| Abstract: | This is an empirical study of language enclave effects on small business success. My central thesis is to explain how the English language proficiency of a small business owner whose firm is located within a language enclave influences the life span of his or her small business. I define a small business as a privately owned firm that employs twenty employees or less. The Small Business Administration (SBA) uses the same definition when determining the health of the small business economy in the United States. This paper is organized as follows. In section one, I discuss who the self-employed are, and what they do. I examine language enclaves and present their possible positive and negative attributes. At the end of this section I describe how my research expands on the previous work of language enclaves. In section two, I discuss the theoretical implications of operating a firm with a linguistically heterogeneous staff, servicing a linguistically heterogeneous market with personal goods and services, and functioning within a language enclave. Within section two, I list the hypothesis. In section three, I describe where and how the surveys were conducted and how the data was structured. In this section I provide a statistical representation of the language enclaves. In section four I explain hazard function analysis, the statistical procedures, and how I define the variables. In section five, I present my findings and analyze the results with a statistical representation of the firms and their proprietors. I summarize my conclusions in section six. |
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