Trust as a coopetititive strategy in a global co-ethnic market: towards an empirically supported theory

Abstract

This article aims to push existing theory on immigrant business in a new direction, challenging the present mono ethnic, community delimited and static-structuralist approach with a focus on the processes of migrant business owners who simultaneously compete and cooperate with competitors, be it co-ethnic or cross-ethnic; in what are characterised as ‘coopetitive’ environments. This coopetitive environment has led to interaction, learning and innovation within the context of multicultural communities and business activities, combined with an understanding of the ways such units are embedded in contemporary processes of globalisation rather than living locally isolated ‘lives of their own’. Trust, identification-based trust, bounded solidarity and enforceable trust seem to be some of the empirically supported catalysts that on one hand act as an initiating factor and on the other hand, as a prohibitive factor; respectively enabling or hindering entrepreneurial migrants to achieve success in their ventures. In order to support this theoretical perspective, the article presents some empirical evidence from Denmark on immigrant businesses, combining longitudinal registry data with survey data.