Immigrant Entrepreneurs’ Identity Constructions and Endeavors: Considering Ethnicity and Gender

Abstract

In this study, we ask: How do immigrant men and women construct entrepreneurial identities at the intersection of ethnicity and gender, and how do these identity constructions interact with entrepreneurial endeavors? We conduct a qualitative study based on interviews with Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in Canada, and analyze their narratives. The findings show various configurations of ethnicity and gender themes in entrepreneurial identity narratives, and provide a nuanced understanding of how social categories of ethnicity and gender offer interpretive resources that immigrant entrepreneurs appropriate and emplot, resist and efface, or subvert and customize in narratives of entrepreneurial identity. Identity constructions show limits of agency as individuals may be constrained by embodiment of identity markers through which they might come to define themselves. Identity markers can also be interpreted expansively, and can change as entrepreneurial endeavors bring about variations that are then taken up in identity reconstructions. The findings also reveal the ambivalences experienced by immigrant entrepreneurs, and show that these ambivalences may persist over long periods of time. This study contributes to research through inclusion of both men and women immigrant entrepreneurs. Men have hitherto not been a major focus of analysis in gendered identity studies of immigrant entrepreneurs.