Accounting knowledge as enacted entrepreneurial practice: A practitioner-informed conceptual perspective on Black Caribbean immigrant entrepreneurs in Brooklyn, New York

Black Caribbean immigrant entrepreneurship represents an important dimension of urban economic activity in the United States. In Brooklyn, New York, Caribbean entrepreneurial activity occurs within socially and culturally embedded commercial environments shaped by market competition, regulatory complexity, resource constraints, and community relationships. Although immigrant entrepreneurship scholarship has established the importance of social and institutional embeddedness, and small business accounting research demonstrates considerable variation in how entrepreneurs use formal and less formalized financial practices, comparatively limited attention has been given to how these bodies of scholarship intersect in explaining the enactment of accounting knowledge. This practitioner-informed conceptual paper addresses this intersection by advancing accounting knowledge as enacted entrepreneurial practice as a conceptual perspective for examining how financial understanding may become expressed through entrepreneurial judgments, decisions, routines, and actions. Rather than equating accounting knowledge exclusively with formal technical expertise or institutionalized accounting systems, the paper conceptualizes enactment as occurring across varying degrees of accounting formalization while maintaining the importance of formal accounting capabilities. Drawing upon scholarship on immigrant entrepreneurship, embeddedness, resource constraints, and small business accounting practice, the paper develops three emerging insights: accounting knowledge may be expressed behaviorally as well as technically; informality and accounting knowledge need not be conceptual opposites; and accounting-related knowledge may potentially develop and circulate through socially embedded entrepreneurial relationships. The paper provides a foundation for future empirical investigation of these relationships among Black Caribbean immigrant entrepreneurs in Brooklyn.