asian wholesaling and manufacturing in Manchester

times a façade of friendship and generosity, disguising competition. The trade itself is cross-continental, the direction of imports currently being from India and Pakistan to Britain. But many of the merchants are located in adjacent high-rise office buildings in the city centre, still bearing names like ‘Bombay Street’ which attest to Manchester’s traditional imperial role in cotton trading. In contrast to the textile trade, the clothing trade is highly competitive and uncertain; it involves constant hustling and short-term deals. Textile merchants deal with what are essentially commodities. This means that knowledge is a prerequisite for competent trading and has a measure of certainty in it (greycloth weights are measured in grams per square centimetre, an eye for quality is a must). By contrast, clothing traders deal in luxury items with uncertain values. Textile merchants are interdependent horizontally; clothing traders are interdependent vertically (see Figure 3). The divide has social connotations in the mutual perceptions that traders and merchants have of each other: the merchants inevitably regard themselves as benevolent members of an exclusive circle of genuine businessmen, unlike (as they see it) the fly-by-night, untrustworthy traders; the traders regard the merchants as arrogant and status-conscious. This mutual stereotyping is reinforced by the fact that the two groups originate from different South Asian regions. An earlier divide between aristocratic Jewish Sephardic textile merchants and low-class East European Jewish clothing traders and manufacturers has been replaced by a similar divide between predominantly Gujerati or Marwati merchants (primarily Hindu but

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Importers [Transporters]

[Travel Agents] Wholesalers/Contractors

Fashion designers Knitwear/Clothing manufacturers

Retailers/market traders

(Sub-contractors) Cloth

Buttons/zips Yarn Cotton s u p p l i e r s i m p o r t e r s

Note: Arrows represent the direction of supply/sale.

Accessories

Stonewashing

[Solicitors] [Accountants] [Taxi firms] [Hotels]

[Insurance agents] [Bankers] [Stockbrokers] [Estate agents]

Figure 3 Vertical and horizontal integration in the ethnic enclave economy

including some Muslims) and Punjabi clothing traders (both Muslim and Hindu; Muslims predominate numerically in the city). We see, then, that objects traded affect spatial clustering and norms of trading, as well as ethnic perceptions. In the fashion trade the dynamics of ethnic enclave development are characterised by two main processes: horizontal multiplication and competition, and vertical expansion and co-operation. The growth of the enclave has been fuelled by external economic factors (recession, racism and disadvantage in the open labour market) and internal factors (the maturation of families and the growth of a trusted labour force). Both precipitated increased entry into the enclave at the bottom, that is, at the level of retailing or petty manufacturing. Although the influx was associated with intensified competition between co-ethnic firms, it was also associated with the overall growth of the enclave and the emergence of very large, highly capitalised firms at higher supply levels (mainly in wholesaling and importing). Growth and decline

If command of an enclave economy enables an ethnic group to acquire collectively wealth and influence, concentration in a single industry can also make it

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more vulnerable to collective failure – unless traders can mobilise collectively to combat competition or to meet new demands for quality control.16 One of the Asian-dominated sectors that grew rapidly in Manchester in the early 1990s was knitwear manufacturing, previously centred in Leicester. The growth of the knitwear cluster came mainly in response to very high demand for English knitwear goods from Eastern Europe. It was associated with large-scale capital investment in computerised knitwear machines costing circa £10,000 each. B.C., a young man of 33, arrived in England from Pakistan at the age of 2 and left school in Manchester at 16 without any qualifications. His father is disabled and has been unemployed for the past thirty years. After leaving school, B.C. worked for six years in a large Asian knitwear factory before opening his own factory in 1988 with an older brother who had previously worked in markets. The two men bought their first knitwear machine with a 20 per cent down payment and unfavourable hire purchase terms but, since they knew the seller, they needed no collateral. They started the factory with four machines, one new and three second-hand, a total investment of £35,000, including the yarn. B.C. told me: We kept on expanding. We bought another two machines, then another two, until now we have thirty-six machines, all computerised (i.e. an investment of some £360,000 in machinery alone). We still continue to sell 100 per cent of our goods to the wholesalers, not to stores or catalogue companies. We don’t like dealing with them – they’re arrogant … We have started to expand a bit into Holland and Belgium – we deal with Indians (not Pakistanis) there. In London our customers are Indian Sikhs. Most of the people we deal with are between 30 and 50 years old. There are very few over 50. Our workers are all Asians, mostly Pakistanis. They just turn up. They knock on the door. But we like to get somebody who is already trained. We employ thirty to thirty-five workers. Mostly ladies do the sewing side. We use freelance designers. Our designer in Manchester is not an Asian but the one in London is. The computer technician is also English but one can get Asian technicians. The yarn suppliers are all Asians in Manchester.

