An emerging African business quarter amid urban decline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe and assess the sustainability of an emergent West African business quarter in Manchester, UK. Comparisons are drawn with developments among other ethnic groups. The research is placed in the context of international literature on ethnic entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach The research is primarily qualitative, using semi‐structured interviews and conversational life histories with a sample of West African retail businesses and a comparative group of other local businesses. Some use is made of quantitative information from census and other public data sources. Findings New West African enterprises appear, over the last few years, to have stabilised the declining retail district of Moston Lane in north Manchester. These new businesses are however confined to few sectors: food stores, hair and beauty salons, cafes, Internet cafes and clothing shops. These developments may parallel the success of longer established retail quarters in Manchester and elsewhere. However, most of the businesses may not survive long, having provided a temporary living, and some entrepreneurial experience, for their owners. Research limitations/implications Limited sample size and short time frame make results exploratory rather than definitive. The research provides however a base for future investigations. Practical implications The businesses studied provide economic opportunities for some immigrants with limited labour market opportunities. Social implications Immigrants are helped to maintain the integrity of their culture through the purchase of appropriate goods and services. Originality/value This paper provides the first consideration of a specifically African retail quarter in Britain, adding an additional ethnicity to the roster of identifiable geographic business locations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".