Non-Liability of “Foreignness”: Theorizing Immigrant Entrepreneurs in the Practice of Bricolage

Abstract

Applying Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we theorize the non- traditional resource mobilization of immigrant entrepreneurs within the adversarial social and institutional context of their country of residence. Through a rigorous analysis of eight cases of immigrant entrepreneurs and their South African-based enterprises, our findings suggest that the habitus of immigrant entrepreneurs is a unique resource in that it represents an internalization of both cognitive and adaptive dispositions. Cognitive dispositions refer to their home-based frameworks through which their cognitive disposition is formed to interpret existing resources in novel ways. Adaptive dispositions refer to their ability to adjust and be responsive to the pressures of a new environment due to biases that perceive foreigners to be a liability. We posit that the habitus of immigrant entrepreneurship is that which embodies and applies both dispositions within even discriminatory environments in order to mobilize or construct resources via non-traditional means through local social capital. We conceptually extend this formulation to depict the practice of bricolage by immigrant entrepreneurs in an adversarial host country social field.