Beyond the Bootstrap: Social and Cultural Capital in Hispanic Entrepreneurship

Hispanic-owned businesses represent the fastest-growing entrepreneurial segment in the United States, yet they face a persistent structural paradox where high business formation volume rarely translates into scalable ventures or significant generational wealth. This qualitative study investigates the systemic and individual factors hindering the growth of these firms by exploring how founders strategically convert social and cultural capital to navigate the minority discount. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of capital, the research utilizes 39 semi-structured interviews with a diverse cohort spanning high-growth sectors including software development, energy technology, fintech, and logistics. This approach achieves a comprehensive view of the innovation habitus, which I define as the internalized professional dispositions and cultural frameworks that dictate how an individual recognizes and pursues opportunities within the technology field, essentially serving as the cognitive map used to navigate elite professional spaces. The findings reveal that resource conversion operates through a sequential dependency of capital, indicating that assets must be activated in a specific order. Within this sequence, economic capital acts as the Igniter for activation energy, cultural capital serves as the Translator for institutional legibility, and social capital functions as the Multiplier for scaling. I identify how successful founders utilize data-driven validation as an algorithmic bypass to overcome human bias in lending and investment, using objective metrics as a social proxy for trust. Ultimately, I introduce the Beyond the Bootstrap Model. This framework shifts the community narrative from necessity-based entrepreneurship toward generational correction. A central discovery of this research suggests that Hispanic innovators are uniquely poised for collective growth, viewing individual success as a mechanism for stewardship. By transitioning from an identity rooted in physical labor toward a vocational standard focused on scalable intellectual assets, founders achieve the autonomy necessary to sponsor the next generation. This model provides actionable recommendations to dismantle the barriers to technical scalability, inviting investors and policymakers to unlock the dormant economic potential of a community that already represents the equivalent of the fifth-largest economy in the world and is primed to lead and reinvest in the future of American innovation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctorate of Business Administration

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Houston

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Arvide, Alfredo 1984-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bailey, Esther E.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Khumawala, Saleha
• Madera, Juan M.
• Horner, Amy C.

• Minority Entrepreneurship
• Technology Innovation Sector
• Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
• Hispanic Entrepreneurship
• Latino Business Owners

Language dc:language.iso

English

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10657/21467

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uh-ir.tdl.org:10657/21467