This success story is now threatened by the imminent collapse of a large segment of the Asian fashion and clothing ethnic enclave economy in Manchester. Signs of this collapse are everywhere. Small wholesalers, part cash and carry, part retailers selling to the wider public on Sundays, have virtually disappeared in one wholesale district. In particular, a large block of some fifty small warehouses is now almost derelict, littered with cardboard boxes, as traders abandon the area when their leases run out. Even the local Asian café-restaurant closed down in December 1999. The more upmarket wholesalers, just off the main city high street, are also depleted in numbers. Many of the larger ones have moved to a newly developing wholesaling area in Strangeways (see Figure 2). Others, who own their warehouses, are expecting a financial property bonanza as the area is re-designated for chic housing and retailing in a multi-million urban regeneration scheme of Back Piccadilly, supported by the European Union and big business. While the City Council has paid lip service

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to the loss of Asian businesses and inner city jobs in the area, little attempt is being made to invest in a solution to the ailing clothing industry. Manufacturers whom I interviewed cited several reasons for the decline of the enclave: (1) The artificially strong pound and export liberalisation policies, which have resulted in the flooding of British markets with imports. In Manchester importers have expanded and thrived while wholesalers buying from local manufacturers have stagnated or gone into liquidation. (2) The dying out of British open air and covered markets. What had been a thriving retail sector, low in overheads and high in profits, is no longer a viable niche. Markets are closing down or are far less busy. This is attributed to the growth of hypermarkets and shopping malls, the pervasive use of credit cards and the increasing preference for designer clothes. (3) Sunday opening of the large department stores and the city centre, which has cut the profits of Sunday markets and small cash and carry wholesalers. (4) The introduction of minimum wages, which has cut profits severely in an industry relying on piece-rate pay and machining speed. (5) The loss of the Eastern European export market which, for several years after the fall of the Berlin wall, provided Manchester manufacturers and wholesalers with bonanza profits. (6) Severe shortages of skilled labour. Young women in particular are unwilling to work as machinists at minimum wages when they can work as secretaries or shop assistants. Training facilities are few. One Pakistani manufacturer I interviewed now employs only young male Pakistani machinists, drawing on a pool of men who immigrated into the United Kingdom to marry local English Pakistani girls and who, he told me, were well trained as tailors. (7) Intense competition between local manufacturers, which has pushed down prices and profits for the more established ones. This is, of course, not a new feature of the enclave. (8) The unwillingness of the next generation, highly educated in Britain,17 to take over the family firm, and the inclination of young Asians generally to move into hi-tech and electronics rather than clothing. (9) The absence of concerted action by manufacturers, or of government support. The collapse of local wholesaling means that low quality manufacturing is simply not in demand. Manufacturers who want to survive must go upmarket and sell beyond the Asian enclave. Most manufacturers in Manchester lack the contacts and expertise to make this leap. For those who do, there are dividends. S.R., a clothing manufacturer who specialises in school uniforms, is an educated man who came from Pakistan as an adult to work for an airline company before setting up as a

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manufacturer. In the 1980s he lost over £100,000 in bad debts when some of his key customers went into liquidation. S.R. told me: When all this happened my question to myself was: how to survive? I knew I had to specialise – from fashion to a more specific good. I had to find something in demand, so I began to concentrate on school uniforms … [I found] two people who were supplying the chain stores … John Lewis’s, Debenham’s.18 We couldn’t approach them ourselves. We found a man (a supplier). [How?] I did research. The same product, we took it to Debenham’s ourselves and they didn’t take it from us. When it went through another person they took it. Probably he is established and they have good contacts with him. They were concerned that being a small producing unit, we might not be able to fulfil the demand, we might not have the capacity. So many questions asked of you. He [the supplier] was also interested in getting to know us. He was introduced to me by a [Jewish] fabric supplier … who told him that he knew that we made good quality stuff.Yes, it was my reputation. Since then I have three more good customers who deal only in school uniforms … For me quality is the only stick with which to beat my competitors. My accountant (an Asian) advised me not to go into liquidation. He told me ‘Lose £100,000 but don’t lose your reputation. Time will come when you will regain everything … After bankruptcy there is no reputation – you can’t survive that’. The bank was very helpful … They believed me because I had always paid my debts on time.

