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One decade after its introduction, the superdiversity concept introduced by Steven Vertovec has widely found echoes in migration research, but also in business studies, particularly those focusing on ethnic minority entrepreneurship (EME). In spite of conceptually embracing superdiversity in EME research, the multidimensionality of superdiversity in its original understanding appears to require further consideration. Dimensions currently overlooked in research at the nexus of superdiversity and ethnic minority entrepreneurship are: (1) ethnic but also religious and linguistic diversity of entrepreneurship, (2) entrepreneurial diversity regarding business-types and (3) incorporation of the characteristics of the city within its analytical unit. Based on an extensive site survey of ethnic businesses in Glasgow combining ethnographic assessment and available statistical data on the city districts, this paper reconceptualizes the entrepreneurial superdiversity to do justice to the on-going debates on superdiversity within migration research. In doing so, it proposes the Entrepreneurial Superdiversity Index (ESI), which is a viable method for approximating entrepreneurial superdiversity in cities. The ESI allows comparative analyses of entrepreneurial superdiversity within a specific city and potentially also between different cities internationally, which could be highly useful for policy-makers and planners alike. It also delivers grounds for developing a general index for superdiversity in further migration research.

The interplays of different types of proximities are crucial to the emergence of new industries, including entrepreneurial ecosystems as pillar of the competitive advantage in regions. Though proximities can be advantageous, negative aspects on the economic development have also been discussed, leading to the discussion of the so-called proximity paradox. To better understand the effective functioning of these proximities, it must be concretized which institutional actors play a role, and how their collaboration and thus their proximity constellations contribute to the regional development. Based on empirical evidence of Malta, this paper operationalizes the different proximities types and conceptually investigates the different proximities between institutional actors in building a new regional industry, i.e. the gaming industry. The case of the Maltese gaming industry illustrates how regions with limited size and resourcescarcity, thus high proximities between actors (also prevalent in city-states and peripheral regions), can still defy the odds of the liability of smallness and, thus the proximity paradox. Results of this in-depth study shows how collaborative endeavour of proximate institutional actors can contribute to developing an effective entrepreneurial environment and the emergence of a new regional industry.

Migrant entrepreneurship in times of transnational migration go beyond locally serving markets and increasingly operate transnationally. The mixed embeddedness by Kloosterman and Rath has become the main concept to analyze such migrants’ entrepreneurship as it accounts for the multiple embeddedness of entrepreneurs in the variety of social and institutional contexts at multiple levels. This concept, however, does not yet accommodate the transnational dimensions of migrant entrepreneurship, which is still rather nascent in entrepreneurship research. Transnationalism is multi-dimensional in its nature as pointed out by migration researchers as Vertovec, and transnational migrants’ embeddedness appears to go beyond the notion of being simply dually embedded in two locations but rather should be conceived as being in one larger transnational field—though such aspects are not conceptually accounted in the mixed embeddedness approach. Taking this as a starting point, we propose to analyze the conditions that allow migrant entrepreneurs to engage in transnational activities. Our proposed framework bases on empirical research with 36 Polish entrepreneurs in the EU labor market, by drawing their opportunities from different levels and contexts of transnationalism. Following the research question on which levels and dimensions of embeddedness in the transnational field contribute to transnational entrepreneurship, we develop a novel refined framework of mixed embeddedness to analyze transnational entrepreneurship. It clarifies the entrepreneurial context by analytically and systematically subdividing components across dimensions (political, social and economic), and rearranging institutional elements and structures in each dimension according to respective levels (macro, meso, and micro). Emphasizing the role of conditions at the meso-level, the novel analytical framework better incorporates the multi-dimensionality and multi-levelling of transnational entrepreneurial activities of migrants. This model can be used as a tool for future comparative analyses of migrant entrepreneurship in different transnational contexts, it also contributes to the concretization of the transnational nature of transnational migrant entrepreneurship.

Tokyo illustrates a particularly interesting case of differential inclusions of transnational migrants in urban spaces, as the novel turn in migration policy in coordination with urban economic development has induced the arrival and diversification of migrant populations into the city. With the recent historic opening of the country to lower-skilled labour migration as well as measures to (re-) attract the global economy, thus incentivising transnational corporate professionals to relocate to specific national economic zones within the city, Tokyo is in a new socio-spatial diversification process. With a non-ethno-focal lens on transnational migration and focusing on upper-class transnational corporate migrants, this article discusses diversification regarding the newer arrivals of migrants who are differently included in the urban spaces as compared to older generations of migrants. It delivers novel accounts of a diversifying transnational migrant groups’ socio-spatial patterns within Tokyo, which illustrate the dynamics of differential inclusions resulting from the superdiversification of urban societies. The article gives new insights into the socio-spatial diversification dynamics of transnational urban spaces in a long-neglected but highly topical Asian arrival city, and conceptually reflects such localised superdiversification of urban spaces on a global scale.

The geography or the spatiality of superdiversity has been only implicitly researched, primarily in ethnographic and sociolinguistic empirical studies on superdiversity. This chapter proposes a geographical conceptualization of superdiversity by analyzing sociospatial superdiversification as a process of bringing together the interconnected phenomena of the global increase of migration and the local transformation of urban spaces. By connecting the spatiality of superdiversity to the debates on the nexus of transnational migration and cities, particularly global cities, the chapter brings a broader contextualization of the diversification processes occurring in different cities on the globe. The approach of such multiscalar embeddedness of the city making and shaping processes demonstrates how the local urban transformation is connected to the global phenomenon of societal superdiversity. It calls for further analysis of the contexts of superdiversity at different scales and research on the diversifications occurring in different socioeconomic classes of transnational migration in urban contexts.

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