Joshua Phillips
PhD student
Location: Room 218, Geography Buildingemail: j.phillips@qmul.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Joshua Phillips is a human geographer with research interests in: entrepreneurship; hybrid economic-development geographies and inter-disciplinary geography research; migration; transnationalism; alternative finance and credit provision.
Current Research Projects:
Economic-Development Geographies of Migrant Entrepreneurship: The Case of London
Small business growth and entrepreneurship has been increasingly highlighted by UK policy makers as a vital engine of post-recessionary economic recovery. Yet the role of new migrant-owned businesses in this process remains poorly understood. This is a vital omission given the importance of entrepreneurship and self-employment to the livelihoods of a growing number of diverse migrants in the UK.
This doctoral research project focuses on entrepreneurship and business development amongst diverse new migrant groups in London. Here, business development paths will be linked to a range of factors - including dimensions of transnationalism, available forms-of-capital, migration trajectories, personal histories and aspirations, market conditions and contextual factors – to help explain the heterogeneous geographies of new migrant entrepreneurship.
Through this analysis, the project aims to re-think the concept of entrepreneurial ‘success’ or ‘failure’ beyond a narrowly conceived business model of profitability, and instead posit an interdisciplinary, spatially and temporally informed, ‘hybrid’ economic-development geography of migrant entrepreneurship.
This project is funded by a Queen Mary College Studentship and is being jointly supervised by Dr. Kavita Datta and Dr. Al James (Queen Mary, University of London).
Previous Research Projects:
Is Microfinance an Appropriate Solution to Financial Exclusion in Developed Countries?
In developing countries, microlending has become an important instrument for providing small businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. This research project examined the extent to which this success could be replicated in developed countries, to overcome the exclusion of a growing number of microentrepreneurs from necessary credit.
A focus on the Grameen Bank’s group-lending model illustrated the dangers of replicating development theory and methodology across space, without sufficient adaptations to make them appropriate in their new contexts. A further investigation of the Women’s Employment Enterprise and Training Unit’s ‘Full Circle’ microcredit programme in Norwich found enterprise groups to be effective peer-support structures for socially excluded female clients. However, peer-lending was found to have limited application in the UK, given its capacity to cover only the smallest start-up costs within an already constrained demand context. Instead, microfinance institutions in developed countries may have a greater impact on combating financial exclusion by focusing on larger loans for enterprise development, delivered through individual contracts.
This project constituted the dissertation element of a MPhil in Geographical Research at Cambridge University, and was supervised by Dr. Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge).
Qualifications:
Joshua has a BA (Hons) degree in Geography from Cambridge University (2004–2007), a MPhil in Geographical Research from Cambridge University (2008–2009), and is currently a Geography PhD student at Queen Mary University of London (2010–2013).