S.R. prides himself on the meticulousness of his design and specialist pleating of school skirts (for the latter he insists on using only one Asian pleater who lives in Yorkshire, some forty miles away). Since his early contracts with large customers he has established links with two of the three major school merchandise companies in Britain. He was proud of a case in which he had to buy a specialist machine in order to produce a complex product for Littlewoods19 originally made in Taiwan. He claimed his product was far better than the original. He has had other offers, but he cannot expand his factory in the absence of skilled labour. Both his children are graduates with good jobs. Neither is willing to join the business. It is not only the fashion industry in Manchester which is in crisis. Rental housing too, a major source of income for Asians in the city, has been hit by a surplus of housing, with new student hostels built by the University of Manchester and new Social Security regulations which have lowered rents arbitrarily. The new rules also mean that landlords risk losing several months’ rent if a tenant’s case is not approved. Under these circumstances the market in rental housing has slumped. Rental property is an almost entirely invisible Asian enclave economy. In the past it was seen as a good investment for windfall profits in the clothing trade, given the unpredictability and uncertainty of the fashion industry. Commercial or rental housing brings in a predictable, regular income; properties either retain their price or – in property boom times – increase their values dramatically. And property can be used as collateral to obtain bank loans in order to overcome dead periods or failed ventures in the fashion trade. Hence the housing market and the fashion clothing trade are symbiotically linked. But the housing market, at least in Manchester,

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encompasses also other Asian landlords who are uninvolved in the fashion trade, including even Asians in full-time wage employment. A common strategy I repeatedly observed among these landlords is to gradually buy and refurbish houses, one at a time, with the mortgage of each property financed by rent paid on a prior property. It is thus quite common for people in low wage jobs, or even the unemployed, to own several rental properties. A former research assistant of mine and her family had managed to purchase twelve inner-city rental properties through this strategy at a time when the assistant’s brother was unemployed and her father earned a meagre salary as a religious cleric. Most Asian rental property in Manchester is spatially clustered around the University and the inner suburbs where properties are either cheap or in demand by students and young professionals. Quite fortuitously, the Asian residential cluster is located close to the University and thus popular with students. It is difficult, however, to uncover this thriving, invisible business niche through the census or other, largescale surveys. It is known that there is a good deal of rental property in particular areas. It is also known that many of the properties are owned by Asian landlords. Such information is known to the populations serviced – for example, to students, young professionals and Social Security (many Asians rent out property to families or individuals drawing on social service benefits). But how many properties a particular landlord owns, or which properties are owned by Asians (even, which properties are rented rather than owner-occupied) remains unknown and invisible in surveys of Asian entrepreneurship. Like market trading, this is another subterranean economy. A.B., a rental property landlord who originates from a Karachi industrialist family, arrived in Britain penniless after the Bhutto nationalisation of his family’s textile factories. A financial expert, although he never completed his degree, he succeeded over a period of twenty-five years through clever manipulations of loans and mortgages from different sources, to acquire rental properties with a combined equity of £1,000,000. In 1999 he was divesting himself, as quickly as possible, of his Manchester properties and investing in rental property near Oxford, in the London outer commuter belt where his son now lives. He also plans to go into the holiday rental property market. His office is based in his suburban home and like most other Asian property investors in Manchester, his identity as a businessman is hidden, although virtually all his properties are clustered in a single Manchester neighbourhood, some miles away. Even the taxi business has its invisible aspects. Throughout Britain, Asians and particularly Pakistanis have move into taxi driving in large numbers, even though they regard this occupation as morally shameful (taxi drivers pick up drunks from pubs and may be subject to racial abuse). But because the business is built upon subcontractual arrangements between taxi firms and drivers, who function as selfemployed businessmen, it is often quite unclear who owns how many taxis and on

