West African Entrepreneur vs. African-American Entrepreneurs in Harlem NY

Faulkner and Literature

The idea of entrepreneurship seems to many of us intrinsically Western, bound up in all those ideas of Adam Smith's about how work redeems people as good (white) Christians and helps them to claim their proper role in the universe. (Which is not exactly what Smith originally said, which we will get to in a moment.) But in fact the spirit of entrepreneurialism is as universal as human society. Across the globe there are those who take on both the responsibility and the risk for starting or running a business - and do so with the belief (or at least the expectation) that they can make a profit by doing so. This paper examines the differences, and the continuities, between two groups of entrepreneurs, those working in west Africa and those working in Harlem.

While there are some distinct differences between these two subgroups, there are also overriding and important similarities as well. In both case the entrepreneur decides on what the product or service will be and assembles the needed requirements for getting this product or service to those who are willing to pay for it. This includes both labor and materials (which include the capital needed for start-up and initial maintenance costs). These are the attributes of entrepreneurial activity worldwide, so we should hardly be surprised to find them in New York and Africa.

However, even as both of these groups have to marshal resources and labor, there are key differences as well as Moss (1995) and Rauch (1996) suggest. The capital available to even poor African-Americans in Harlem is relatively much greater (with a very few exceptions) to the capital that is available to West Africans. However, African entrepreneurs may draw upon a wider labor pool, and may do so on a voluntary basis or at least a basis of deferred payment - an option that is generally not available to American entrepreneurs (although more so to those working within ethnically or racially defined enclaves than to others, as Lee [1998] argues).

West African entrepreneurs can draw upon family and fictive kinship ties to assemble the labor and the resources needed to start a business; these in-kind loans do not necessarily have to be paid back, and certainly do not have to be paid back in the same way a loan from a Western bank does. People in villages in West Africa and even in the larger cities are bound to each other in sets of intergenerational mutual obligations, requiring that people help out when they are called upon to do so even as they know that they can call upon others when they need to.

The extent to which people in a community are bound to each other by informal ties of obligation varies from one community to another, and New York is famous for having a very low measure of mutual obligation. However, Harlem is no small measure an exception to this atomization of modern life (although the continuing poverty of the are tends to break down some of the forms of social obligation that African-Americans have maintained from traditional African life as well as developed in the face of the challenges that life in American presents to minorities.)

The (Western) stereotype of the entrepreneur is a loner, an innovator who works impossibly long hours on his (or less often her) own and with nerves of steel risks everything time and again to come up in the end with a jackpot. However, this stereotype is not particularly useful in a traditional society, where ties of obligation are intergenerational, and where the overall level of poverty makes sharing what wealth one has even more of a moral obligation than it is in the United States.

In fact, if we look back to the ur-text of Westen entrepreneurialism, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, we see that even he was not arguing that the entrepreneur is not someone who goes it entirely alone, and certainly not someone who sacrifices family and friends to earn a few more dollars. That particularly mercenary vision of the entrepreneur (which is rejected by nearly everyone in both Harlem and West African entrepreneurial communities, at least according to our readings) arises after Smith had laid out the ground rules. It is a product of the Industrial Revolution and in many ways applies to the economic requirements of the first phases of industrialization, when high levels of capitalization and getting in on the ground-floor of a business were imperative.

Smith himself would no doubt have been appalled at many of the excesses that have been perpetuated in the name of entrepreneurship; the economic philosopher believed that humans are creatures driven by passions while at the same time governed by our ability to reason and (and this was an essential part of his model of how one could and should pursue business) by our capacity to sympathize with each other. The result of these differing human impulses is that we as individuals, as a species are engaged in conflicting activities most of the time - both competing with each for resources (including the resource of labor) while at the same time engaged in the process of creating social institutions and establishing and maintaining cultural behaviors that will channel our natural competitiveness into ways that promote rather than destroy the common good. As Smith wrote in his manual on the good and ill of the entrepreneurial spirit, these conflicting impulses lead us all as if "by an invisible hand" so that even without knowing it or intending it, we each act in ways to advance the interest of both ourselves and society at large.

This seems a very accurate description of what happens in both Harlem and West Africa.

Without constant work to create these structures in society that constrain our Hobbesian selfishness, we would destroy ourselves. Work, for Smith, is motivated both by the fact that we are driven to compete and driven to make amends for our competitiveness. As such, Smith sees human nature itself as the reason that people become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set the economic system into motion. For Smith, the world was not a battle of all against all, nor yet a struggle between contending classes. Rather, it was a steady line of evolutionary progress from the food collection of the hunters and gatherers to the pinnacle of laissez-faire industrialism and the establishment of strong civil governments that could protect private property.

The world has changed a great deal since Smith was writing, and in many ways his vision of how trade and commerce would work to be civilizing forces has proven to be wildly optimistic. But there are also key similarities between his model of business (written at the beginning of the rise of Modernism) and the kind of commerce that is practiced in the two communities that we are examining here (and which are both in essential ways at the other border of modernism, sliding into a postmodern, post-industrial society and economy).