Abstract
Immigrants perform better in import/export industries than generally in independent business. The usual explanation addresses their overseas social networks. Extensive network connections abroad enable immigrants to reduce the daunting transaction costs that otherwise bedevil SMEs in international trade. Accepting that prevailing view, this research obtains evidence regarding the actual social network ties that Iranian immigrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles had with trading partners abroad. However, instead of looking at connections between the Iranians and their homeland, we examined instead their social connections with other locations in the Iranian international diaspora. Although preliminary and sketchy, this evidence tends to confirm the importance of personal social contacts abroad, but it also shows that Iranian traders still reported many collection problems overseas and, as a result, had undertaken legal strategies of self-protection.
This chapter is reprinted with permission from Inderscience Publisher. Initially published in Int. J. of Business and Globalisation (Vol. 16, No. 3, 2016, pp. 304–313).
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Shayegheh Ashourizadeh, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Entrepreneurship at the University of Tehran for assistance in locating Iranian trade data.
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Light, I., Shahlapour, P. (2017). Transnational Iranian Entrepreneurs in the Import/Export Industry of Los Angeles. In: Rezaei, S., Dana, LP., Ramadani, V. (eds) Iranian Entrepreneurship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50639-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50639-5_11
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