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what terms taxi driving is contracted out. Like other forms of business which attract immigrants, taxi driving requires very low start-up capital and allows for gradual investment and growth. This is equally true of the fashion and housing markets. All three are typical immigrant enclave economies. However, while beginnings may be modest, all three economies potentially promise very large profits. Overlapping spaces

We may think of the fashion industry as a discrete ethnic enclave economy, or we may define the Asian ethnic enclave economy in Manchester as encompassing all four major industrial clusters which Asians have penetrated in large numbers – fashion, food, property and transport. The four are interconnected through a penumbra of ancillary and professional services: travel agents, accountants, solicitors and so forth. Each cluster has its spatial manifestations, depending on the product or service produced and marketed. In Lefebvre’s terms, social spaces interpenetrate, intertwine and overlap, attaining ‘real’ existence by virtue of networks and pathways, linked through invisible channels of trading and collaboration.20 Asians are increasingly involved in many other, diverse types of business. It is not fortuitous, however, that first-generation immigrants tend to cluster in specific industries. They confront a racialised job market while having little capital and few useful formal qualifications. Once opportunities are uncovered or discovered, members of the group move into the enclave in increasing numbers. Trading networks facilitate credit and trust (see, for example, Light et al. 1993:36–9), knowhow, training and recruitment. Co-ethnic networks also produce the kind of work environment sympathetic to ethnic sensitivities and needs, particularly those of women (see, for example, Ram 1994). Such networks, however, rather than being diffuse and generalised, are embedded in ethnic enclave economies in highly structured ways. Subcontracting which is a crucial feature of the clothing industry, involves complex but predictable flows of goods, information, credit and work recruitment. It too generates spatial transformations. For example, labour shortages of machinists in Manchester have compelled manufacturers to subcontract the making up of garments to Asians living in outlying small towns in the North West of England, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, who still have access to a ready pool of female labour among friends and relatives. Hence the clothing enclave now encompasses a wider region than in the past. As ethnic firms grow and diversify, and as a second or third generation takes over from the pioneers, the concentration in particular industries may being to vanish. At this point ethnic firms stop being ‘ethnic’ in anything except the identity of their owners. The choices these new entrepreneurs make are dictated by the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, by the opening up of new technologies or the availability of low-interest state loans. The firms of second- and third-generation

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Asians may thus cease to be interconnected through trading networks or entrepreneurial chains. Nor do they necessarily share a distinctive culture of entrepreneurship that marks them apart from the rest of society. At this point it becomes valid to talk of Light’s ‘ethnic economy’, but this is also the point where the subject loses its fascination. Analyses of dispersed and disconnected businesses owned by members of a single ethnic group can shed little light on the generative processes that lead ethnic groups to monopolise whole industries or tracts of city space and to produce ‘Asian’ or ‘Jewish’ or ‘Cuban’ or ‘Irish’ or ‘black’ millionaires and distinctive urban commercial spaces. Conclusion

The Ethnic Enclave Economy hypothesis proposed that ethnic enterprises tend to form expanding clusters and that working within the enclave improves the lot of ethnic workers and their prospects for social mobility. The reasons for this advantage stemmed, it was argued, from the integrative features of the enclave and the opportunities for further expansion which it generated. The challenge to the hypothesis came from those denying that integration occurs, or that it creates such advantages. Drawing on industrial cluster theory, this paper has challenged the current consensus that the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided, best abandoned in favour of new concepts such as the ethnic ‘economy’ or ‘niche’. The whole debate, I have demonstrated, has been marked by misconceptions and misreadings of what an ethnic economy is, which have obscured the original insights attached to the hypothesis. The challenge has been to theorise what ethnic enclave economies really are, beyond the determinative spatial metaphor in which the hypothesis was first grounded, and to interrogate how and why such enclaves may emerge. Using the penetration of Asians into the clothing and textile industries in Manchester as an example, this paper has demonstrated that ethnic enclave economies both enhance opportunities but also make ethnic groups highly vulnerable to macro-economic and demographic changes. Secondly, I proposed that different Asian industrial clusters in the city – fashion, housing, food and transport – are interlinked symbiotically or via an expanding Asian service sector. To investigate ethnic enclave economies, the need is to probe beneath the visible, to uncover the invisible social processes that produce spatial clusters. This can only be achieved through economic models and methods of research that start from hidden transactions in particular goods and the social networks these generate. The Ethnic Enclave Economy hypothesis, recast to theorise these invisible networks of object/persons expanding across, rather than circumscribed by, space, is the basis, I suggest, for fruitful insights into ethnic social mobility. These do not need to rely on essentialist notions of ethnic values apparently conducive to successful entrepreneurship (Werbner 1999). But, above all, the hypothesis avoids simplistic

