Being an entrepreneur: emergence and structuring of two immigrant entrepreneur groups

Abstract

The paper aims to analyse the mechanisms whereby immigrant entrepreneurship emerges and develops. In this connection, we argue that studies of immigrant entrepreneurship can benefit from deeper dialogue with economic sociology. With the idea of mixed embeddedness as our starting point, we advocate an analytical framework of immigrant entrepreneurship that traces the interconnections between the approaches of new economic sociology, political economy and neo-institutionalism from the perspective of mechanism-based explanation. This framework is then applied to a qualitative case study conducted on two micro-immigrant entrepreneur groups: the Italian ice-cream parlour owners and pizzeria owners in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, selected inasmuch as they represent polar forms of immigrant entrepreneurship. In this perspective, empirical findings show detailed differences between the two groups. For pizzeria owners, entrepreneurial transition is the result of a short-term project; the actors are part of small networks, do business in predominantly local markets and are mainly shaped by mimetic isomorphism. By contrast, the ice-cream parlour owners script more consistent entrepreneurial paths, belong to more highly articulated networks, show specific aspects of economic transnationalism and structure themselves by a predominately normative process.