Who Do You Take Me For? How Ethnicity Inferences Shape Entrepreneurs’ Business Naming Decisions

Join us for an insightful research seminar exploring how ethnic identity shapes entrepreneurial decisions. Professor Joel Gehman will present fascinating findings on how founders strategically navigate business naming decisions based on their surnames' perceived "foreignness." Drawing from a comprehensive dataset of over 2.3 million UK business founders, this research challenges traditional views of eponymy (naming a business after its founder) and reveals how societal biases influence fundamental entrepreneurial choices.

Presenter: Professor Joel Gehman

Abstract

Eponymy, the practice of naming a firm after its founder, is widely heralded as a signal of firm quality—and has been connected to many positive outcomes like higher profitability and better debt terms. However, we introduce an underappreciated consideration in the eponymy decision: the potential for audience inferences about a founder's ethnicity. Going beyond extant views of eponymy as a quality signal, we explore how the founder's choice to eponymize their organization is influenced by the "foreignness" of their surname—the extent to which audiences in a focal country might associate the name with ethnicities linked to non-domestic nationalities. We theorize that surname foreignness leads founders to avoid eponymy to mitigate the role of ethnicity inferences related to the organization. We suggest that this name-withholding pattern will be stronger for more common surnames, in communities with strong nationalist sentiment, and in eponymy-prevalent industries. We find support for these ideas using administrative data from the United Kingdom, capturing over 2.3 million founders of newly incorporated businesses from 2016 to 2019. The results hold when accounting for true nationality, organizational quality, and endogeneity concerns. The findings speak to the nuanced, culturally situated strategies by which entrepreneurs navigate potential barriers to success.

This seminar will be particularly valuable for scholars and practitioners interested in:

• Entrepreneurship and organisational strategy
• Immigration and ethnic entrepreneurship
• Business culture and discrimination
• Market signalling and firm identity

Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP by registering. 

Please contact Assoc Prof Sumati Ahuja at Sumati.Ahuja@uts.edu.au for your questions related to this event.