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Injecting reality into the migrant entrepreneurship agenda
... Such thinking has inspired formation of a body of critical scholarship challenging dominant assumptions and giving voice to alternative subjectivities (Essers, Dey, Tedmanson, & Verduyn, 2017;Deirdre Tedmanson, Verduyn, Essers, & Gartner, 2012). For instance, among other things, these critical scholars have explored ethnic and indigenous entrepreneurship to expose the economic rationality implicit to Western entrepreneurial norms (e.g., Lyne, 2017;Deidre Tedmanson & Evans, 2017), and challenging ideals such as ideas of wholesome entrepreneurs (Williams, 2008;Wright, 2015) and the emancipation of digital entrepreneurialism (Wright, 2015), migrant entrepreneurship (e.g., Jones, Ram, & Villares, 2017) and female entrepreneurship (Alkhaled, Berglund, & Alkhaled-Studholme, 2018), revealing the workings of gender (Bruni, Gherardi, & Poggio, 2004) and power (Kenny & Scriver, 2012;March & Thomas, 2017). ...
Tourism enterprises play a vital role in tourism development. This has inspired scholarly and policy interest in the workings of tourism enterprises, particularly the small enterprises that account for the majority. The heterogeneity of small enterprises presents challenging terrain for scholars and policymakers concerned to understand and manage enterprise development and tourism development. Scholars have called for more
research to deepen understanding of tourism enterprises and tourism development. The question is how to
approach this complex terrain in research and practice.
Recent lines of research suggest that answers may lay in the vicissitudes of practice. Entrepreneurship
scholars have lately started to examine enterprises from the vantage of practice, the research concern shifting to the constructing action of enterprising. This vantage offers much promise to deepen understanding of tourism enterprises and tourism development. However, practice perspectives have rarely been used in studies of tourism enterprises and the link between enterprising practices and tourism development has not yet been made. Drawing inspiration from nascent practice perspectives lately emerging in entrepreneurship and tourism studies, this thesis takes up the practice modality of enterprising to explore the terrain of tourism enterprises and tourism development.
Using a multimethod qualitative approach, the thesis tours sites of enterprising action to offer another view of tourism enterprises and tourism development. Visiting the enterprising action of innovating, constructing, performing, intervening, and reflecting, the tour sheds light on the everyday action of enterprising to unfold an image of mundane tourism development. Orienting to the vicissitudes of enterprising practice, this
thesis provides another view of tourism enterprises and tourism development, opening new avenues for
research and practice.
Enterprising carries ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications for research. It urges for post-disciplinary research approaches characterised by theoretical and methodological diversity geared to producing practicable knowledge through close encounters with the vicissitudes of practice. Enterprising and mundane tourism development are travelling concepts with transformative potential – not conceptual destinations, but concepts to inspire further travel.
... Moreover, experts from the civil society initiatives do not appear to actively work on influencing migrants to enter more profitable market sectors, while recognizing that migrants largely operate in low-growth sectors (e.g., services and gastronomy) [102]. This reinforces the premise that self-categorisation in migrant integration could be (implicitly) driven by orientalist ideologies, where migrants from Muslim-majority backgrounds are regarded as inferior to the European, and therefore not expected to achieve success in areas where a European can (see [103]), such as high-growth entrepreneurial venturing. Also, it is an indicator of out-group homogeneity, seeing all (welfare-dependent) migrants as a single group of unlikely victors. ...
The economic integration of migrants has become increasingly prioritised by European governments. However, Europe’s colonial past and orientalist narratives have contributed to the inevitable othering of migrants, even in the minds of those with the best of intentions. Guided by the self-categorisation theory, we postulate that those involved in supporting migrants to integrate in European societies implicitly categorise them as an out-group, potentially leading to suboptimal integration outcomes and the (inadvertent) exclusion of the very migrants they attempt to integrate. A case study of migrant entrepreneurship support initiatives in Berlin is illustrated as a qualitative, empirical example, providing some evidence for those arguments. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners and suggestions for further research.
We observe the opportunity-production processes of aspiring refugee entrepreneurs in their host countries. Our process data from eighteen refugee entrepreneurs reveal heterogeneity in how entrepreneurs move across the opportunity-production stages of conceptualization, objectifica-tion, and enactment. We identify four patterns, which are characterized by differences in iteration , order, and continuity. By theorizing on process characteristics and connecting these characteristics to embeddedness and temporality, we provide insights into how cognitive alignment and use of networks from home countries versus host countries help expand the explanatory scope of the opportunity-production theory from ordinary entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs who are subject to disruption in their lives.
Despite increased academic attention paid to migration flows in Europe, the gendered nature of transnational migrant entrepreneurial journeys within the context of a family business remains under‐researched. We address this gap by investigating how transnational spaces allow women to challenge dominant ideas about their roles, and to claim legitimacy by opening branches of their family business abroad. With extensive longitudinal evidence collected over a seven‐year period, we showcase four biographical narratives of women operating transnational family businesses in the UK that had originated in Eastern Europe. Adopting this novel longitudinal approach, we provide insights into how these transnational migrant women entrepreneurs exercise individual agency to overcome structural constraints by developing strategies that prioritize their own business aspirations without fully sacrificing their family ties.
