Breaking Boundaries: Exploring the Process of Intersective Market Activity of Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the Context of High Economic Inequality

Journal of Management Studies · 2018 · Volume 55 · Issue 3

Abstract

We explore immigrant entrepreneurship using structuration theory to understand how migrant-led venture creation conducts socially-intersective market activity in the host country of high economic inequality and social exclusion. Applying Gidden's structuration theory to immigrant entrepreneurship (1994), we unravel the co-evolutionary process of both the entrepreneurial agent and the social structure of the host country via three phases of venture creation. We collected and examined original and longitudinal empirical data of eight South African-based immigrant entrepreneurs using a process-oriented theory-building approach. Our findings unveil a process by which home and host institutions shape immigrant entrepreneurial agency to identify non-ethnic business opportunities and to form relationships across diverse actors that counter existing norms of intergroup segregation and hostility. The process illustrates how an immigrant's social orientation to his/her host country's structure changes over time, and symbiotically, how the immigrant entrepreneur's actions – which break socially constructed boundaries – also change the social structure.

Keywords

economic inequality, immigrant entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship, markets, social norms, structuration theory

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