O “Problema da Imersão” nos Estudos do Empreendedorismo: Uma Proposição Teórica

Abstract

RESUMO Objetivo o artigo procura investigar o conceito de imersão e sua influência aos estudos do empreendedorismo. Metodologia o trabalho, um ensaio teórico, apropria-se da literatura sobre embeddedness de Granovetter, e associa-a a proposições clássicas da sociologia econômica de Karl Polanyi. Reflexões relacionadas às estruturas de reciprocidade e redistribuição são, aí, enfatizadas. Resultados evidências sugerem que o conceito de imersão de Granovetter acaba por não romper com a lógica utilitarista que caracteriza os estudos subsocializados dos quais critica. O mesmo ocorre quando o conceito é empregado por pesquisadores do empreendedorismo. Embora implícita à origem da associação entre “imersão e empreendedorismo” se encontre a noção do empreendedor enquanto criador de redes, isto é, como agente influenciado pelos recursos derivados das estruturas nas quais se encontram imersos, estudiosos da área acabam por endossar o pressuposto do ator interessado. Conclusões o artigo chama a atenção dos pesquisadores do empreendedorismo para a repercussão, ainda pouco explorada, de outros tipos de imersão social (Reciprocidade e Redistribuição). Ao mesmo tempo, sugere por meio da “imersão total” a criação de novo modelo analítico, eventualmente capaz de ampliar as reflexões sobre as influências da imersão em diferentes estruturas à trajetória empreendedora. Finaliza com novas proposições, com destaque para abordagens e sugestões de investigações ainda hoje inexploradas. Classificação JEL: L26, A2, L21.

In Search of an Integrative Framework for Female Immigrant Entrepreneurship

“…Embeddedness is a theoretical concept originally devised by Polanyi (2018) to understand how social interactions impact behavior and institutions. However, Granovetter (1985) was responsible for introducing it to entrepreneurship scholarship (Corrêa et al, 2020). Granovetter (1985) saw the entrepreneur as an individual who connects and interacts with different groups in their social networks.…”

“…Langevang et al, 2015;Yousafzai et al, 2015), these could not avoid a predominantly dualist perspective that may only capture women's entrepreneurial processes through their enablers and deterrents (Chreim et al, 2018). According to Corrêa et al (2020), this is not an issue exclusive to women's entrepreneurship studies since it is grounded in the fact that reciprocity and redistribution mechanisms within social relations have been poorly explored in the broad entrepreneurship literature, one thing an integration between ME and Neo-IT is meant to address. Corrêa et al (2020) have commented that a detailed look at these repercussions of social embeddedness is essential to solving Granovetter's (1985) famous 'problem of embeddedness,' which tried to avoid a deterministic view of individual behavior but kept on overlooking social dimensions present in an individual's relationship with their strong and weak ties because Granovetter (1985) ended up privileging economic structures as much as his contemporary economic scholars did (Corrêa et al, 2020)-a trend that has perpetuated in ME despite the inclusion of spatial and relational embeddedness in the model.…”

“…In our theoretical triangulation between ME and Neo-IT, we argue reciprocity refers to how close ties establish similar patterns of behavior (Corrêa et al, 2020), i.e., the entrepreneur tries to mimic business strategies seen elsewhere in the organizational field s/he operates, recurring to their personal relations to shape their behavior in the enterprise setting. Therefore, in our model, we align ME's concept of reciprocity to Neo-IT's isomorphism.…”

“…Despite the existing knowledge, migration entrepreneurship theories are not as consolidated as other branches of international entrepreneurship, especially regarding intersectional issues such as gender (Dabić et al, 2020). Therefore, we adopt a multi-theoretical lens to deepen the understanding of women's entrepreneurial practices (see Chreim et al, 2018), following the argument of Corrêa et al (2020) that the broad entrepreneurship scholarly is yet to devise a model to solve Granovetter's (1985) embeddedness' inconsistencies. Our contribution lies in recognizing that these inconsistencies stem from a lack of synergy between Institutional Theory and Mixed Embeddedness (ME), as they are complementary in several aspects concerning organizational or meso-level categories of interest to entrepreneurship scholarship (Langevang et al, 2015;Solano, 2020;Wang & Warn, 2018;Yousafzai et al, 2015).…”

The social structures of entrepreneurial embeddedness: the influence of market, reciprocity and redistribution

“…Several authors have highlighted the limitations of the embeddedness metaphor. One criticism addresses Granovetter's (1985Granovetter's ( , 2018 neglect, and partly of those scholars after him, concerning the relationship between entrepreneurship, for instance, and the social structures of reciprocity and redistribution (Corrêa et al, 2020;Lajqi and Krasniqi, 2017;McKeever et al, 2014). Such structures were central to Polanyi (2018).…”