Contextual and Family Determinants of Immigrant Women’s Self-Employment

Abstract

While a growing body of literature addresses the experience of migrant women’s involvement in self-employment, this work has focused on relatively few groups and has emphasized gender to the neglect of other contextual factors, such as family, class and ethnic resources, structures of opportunity and the nature of migrants’ relations with networks in countries of origin and settlement. In this article, I draw on multi-sited ethnography to explore Vietnamese, Russian-speaking Jewish, and Israeli women immigrants’ patterns of self-employment. Results suggest that contrary to being an end in itself, in most cases self-employment is simply a strategy that immigrant women engage in to obtain income while coping with an array of opportunities, impediments, and obligations framed by the structure of opportunities and disadvantages as well as transnational concerns.

From Center to Periphery and Back Again: A Systematic Literature Review of Refugee Entrepreneurship

“…Table 2 is a first grouping of literature that examines refugee entrepreneurs who entered their host countries, mainly up to the mid-1990s: studies notably focused on Jews who fled persecution as well as populations from the former Soviet Union, who then took up entrepreneurship especially across North America. Collectively, these studies echo the political shifts that occurred in the light of WWI and WWII and overall, this group of studies establishes the very origins of refugee entrepreneurship research, prevailed by the work of Gold [32,[66][67][68][69][70]. Table 3 details studies undertaken from the late-1990s, which concern refugee entrepreneurs who set up businesses in developed countries.…”

“…The cross-citation analysis highlights a limited mutual acknowledgement of and engagement between authors publishing on refugee entrepreneurship, even from within the same outlets (i.e., similar journal). Despite a number of sources that remain uncited due to their recent print date, Gold's [32,[66][67][68][69][70] as well as Wauters' and Lambrecht's [25,71,72] voices have been endorsed as foundational, altogether presenting studies of refugees in developed CORs.…”

“…This leads us to infer that refugee entrepreneurship has been stifled as a potential consequence of its peripherality, what Baker, Aldrich and Liou [128] have identified as a "thwarting of assumptions". Continuity in empirical work is low, as only a few authors have produced more than one contribution in relation to their examined populations (i.e., Gold [32,[66][67][68][69][70], Crush and colleagues [108,109], Kachkar and colleagues [83,84], as well as Wauters and Lambrecht [25,71,72]). Moreover, since central-peripheral publications recognizably encompass an important body in the field of migration studies, they contribute to maintaining refugee entrepreneurs as subjects of social studies rather than as agents of change in economies and entrepreneurship.…”

“…The majority that deal with refugee entrepreneurship in developed CORs (see Tables 2 and 3 for waves 1 and 2) lean upon theories from the field of migrant/immigration studies such as ethnic entrepreneurship and social networks, ethnic enclaves, diaspora theories, mixed embeddedness, and disadvantage theory (e.g., [25,[32][33][34][66][67][68][69][70]92,93,97,98,104,114,115,119,126]. Only three-and recent-contributions consider such theories in developing COR contexts: Raijman and Barak-Bianco [81], in their study of refugees from Africa to Israel, using a mixed embeddedness approach; Suter [112] who draws upon transnationalism and social networks to analyze refugee entrepreneurship in Turkey; and, Bizri [26] who draws upon social capital theory, in her case study examination from Lebanon.…”

“…Noted are the differences in macro-environmental circumstances (e.g., legal frameworks), including country-specific institutional arrangements as well as socio-political contexts and perceptions within CORs. For instance, Abdel Jabbar and Ibrahim Zaza [82], Gold [32,[67][68][69][70], LaTowsky and Grierson [91], Miyares [114], Sheridan [96], Singh [86], Tömöry [97] and van Kooy [106] have demonstrated the positive function of approaching refugees as beneficiaries of, e.g., specialized social and governmental programs, including the right to self-employment opportunities and microfinance [83,84,123].…”