Drawing on the life histories of migrant women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and Spain, this article explores the influence of transnational trajectories on their social positions and business strategies. A translocational positional approach enables us to research the transnational strategies of women entrepreneurs more effectively in addition to examining the changes in social positions and gendered identities between the country of origin and the country of destination. This approach contributes to scholarship on ‘context’ by offering a transnational gendered dimension in relation to the effects of social, spatial and institutional factors. Our findings demonstrate how female migrant entrepreneurs redefine their social status in different contexts by establishing a business and challenge, contest or comply with gender relations in their transnational entrepreneurial journeys.
Despite increased academic attention paid to the influx of migrants from Eastern Europe to the UK, the gendered nature of migrant entrepreneurial journeys within the family business context remains under-researched. We aim to address this gap by investigating how transnational spaces enable women to challenge the dominant ideas about their roles, and claim legitimacy by developing branches of the family business abroad. Reporting extensive longitudinal evidence collected over a six year period, we showcase four biographical narrations of women operating transnational family businesses in the UK, which originated in Eastern Europe. Adopting this novel longitudinal approach, we provide insights into how the pursuit of their entrepreneurial ambitions in a new host environment, enables these transnational migrant women business owners to develop strategies which prioritize their own business aspirations without fully sacrificing their family ties and embedded cultural traditions of their homeland.
This article investigates the factors that influenced the entrepreneurial start-up businesses among Chinese immigrants who had been granted residency under three different immigration policies in Australia. These immigrant groups differed in their resources and experienced different market conditions which led to different opportunity structures and subsequent choices of entrepreneurial activities. The mixed embeddedness model was identified as being useful for analysing the factors contributing to the business start-ups of these Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs. The research contributes to the existing literature by developing a dynamic analysis of the interaction of personal resources and economic conditions in the pursuit of business ventures. Also, the intersectionality of gender, race and class is analysed in relation to the mixed embeddedness model. Importantly, this research emphasises the need to look beyond either broad cultural factors or single factors in attempting to analyse the pathways selected by immigrant entrepreneurs.
This article examines the patch-working strategies of migrant entrepreneurs as a form of social agency. ‘Patch-working’ - the reliance on supplementary forms of income to support business activity – is often seen as a means of cushioning the financial vulnerability of small firms. However, the mechanisms and forms that patch-working takes tend to be overlooked. Evidence from 42 west Midlands’ firms shows that, despite the highly constrained operating environment, the exercise of social agency can help to cushion against disadvantage and to rework their current conditions through patch-working. This allows for business growth, and even transformational growth in some cases, rather than sheer survival. Even so, our findings show that the agency of migrant entrepreneurs brings about only minor improvements in revenue and is certainly not capable of fundamentally changing either the nature of the sector or the structure of the labour market in which they are embedded.
br/>This article analyses how the gendered and classed positions of migrant women explain the meanings of becoming an entrepreneur and the role of their spouses in their occupational trajectories. Using a translocational positionality approach, the article challenges the claim that women escape patriarchal domination by establishing their own businesses. The narratives of 35 Latin American women entrepreneurs in Spain reveal that becoming an entrepreneur is conditioned by class-based ideas of masculinity and femininity. I argue that middle-class Latin American immigrant women become entrepreneurs to promote their spouse’s career advancement while conforming to class-based norms of femininity. In contrast, lower class Latin American women view the business as a space of autonomy and occupational upward mobility that nevertheless also complies with working-class definitions of femininity. The policy implications of these findings relate to making class aspirations central to the support of labour market integration and empowerment of migrant women.<br/
Restricted opportunities for economic advance led to the development of small-scale entrepreneurial activity in the form of shopkeeping. At one extreme, groups such as the Chinese and Jews are identified with commercial success and social mobility, while at the other pole, the under-development of black business is associated with continuing social and economic disadvantage. Paradoxically, the business 'success' of Asians in Britain now has to lie in shielding themselves from economic equality. An economically segregated commercial sector is able to serve a socially segregated population, but this precludes integration or desegregation in either sphere. It is likely, however, that the role of the Asian shopkeeper varies among the different ethnic subgroups. There is, for example, a considerable difference between Punjabi Muslims from Pakistan and Gujerati Hindus from East Africa. The role adopted by Asian shopkeepers in Bradford may have more to do with the Punjabi peasant origin of the bulk of the Asian immigrant population there than with a universal Asian attempt to avoid catering for the native British population. East African Asians in other cities seem economically more integrated into the total market, rather than restricted to the small scale and to their ethnic group. -from Editorsentrepreneurial activity shopkeeping ethnic groups UK