Transnational Symbolic Capital and the Business Accelerator

Abstract

Situated within a context where high-skilled migration is increasingly being featured in policy debates around the world as part of strategies to foster innovation, this chapter examines the ways highly skilled entrepreneurs in tech traverse their entrepreneurship and their subsequent migration via business accelerators. Business accelerators, which are not just promoted as pre-seed funds in financial circles, but also by migration policy as sponsors of migrant innovation, play an important role in the lives of young migrant ventures. However, based on interviews with entrepreneurs that used policy-endorsed accelerators in the United Kingdom, this chapter emphasises that both finance and migration policy considerations are just tiny specks in a larger picture. This chapter shows the boundary-fluid lives entrepreneurs in tech lead, and puts forth that it is the symbolic capital that they amass through their active use of accelerators, that they then convert to economic value. Consequently, it is argued that discussions around social integration of migrants into ‘mainstream’ society need to be viewed with a new lens, as the symbolic capital thus accrued, is at a truly transnational level.

Citation

Noor, A. (2021), "Transnational Symbolic Capital and the Business Accelerator", Vershinina, N., Rodgers, P., Xheneti, M., Brzozowski, J. and Lassalle, P. (Ed.) Global Migration, Entrepreneurship and Society (Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research, Vol. 13), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 125-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2040-724620210000013007