An Exploratory Analysis of the Largest Black-Owned U.S. Companies
分析了1975-1984年美国最大黑人企业的销售和员工数据，发现这些企业虽属成功但仍为小企业，旨在为政策制定者和研究者提供参考。
AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF THE LARGEST BLACK-OWNED U.S. COMPANIES In the past few decades, a number of black-owned business firms have become successful to the point of attaining a degree of national recognition. These firms and their owners have been written about in both black and general business magazines, have been included in lists of the largest minority businesses, and have been used as examples of the success possible under Capitalism. Any study of even the largest and most successful black-owned businesses, nevertheless, is a study of small business. In 1984, among the one hundred largest black-owned businesses in the United States, only two had sales of more than $100 million and all but eighteen had sales under $30 million. Similarly, only two had more than one thousand employees, and only seven had more than five hundred employees. By way of comparison, in 1984 the largest firm in the Fortune 500 listing had $88 billion in sales and the 500th firm had sales of $418 million. By the standards of mainstream business, the largest black-owned firms may not be mom-and-pop operations, but almost all would be considered small. During the last two decades, with the growth of public awareness of minority issues in general, black and minority small business has become a familiar object of public policy and the subject of many research studies. Almost all of the latter, however, have dealt with the typical minority firm, sized on the lower end of the small business spectrum. emphasis of most of this research has been on assistance programs for such firms and on comparisons between minority and white entrepreneurs. developing consensus is that most financial and management assistance programs are of value to minority clients, and that minority entrepreneurs tend to be quite similar to their mainstream counterparts in terms of ability and potential. Thus, while much more is known today than formerly about the very small, minority-owned company, there is a need to look more closely at the most successful (and often, therefore, the largest) minority firms, which have not been studied sufficiently to date. An examination of this second group of companies should allow the researcher to focus specifically on the nature of success in minority small business. purpose of this article is to analyze a portion of the available data relating to the largest black-owned businesses in the United States, to reach conclusions as to the level of progress and the current status of these successful black-owned firms, and to develop conclusions with regard to social policy. METHOD Because the ownership of even the largest minority-owned firms is often closely held, public information concerning such companies is much more difficult to obtain than for large mainstream firms. best long-term listing is The Top 100 Black Businesses, compiled annually since 1973 by Black Enterprise magazine. This is a list of firms, at least 51 percent black-owned and in the fields of manufacturing and industrial or consumer services, which had the largest sales volume during the previous year. For the purposes of this study, the latest available ten-year BE data, covering the period 1975 through 1984, have been selected. As suggested by this data base, the study is limited wholly to black-owned firms. While it would be useful to compare data for the largest black-owned firms with similar data for white-owned, or mainstream, companies, such a comparison is not possible at present, due to the lack of any truly comparable mainstream listing. mainstream companies appearing in the annual listings of various magazines are either a great deal larger than the BE100 firms, or have been chosen for some outstanding attribute other than sales volume (ROI, growth rate, etc.). ANALYSIS Current Status status of black-owned business in the United States today is best described as uncertain. …