Which of the following can be inferred from the passage……
TEXT C In contrast to traditional
analyses of minority business, the sociological analysis contends that minority
business ownership is a group-level phenomenon, in that it is largely dependent
upon socialgroup resources for its development. Specifically, this analysis
indicates that support networks play a critical role in starting and maintaining
minority business enterprises by providing owners with a range of assistance,
from the informal encouragement of family members and friends to dependable
sources of labor and clientele from the owner’s ethnic group. Such self-help
networks, which encourage and support ethnic minority entrepreneurs, consist of
"primary" institutions, those closest to the individual in shaping his behavior
and beliefs. They are characterized by the face-to-face association and
cooperation of persons united by ties of mutual concern. They form an
intermediate social level between the individual and larger "secondary"
institutions based on impersonal relationships. Primary institutions comprising
the support network include kinship, peer, and neighborhood or community
subgroups. A major function of self-help networks is financial
support. Most scholars agree that minority business owners have depended
primarily on family funds and ethnic community resources for in vestment
capital. Personal savings have been accumulated often through frugal living
habits that require sacrifices by the entire family and are thus a product of
long-term family financial behavior. Additional loans and gifts from relatives
forthcoming because of group obligation rather than narrow investment
calculation, have supplemented personal savings. Individual entrepreneurs do not
necessarily rely on their kin because they cannot obtain financial backing from
commercial resources. They may actually avoid banks because they assume that
commercial institutions either cannot comprehend the special needs of minority
enterprise or charge unreasonably high interest rates. Within
the larger ethinic community, roating credit associations have been used to
raise capital. These associations are informal clubs of friends and other
trusted members of the ethnic group who make regular contributions to a fund
that is given to each contributor in rotation. One author estimates that 40
percent of New York Chinatown firms established during 1900--1950 utilized such
associations as their initial source of capital. However, recent immigrants and
third or fourth generations of older groups now employ rotating credit
associations only occasionally to raise investment funds. Some groups like Black
Americans, found other means of financial support for their entrepreneurial
efforts. The first Black-operated banks were created in the late nineteenth
century as depositories for dues collected from fraternal or lodge groups, which
themselves had sprung from Black churches. Black banks made limited investments
in other Black enterprises. Irish immigrants in American cities organized many
building and loan associations to provide capital for home construction and
purchase. They in turn, provided work for many Irish home-building contractor
firms. Other ethnic and minority groups followed similar practices in founding
ethnic-directed financial institutions. Which of the following can be inferred from the passage about rotating credit associations
A．They were developed exclusively by Chinese immigrants. B．They accounted for a significant portion of the investment capital used by Chinese immigrants in New York in the early twentieth century. C．Third- generation members of an immigrant group who started businesses in the 1920’s would have been unlikely to rely on them. D．Recent immigrants still frequently turn to rotating credit associations instead of banks for investment capital.