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individualistic models of ethnic firm success in favour of collective models which encompass individual agency within a broader theory of expanding ethnic socioeconomies composed of interrelated, small and medium-sized enterprises. acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented to the conference on ‘Transformations in the Plural City,’ Bergen, 28 May–1 June 1997. Research on Asian enterprise was conducted in 1975–78 and 1986–88 with support from grants from the Social Science Research Council, UK, the Economic and Social Research Council, UK, and the Nuffield Foundation, and has been updated in 1999–2000. The support of all these bodies is gratefully acknowledged, as are the comments of anonymous reviewers for Sociology. notes 1. On urban imaginaries, see Westwood and Williams (1997:1). 2. Particularly in novels and films, as in the colourful, exotic scenes of Bradford’s Asian commercial centre in the British Pakistani award-winning film, East is East. 3. Representations of the everyday aesthetic of urban life draw on Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur, the stroller who samples the view from the sidewalk (Savage and Warde 1993:137). Raban’s depiction of Roxbury in Soft City (1988:213–17) or Sennett’s of New York’s Lower East Side (1990:164–6) both savour the minute aesthetic details of changing urban immigrant and black neighbourhoods. 4. A classic critical commentary on the deprivation of the African-American ghetto is Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). For a shocking description of Los Angeles’ deprived inner-city immigrant and black neighbourhoods, see Davis (1999). Taylor et al. argue that discourses on Moss Side in Manchester echo similar American themes of danger and violence (1996:205–9). 5. For a classic study see Kramer and Leventman (1961). 6. On the commercial aesthetics of the restaurant trade in New York City more generally, see Zukin (1995). 7. This was the classic Chicago School formulation (see Morris 1968:109–13). In Britain, Rex and Moore’s (1967) study of Sparkbrook in Birmingham deployed images of colonisation to describe competition for scarce housing and its effect on immigrant ‘twilight zones’. 8. The analysis by Morris (1968) and Zukin (1988) of loft conversions in New York City highlight the impact of capital on the social profile of residents. 9. War is the central trope of Davis’s (1990) City of Quartz. 10. Critics have argued, in my view wrongly, against what they see as Lefebvre’s tendency to conflate abstract space with locality or territory (see Farrar 1997:106–7). Others argue, again mistakenly in my view, that his concepts cannot be operationalised empirically (Savage and Warde 1993:132). 11. This is, indeed, one paramount tendency in the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship, and there are numerous examples of such analyses, a recent one in Britain being Metcalf et al. (1996) 12. A similar interconnectedness between different parts of a single industry or enclave existed among Japanese market gardeners in California who supplied Japanese vegetable market wholesalers, themselves serviced by Japanese truckers, who in turn supplied a distribution network of widely dispersed Japanese greengrocers (Jiobu 1988). So too in the apparel industry in New York, Italian and Jewish contractors and manufacturers were integrated

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13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

vertically and connected horizontally to a range of ancillary industries (Waldinger 1986:50). Co-ethnics may be defined as persons who regard themselves as members of the same ethnic group in a particular context or situation. These figures are estimates based on personal interviews with manufacturers, published figures for the large cash and carry wholesalers/importers, surveys conducted by the Business Liaison Officer for Cheetham and Broughton and a survey of knitwear firms by Numan Azmi of the UMIST knitwear project. The Yellow Pages for Central Manchester (where most of the firms cluster) lists 450 clothing, knitwear and hosiery manufacturers and wholesalers, of which a high proportion are Asian. Some originated from East Punjab before Partition (Werbner 1990a). Pakistanis predominate in the city among the 20,000 Asians recorded in the 1991 census, 100,000 in Greater Manchester. See Nadvi (1999), Tewari (1999) and Knorringa (1999) for cases of collective mobilisation and change arising where industrial clusters had to adjust production in the face of liberalisation policies, the loss of prior markets or new quality controls. Many Asian businessmen send their children to private schools and virtually all live in the suburbs where state schools are reasonably good. It is noteworthy, however, that sons and daughters have joined the business in the case of the largest and most successful Asian firms. British chain department stores. Another British chain department store. The level of analysis determines whether the concept of an Ethnic Enclave Economy is used to refer to a single industrial cluster or to a cluster of clusters, linked by a service sector.

