Opportunity-production processes of aspiring refugee entrepreneurs
Research Paper Title:
“Unfolding refugee entrepreneurs' opportunity-production process — Patterns and embeddedness”
Authors:
Yi Dragon Jiang (ESCP Business School)
Caroline Straub (Bern University of Applied Sciences)
Kim Klyver (University of Southern Denmark)
René Mauer (ESCP Business School)
Overview:
Unlike other entrepreneurs, refugee entrepreneurs have experienced trauma in their home countries from wars. These entrepreneurs enter an opportunity-production process in which their cognitive abilities are impaired by trauma, and social networks are fractured by discontinuity from relocations. In this article, the authors aim to understand how entrepreneurs who have experienced disruptive life events still thrive in producing opportunities once they arrive in a host country. Through observing 18 refugees over three years, the authors discover that entrepreneurs follow different sequences in their activities of producing opportunities. These analyses identify four patterns refugees use to navigate the opportunity-production process: (1) Stuck in conceptualization, (2) Focus and low iteration, (3) Jump ahead and iterate back and (4) Enacting after early iteration. The researchers find that variation in the four patterns is explained by the degree to which the entrepreneurs are embedded in the cultural norms and values in both their home countries and their host countries; and that the dynamics of embeddedness in relation to cognitive alignment and the use of a network lead to the different patterns.
Results:
The authors observe the opportunity-production processes of aspiring refugee entrepreneurs in their host countries. The process data from eighteen refugee entrepreneurs reveal heterogeneity in how entrepreneurs move across the opportunity-production stages of conceptualization, objectification, and enactment. The authors identify four patterns, which are characterized by differences in iteration, order, and continuity.
Conclusion:
By theorizing on process characteristics and connecting these characteristics to embeddedness and temporality, the authors 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.