Immigrant entrepreneurship is defined as business establishment and ownership among immigrants who arrive to a new host country. Immigrant entrepreneurship has become an important theme due to the increasing rates of immigration to developed countries, and its impact on their economic development. However it is also discredited and qualified as low value-added, rarely innovative, restricted to the ethnic communities and with stagnating growth potential. Following this debate, a new research stream affirms that immigrants should not be treated as one entity. Thus attention is shifting towards groups of immigrant entrepreneurs that were previously neglected in the literature. One such group consists of the second generation children of immigrants. Work to date provides ample investigation about immigrant entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial process; however there is less research on similarities and differences in the entrepreneurial process experienced by first and second generation immigrant entrepreneurs. Despite some recent research on second generation immigrant entrepreneurs, this topic remains understudied. The objective of this study is to understand, from a multi-level perspective, how different generations of immigrant entrepreneurs experience the entrepreneurial process. Using a grounded theory approach and qualitative in-depth interviews, the findings indicate that first and second generation immigrant entrepreneurs experience the entrepreneurial process differently by facing different micro and macro level enablers and obstacles. They also recognize, evaluate and exploit opportunities differently. The extent to which they are embedded in specific environments affects their entrepreneurial experiences.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/31692 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | El Chababi, Maria |
| Contributors | Chreim, Samia, Freel, Mark |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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