Immigrant entrepreneurship is an important socio-economic phenomenon today. Many studies have been developed in academic arenas of different disciplines. This paper aims to present a systematic review of academic literature related to immigrant entrepreneurship. In doing so, two questions are addressed: what has been done in international immigrant entrepreneurship research? and what are the trends that marked this phenomenon in research arenas? For this purpose, 45 articles published in academic journals are examined based on their (a) objectives, (b) theoretical frameworks and (c) methodologies. This paper provides evidence that most papers on immigrant entrepreneurship have focused on the reality of the USA, followed by Europe and Oceania. Furthermore, the review has identified the individual level of analysis and the deductive perspective as a common trend. There is a shortage in theory-building and qualitative studies in this field of knowledge. On the basis of the review, several gaps in the literat...

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Systematic review of immigrant entrepreneurship literature: previous findings and ways forward

http://www.seipa.edu.pl/s/p/artykuly/91/917/Immigrants%20ouperform%20locals%202013.pdf

Do young firms owned by recent immigrants outperform other young firms

The paper, by three geographers, including a noted U.S.-based senior specialist on China's urban and human realm, presents the first known academic study of the country's African migrants. The authors examine the emergence of a new African community (primarily traders from West Africa) in the Xiaobei urban district of Guangzhou City, arguing that Xiaobei is not only a space for transacting transnational business but also a place of sojourn where African migrants struggle to make a living without local integration or assimilation. As a "non-state" gateway for burgeoning economic linkages between China and Africa, Xiaobei's spontaneous place-making is strengthened by the aspiring efforts of local entrepreneurs, at the same time that this new transnational space is challenged by an invisible wall between Africans and local residents due to cultural and social differences. The paper notes the impacts of globalization, which appears to be adding a new dimension (ethnicity) to the pattern of residential segrega...

An African Enclave in China: The Making of a New Transnational Urban Space

This study contributes to the recent empirical literature on the performance of transnational immigrants' firms by investigating the effect of transnational ties on the firm's growth. In addition to the effect of the ties, the paper shows that home country's institutional and socio-economic characteristics and country-specific entrepreneurial factors have a crucial role in shaping the ties–performance relationship. The evidence from a sample of immigrant-owned firms in the Italian information and communications technology (ICT) sector in the period 2000–2010 confirmed the relevance of the proposed model and helped in understanding a potential channel of improvements in immigrant firms' performance through transnational ties. Our results show the limited relevance of a direct, or linear, impact of ties on the growth of sales in immigrant-run firms in the ICT sector, but support the crucial moderating role of home-country characteristics on the ties–performance relationship.

Transnational ties and performance of immigrant entrepreneurs: the role of home-country conditions

This paper draws on research with Vietnamese businesses in London which seeks to challenge some of the traditional views of transnational entrepreneurship. These have focused primarily on entrepreneurs embedded in both home and host countries and the need for regular travel between the two to manage the business. In contrast, this study suggests that transnational entrepreneurship today is more fluid than previous studies have suggested and is often characterised by multi-polar (rather than bipolar) links. Travel is also less relevant in the current age of ‘super-connectivity’. The research explores how Vietnamese entrepreneurs in London draw on various forms of transnational capital to further the development of their business, and develops a framework to measure the degree and extent of the transnational embeddedness and dependency of the business. The results suggest that transnational entrepreneurship amongst ethnic minority entrepreneurs today is better viewed as a continuum rather than a set of disc...

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Transnational Entrepreneurship amongst Vietnamese Businesses in London

This paper explores the structure and strategies of Polish migrant entrepreneurship in Berlin in the 1990s, drawing on statistical data, in-depth interviews and a comparison to Turkish entrepreneurship in Berlin. Existing research on the entrepreneurial activity of migrants and ethnic minorities tends to focus on processes observed solely within specific places in the country of immigration. I argue that further insights into the dynamics of ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’ are enabled by introducing the concept of transnational social space to the ‘mixed embeddedness’ perspective on ethnic business. This approach may explain the early orientation towards an open and transnational market among Polish entrepreneurs in comparison to the more local orientation of the ‘ethnic community’ in the first period of Turkish entrepreneurship. Four main entrepreneurial strategies of migrants from Poland can be observed: first, utilising a high degree of personal mobility and the differences in purchasing power between German...

Frauke Miera

Papers

Transnational Strategies of Polish Migrant Entrepreneurs in Trade and Small Business in Berlin