references Basu, Dipannita and Werbner, Pnina 2001.‘Bootstrap Capitalism and the Culture Industries: A Critique of Invidious Comparisons in the Study of Ethnic Entrepreneurship’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, No. 2. Callon, Michael and Law, John 1995.‘Agency and the Hybrid Collectif ’. South Atlantic Quarterly 94:481–508. Cohen, Abner 1969. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Davis, Mike 1990. City of Quartz. London: Verso. Davis, Mike 1999.‘Urban Control: The Ecology of Fear’, pp. 141–5 in Steve Pile, Christopher Brook and Gerry Mooney (eds.), Unruly Cities? Order/Disorder. London: Routledge for the Open University. Farrar, Max 1997.‘Migrant Spaces and Settlers’ Time: Forming and Deforming an Inner City’, pp. 104–24 in Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds.), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge. Jiobu, Robert M. 1988.‘Ethnic Hegemony and the Japanese of California’. American Sociological Review 53:353–67. Knorringa, P. 1999.‘Agra: An Old Cluster Facing the New Competition’, pp. 1587–604 in H. Schmitz and K. Nadvi (eds.),‘Industrial Clusters in Developing Countries’, special issue of World Development 27. Kramer, Judith R. and Leventman, Seymour 1961. Children of the Gilded Ghetto. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Latour, Bruno 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Lefebvre, Henri 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Light, Ivan, Bhachu, Parminder and Karageorgis, Stavros 1993.‘Migration Networks and Immigrant Entrepreneurship’, pp. 25–50 in Ivan Light and Parminder Bhachu (eds.), Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital and Ethnic Networks. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Light, Ivan, Sabagh, George, Bozorgmehr, Mehdi and Dermartirosian, Claudia 1995.‘Ethnic Economy or Ethnic Enclave Economy?’, pp. 23–42 in Marilyn Hatter (ed.), New Migrants in the Market Place. Boston, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press. Light, Ivan and Rosenstyn, Carolyn 1995. Race, Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship in Urban America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Metcalf, Hilary, Modood, Tariq and Virdee, Satnam 1996. Asian Self-Employment: The Interaction of Culture and Economics in England. London: Policy Studies Institute. Morris, R. N. 1968. Urban Sociology. London: George Allen and Unwin. Nadvi, K. 1999.‘Collective Efficiency and Collective Failure: The Response of the Sialkot Surgical Instrument Cluster to Global Quality Pressures, pp. 1605–27 in H. Schmitz and K. Nadvi (eds.), ‘Industrial Clusters in Developing Countries’, special issue of World Development 27. Portes, Alejandro and Bach, R. 1985. Latin Journey. Berkeley: University of California Press. Portes, Alejandro and Jensen, Leif 1987.‘What’s an Ethnic Enclave? The Case for Conceptual Clarity’ (Comment on Sanders and Nee). American Sociological Review 52:768–71. Portes, Alejandro and Jensen, Leif 1989.‘The Enclave and the Entrants: Patterns of Ethnic Enterprise in Miami Before and After Mariel’. American Sociological Review 54:929–49. Portes, Alejandro and Jensen, Leif 1992.‘Reply: Disproving the Enclave Hypothesis’. American Sociological Review 57:418–20. Raban, Jonathan 1988. Soft City. London: Collins Harvill. Ram, Monder 1994. Managing to Survive: Working Lives in Small Firms. Oxford: Blackwell. Rex, John and Moore, Robert 1967. Race, Community and Culture: A Study of Sparkbrook. London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations. Sanders, J. M. and Nee,Victor 1987.‘Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Ethnic Economy’. American Sociological Review 52:745–73. Sanders, J. M. and Nee,Victor 1992.‘Comment: Problems in Resolving the Enclave Economy Debate’. American Sociological Review 57:415–18. Savage, Mike and Warde, Alan 1993. Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. London: Macmillan. Schmitz, Hubert and Nadvi, Khalid 1999.‘Clustering and Industrialization: Introduction’, pp. 1503–14 in ‘Industrial Clusters in Developing Countries’, special issue of World Development 27. Sennett, Richard 1990. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. London: Faber and Faber. Soja, Edward W. 1997.‘Six Discourses on Postmodernism’, pp. 19–30 in Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds.), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge. Taylor, Ian, Evans, Karen and Fraser, Penny 1996. A Tale of Two Cities: A Study in Manchester and Sheffield. London: Routledge. Tewari, M. 1999.‘Successful Adjustment in Indian Industry: The Case of Ludhiana’s Woollen Knitwear Cluster’, pp. 1651–72 in H. Schmitz and K. Nadvi (eds.),‘Industrial Clusters in Developing Countries’, special issue of World Development 27. Waldinger, Roger D. 1986. Through the Eye of the Needle: Immigrants and Enterprise in New York’s Garment Trade. New York: NYU Press. Waldinger, Roger 1993.‘The Ethnic Enclave Debate Revisited’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17:444–52.

