How to circumvent adversity? Refugee-entrepreneurs' resilience in the face of substantial and persistent adversity

Abstract

People face adverse events in a variety of forms. Some individuals are resilient to adverse events in that they are able to maintain positive functioning while others experience considerable disruption. In explaining heterogeneity in resilience, research has emphasized people's resource endowments and pre-adversity organizing prior to the adverse events as well as people's cognitive and behavioral responses to such events. Therefore, for most resilience studies, adversity is an event. Although it is critically important to understand resilience to these short-to mediumterm adverse events, there is a need to understand resilience over an extended period. In this regard, we focus on Palestine refugees who were born in refugee camps and as adults have known nothing other than being a refugee. When it comes to substantial and persistent adversity, entrepreneurial action likely plays a central role in resilience to such adversity. To explore these relationships, we conducted an extensive data-collection effort over 15 months on refugee entrepreneurs (in refugee camps and not in camps), including 110 interviews. We find the importance of direct, indirect, and recursive relationships among actions (i.e., entrepreneurial action and integration activities), multiple identities, and resilience outcomes under conditions of substantial and persistent adversity. Furthermore, we find important differences between refugee entrepreneurs who live in refugee camps and those who live outside these camps-differences in affiliation, language use, and social capital development-which enable those refugee entrepreneurs living outside the refugee camps to achieve resilience outcomes not accessible to those living inside the camps. Overall, this study makes a number of contributions to the entrepreneurship literature. First, research has investigated resilience in terms of resources, endowments, and capabilities before an adverse event. The implicit assumptions in this research are that capabilities matter and that adversity has a beginning and subsides over time. In this study, we focus on resilience outcomes in the context of refugees facing substantial adversity over a substantial period and extend the capability argument of resilience in the following ways: (1) the "social" capability for resilience, not as an endowment but created through activities that build a social basis for resilience outcomes, (2) social integration activities are initiated and facilitated by engaging in entrepreneurial action with non-similar others, and (3) resilience outcomes help individuals both engage in integration activities and build a social capability of resilience. Therefore, in the context of substantial and persistent adversity, refugee entrepreneurs need to act in order to build (rather than simply deploy) their social capability for resilience outcomes. Second, resilience has been explored as either a process or as an outcome. In this study, we find that resilience outcomes are both a consequence and an antecedent of entrepreneurial action-a mu...

Entrepreneurial Opportunities of Refugees in Germany, France, and Ireland: Multiple Embeddedness Framework

“…Several studies have revealed that refugees have a substantial propensity and desire for entrepreneurship (Alexandre et al 2019;Mawson and Kasem 2019;Obschonka et al 2018). Despite traumatic experiences in their home countries and adverse situations in new circumstances, in which refugees need to reconstruct their lives while overcoming various institutional barriers, refugees can demonstrate resilience through entrepreneurial activities (Dionigi 2016;Pieloch et al 2016;Shepherd et al 2020). In their entrepreneurial activities, refugees contribute to their host societies by offering not only economic but also various types of socio-political values.…”

“…Nevertheless, time does not necessarily solve all the issues caused by forcible displacement. Long-standing conflicts have caused several refugee populations, such as Palestinian and Tibetan refugees, to remain disconnected from their homelands over generations (Nayak et al 2019;Shepherd et al 2020;UNHCR 2016).…”

“…In several cases, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, the political situations of home countries eventually improve, which gives refugees the chance to return to their homelands or engage in transnational entrepreneurial activities with their home countries (Halilovich and Efendic 2019). In other cases, such as with Palestinian and Tibetan refugees, however, forcibly displaced migrants and their decedents remain stateless or in refugee status for generations, remaining disconnected from their home countries (Shepherd et al 2020). The situation here is comparable to the notion of disembeddedness and re-embeddedness (Giddens 1990;Haunschild 2004;Levi and Pellegrin-Rescia 1997).…”

“…In recent years, scholars have paid attention to the entrepreneurial potential of refugees (Betts et al 2014;Bizri 2017;Shepherd et al 2020;Wauters and Lambrecht 2008). Researchers have studied different aspects of refugee entrepreneurship, such as social capital (Bizri 2017;Mboko 2020;Yassine et al 2019), innovations created by refugees (Betts and Bloom 2015), entrepreneurial intention (Alexandre et al 2019;Mawson and Kasem 2019), barriers that refugees face in the host country (Alrawadieh et al 2018;Kachkar 2018;Wauters and Lambrecht 2008), support programs for refugee entrepreneurs (Harima et al 2019;Meister and Mauer 2019), social entrepreneurship for and by refugees (Freudenberg and Halberstadt 2018), and psychological factors such as resilience and hope (Freiling and Harima 2019;Shepherd et al 2020).…”

Is this Transnational Entrepreneurship? Five Cases in Which It Is Hard to Say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’

“…Similarly, diaspora entrepreneurship also focusses on the role of the home country but emphasizes the diasporic nature of entrepreneurs with migration backgrounds, such as homeland orientation and boundary-maintenance (Newland & Tanaka, 2010; Nkongolo-Bakenda & Chrysostome, 2013; Riddle & Brinkerhoff, 2011). Recently, scholars have initiated discussions on refugee entrepreneurship to explore forcibly displaced people as special entrepreneurial agents (Bizri, 2017; Harima & Freudenberg, 2019; Heilbrunn, Freiling, & Harima, 2019; Shepherd, Saade, & Wincent, 2019).…”