Global Embeddedness: Situating Migrant Entrepreneurship within an Asymmetrical, Global Context

Abstract

Historically, approaches within the field of migrant entrepreneurship have almost exclusively focused on migration to nation-states in the Global North. Despite more-recent studies extending the scope to migrants’ home countries – and even third-country locations – they have nonetheless remained rooted in South–North migratory contexts and, subsequently, have been mainly theorised based on the concept of persistent power imbalances internationally. Indeed, studies of migrant entrepreneurship in reverse (North–South) migratory contexts have exposed a number of assumptions implicit within these approaches. What is needed, therefore, is a theoretical approach which can account for the global asymmetry hitherto overlooked in the field of migrant entrepreneurship. This paper aims to do exactly that, offering the concept of ‘global embeddedness’, which situates the phenomenon of migrant entrepreneurship within a wider, asymmetrical global environment and, in so doing, provides a way of accounting for variations in migrant entrepreneurship found outside of the Global North.

Keywords

• migrant entrepreneurship
• ethnic entrepreneurship
• transnational entrepreneurship
• mixed-embeddedness
• global-embeddedness