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Waldinger, Roger 1996. Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in PostIndustrial New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Werbner, Pnina 1984.‘Business on Trust: Pakistani Entrepreneurship in the Manchester Garment Trade’, pp. 189–210 in Robin Ward and Richard Jenkins (eds.), Ethnic Communities in Business: Strategies for Economic Survival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werbner, Pnina 1987.‘Enclave Economies and Family Firms: Pakistani Traders in a British City’, pp. 213–33 in Jeremy S. Eades (ed.), Migrants, Workers and the Social Order, ASA Monographs 26. London: Tavistock. Werbner, Pnina 1990a. The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis. Oxford: Berg. Werbner, Pnina 1990b.‘Renewing an Industrial Past: British Pakistani Entrepreneurship in Manchester’. Migration 8:7–41 (reprinted in Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot (eds.), Migration: The Asian Experience (1994). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Werbner, Pnina 1999.‘What Colour “Success”? Distorting Value in Studies of Ethnic Entrepreneurship’. Sociological Review 47:548–79, reprinted in Hans van Vermeulen and Joel Perlmann (eds.), Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility: Does Culture Make a Difference?. London: Macmillan. Westwood, Sallie and Williams, John 1997.‘Imagining Cities’, pp. 1–16 in Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds.). Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge. Wilson, Kenneth L. and Martin, W. Allen 1982.‘Ethnic Enclaves: A Comparison of Cuban and Black Economies in Miami’. American Journal of Sociology 88:135–60. Wilson, Kenneth L. and Portes, Alejandro 1980.‘Immigrant Enclaves: A Comparison of Cuban and Black Economies in Miami’. American Journal of Sociology 86:295–319. Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wong, Bernard P. 1982. Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Zukin, Sharon 1988. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. London: Radius. Zukin, Sharon 1995. The Culture of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Biographical note: Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University and Research Administrator of the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research (ICCCR) at the Universities of Manchester and Keele. Her monograph on Pakistani settlement and community formation in Britain is The Migration Process (Berg, 1990), and recent edited collections include Debating Cultural Hybridity and The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe, both co-edited with Tariq Modood (Zed Books, 1997), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, co-edited with Helene Basu (Routledge, 1998), and Women, Citizenship and Difference, co-edited with Nira Yuval-Davis (Zed Books, 1999). She is co-editor of a recent issue of the journal Diaspora on the topic of ‘The Materiality of Diaspora’. Her fieldwork has included research both in Britain and in Pakistan, and she currently has a Nuffield Small Grant to do research on ‘Women and the Changing Public Sphere in Botswana’. She is also co-editor of the ‘Postcolonial Encounters’ series published by Zed Books. Her forthcoming books are Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims (James Currey, 2001) and Charisma and Living Sainthood: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Hurst, in press). Address: School of Social Relations,Keele University, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG; e-mail: [email protected]

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