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This chapter deals with labour conditions and discrimination of migrant workers in Italy, with a particular focus on the agricultural sector in two Southern Italian areas: Northern Basilicata and Western Sicily. The first part of the chapter describes the history of migration to Italy and the most relevant transformations occurred over the last years, as well as an overview of the relevant legislation on migration and racial discrimination at work. The second part, on the basis of two ethnographic studies realized by the two authors, analyses the complex intertwinement of structural and symbolic violence in determining the conditions of exploitation and discrimination of migrant seasonal labourers in the two areas. The study focuses on three topics: piecework payment; the ghettoization and segregation of seasonal labourers; the system of informal and illegal labour intermediation called caporalato. It is argued that that the main source of symbolic violence is represented by the brokers called caporali, who are usually of the same nationality of the labourers. If, on a certain extent, migrant workers perceive their ghettoization, discrimination and exploitation as ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’, this is due to the communitarian relationships built and manipulated by the caporali. On the contrary, the State and the local administrations seem to act exclusively as a source of structural violence. The national legislation on migration, as well as the lack of public policies concerning labour intermediation, transport and accommodation for seasonal labourers, appears as the main reason of the vulnerability of migrant workers in the considered areas.

In an extreme and intentional institutional void, African refugees in Israel are bricoleuring by building an entrepreneurship market next to an “open” detention camp. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how refugee entrepreneurs overcome institutional voids through bricolage in an illegal marketplace outside the detention camp.

In order to deal with the question of why and how people act entrepreneurial under extreme circumstances, the interpretive/social constructionist paradigm is applied in form of the multiple stories milieu case study pattern. Data were gathered via official reports, interviews and observations.

Outside the detention camp it is via bricolage that entrepreneurs address the economic detour in the intentional institutional void. At a place which is meant to make asylum seekers leave Israel by coining them “infiltrators” and by “making their lives miserable,” bricoleurs attend their own and the needs of fellow detainees providing goods and service and community space.

By contextualizing entrepreneurial practices, the paper contributes to the understanding of refugee entrepreneurship by demonstrating how refugees – within the pressure and constraints of context – initiate entrepreneurial activities. Theoretically the paper extends knowledge of minority entrepreneurs who are acting as bricoleurs, explaining how their entrepreneuring can be a kind of space creation process.