"The last 15 years have seen a significant increase in the participation of African Americans in the U.S. labor force and, as a result, a rapid growth in the number of self-employed Black businessmen and women relative to White Americans (Fairlie, 2004; Fairlie & Sundstrom, 1997). Noteworthy regarding the increase is that Black businesses in the U.S. struggled to perform, in comparison to majority-White businesses, in the increasingly competitive marketplace today. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the general understanding of how businesses' entrepreneurial orientation (EO)--a firm-level strategic orientation which captures an organization's strategy-making practices, managerial philosophies, and firm behaviors that are entrepreneurial in nature --impacts Black business performance. Although research has been studying majority firms for years and correlated EO as a strong predictor of firm performance, there is a widening gap in the literature assessing the performance measures of Black businesses. Data gathered from this study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by measuring the performance of Black and majority small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and by critically examining any disparities or commonalities that may exist individually, and between these two distinct organizations. New business start-ups (entries) into the marketplace have been very important to the nation's economic foundation and can be attributed to significant job growth. By measuring performance amongst Black SMEs, we can begin to learn significant information to help improve black businesses. Despite the increased growth of Black SMEs, Black business owners struggled to perform at high levels of peak performance and degrees of success, in comparison to majority SMEs. Important to the performance measures of Black entrepreneurs, Black firms experienced challenges when operating in turbulent business environments with increased competition, even though they tried relentlessly to enter the marketplace. Thus, Black SMEs fail at a considerably higher rate than other majority organizations and barriers to entrepreneurship for these groups remain. Census data indicate that the rates of entrepreneurial activity for Blacks lag significantly behind those for Whites (Strom, 2007). The study is designed to examine the constructs of entrepreneurial orientation, which is a firm's innovativeness, ability to be proactive, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy, and its impact on performance in a comparison of Black and majority SMEs. I also examined whether the constructs and their measurements can be used to identify literature that is useful and relevant to the needs and improvements important to high performance of Black SMEs."--Pages ii-iii.
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