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This study investigates the differential likelihood of being an entrepreneur among immigrants to and natives of a country. Using a mixed embeddedness perspective, the authors outline how economic, sociocultural, and institutional embeddedness influence the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity exhibited by immigrant and native residents.

The tests of the hypotheses rely on a multilevel cross-country research design that uses secondary data from different sources.

Compared with their native counterparts, immigrants are more likely to start and run their own businesses, and an array of environmental factors influences this likelihood. The level of economic development and equality laws increase it; the abundance of market opportunities in an economy, entrepreneurship culture and cultural collectivism diminish it.

The findings provide policy makers and stakeholders with valuable insights into pertinent environmental factors that determine the differential propensities of immigrant and native residents to become entrepreneurs.

This study provides an expanded understanding of the connection between being an immigrant and entrepreneurial activity, by explicating the influences of country-level conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how entrepreneurship opportunity formation amongst immigrants has been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, given that environmental changes and irregularity can contribute to entrepreneurship opportunity formation in the immigrant set-up.

The study employed a comparative narrative analysis of literature relating to entrepreneurship opportunity formation, immigrant entrepreneurship, environmental change (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic) and demand expansion (e.g. market extension resulting from environmental changes) and primary dataset from 11 semi-structured interviews.

The triangulation of the literature from these diverse topics leads to the conclusion that environmental changes and irregularity creates demand expansion that can drive entrepreneurship in any climate.

The limitation to the present study is the inability to use more than 11 primary dataset for this study, so future research on this topic should ensure the use of more primary dataset to validate the literature review.

This article contributes to existing knowledge by suggesting that irregular events within the environment (not stable economic growth alone) can positively influence entrepreneurship opportunity formation amongst immigrants.

This study explores how the family influences the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) process in immigrant businesses.

The paper draws on inductive multiple-case studies using 34 in-depth interviews. This paper relies on three cases of immigrant entrepreneurs originating from Mexico and Colombia that established firms in Sweden.

The results suggest that EO development trajectories vary in the presence of family roles (i.e. inspirers, backers and partners), resulting in the immigrant family business configurations of family-role-influenced proactiveness, risk-taking and innovation.

The immigrant family configurations drive three EO-enabling scenarios: (1) home-country framing, (2) family backing and (3) transnational translating. Immigrant family dynamics facilitate the development of EO over time through reciprocal interaction processes across contexts. This study indicates that, through family dynamics, EO develops as mutually interactive processes between the immigrant entrepreneur's family in the home and host countries.

This study is devoted to the empirical assessment of the macro‐level impact of social capital on immigrant entrepreneurship (the general levels of immigrant entrepreneurship, as well as high‐value added immigrant entrepreneurship).

The paper applies multiple regression analysis to the data on immigrant entrepreneurship and high‐value added immigrant entrepreneurship provided by OECD. The measures of the independent variables (the components of social capital) are based on World Value Survey.

The results reveal that social capital does play a significant role in high‐value added immigrant entrepreneurship in particular and immigrant entrepreneurship in general. With strong statistical significance, three social capital factors – networking, interpersonal trust, and institutional trust – provide an explanation for variations in immigrant entrepreneurship across countries.

Although the literature has long pointed out the importance of social capital as a determinant of economic activity, entrepreneurship researchers have focused much attention on the impact of personal, economic, and politico‐administrative factors while leaving social capital factors largely unexamined. Thus, study offers a systematic analysis of the effects of social capital on immigrant entrepreneurship and high‐value added immigrant entrepreneurship at a macro level and discusses policy‐making implications.

This paper aims to address the rural and gender gaps in the immigrant entrepreneurship literature by exploring the start-up stories of 18 female immigrants who currently run a business in northernmost Norway.

The paper is based on a qualitative fieldwork including business visits and in-depth interviews. The transcripts from the interviews were analysed using a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach.

Four modes of entry to entrepreneurship were identified: entrepreneurship as a way out of unemployment; entrepreneurship as a means to avoid underemployment, entrepreneurship as a means to live in a region of perceived attraction; and entrepreneurship as a preferred choice for women in satisfactory wage labour. In addition, the paper reveals the importance of family support and of spatial embeddedness among immigrant entrepreneurs living in a rural context.

This study notes that the modes of entry to rural immigrant entrepreneurship are diverse, but that they are often partly related to the pursuit of an initial feeling of belonging in the new region of settlement. Hence, developing the knowledge of how to not only attract but also retain and increase the feeling of local belonging of immigrants may be important for many rural regions in the Western world. This is because rural immigrants not only represent a much needed in-flow of younger people in a typically decreasing and ageing population but also entail cultural variation and job creation, thus contributing to place development.

The paper argues for the importance of considering immigrant entrepreneurs as significant actors of rural development.

While immigrant entrepreneurship has emerged as an important field of study, it has been criticised for focusing predominantly on men and for neglecting contextual variations in the analysis. The rural context especially has been largely omitted. By focusing on female immigrants having established a business in a rural context, the paper adds to the literature, firstly, by highlighting the experiences of female immigrant entrepreneurs. Secondly, it reveals that rural immigrant entrepreneurship cannot be conceived in terms of “ethnic resources” or “enclave economy” that are often central explanatory dimensions in megacity studies. Thirdly, it argues for the importance of considering both the spatial as well as the family contexts in the author’s theoretical conceptualizations of the (immigrant) entrepreneurial start-up phase.

This paper examines how the institutional distance between immigrants' country of residence and country of origin, as well as the regulative and normative aspects of institutions in immigrants' country of residence, social context variables and individual psycho-behavioural factors, condition immigrants' entrepreneurial motivation (i.e. mainly by necessity, by a combination of necessity and opportunity, or mainly by opportunity), which is in contrast to the previous literature on immigrant entrepreneurship that mainly focuses on micro-level factors.

By using hierarchical linear regression models to test our hypotheses, the authors analyse 468 first-generation immigrant entrepreneurs settled in 31 European countries using data from the European Working Conditions Survey (6th EWCS; Eurofound, 2015 database) combined with other datasets to derive the macro-level variables (i.e. the Doing Business Project; Hofstede et al., 2010).

The authors find that distance in the normative aspects of institutions harms entrepreneurial opportunity motivation. At the same time, however, opportunity motivation is likely to benefit from both the normative aspects of institutions that reduce locals' opportunity motivation and the distance in the regulative aspects of institutions.

This article analyses immigrant entrepreneurship in Europe, which has been under-examined in the extant literature, and takes into account the micro-, meso- and macro-level factors affecting the entrepreneurial motivation of immigrants in Europe. This analysis responds to the need already highlighted by previous research to include not only micro-level factors but also meso- and macro-level factors in the analysis of immigrant entrepreneurship (Aliaga-Isla and Rialp, 2013).

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on immigrant entrepreneurship since the mid-2000s to examine the changing trends, variations and theoretical advances in immigrant entrepreneurship in Western societies.

Using the SocIndex and Proquest Business Premium databases, the authors conducted a literature review of about 100 peer-reviewed articles published since the mid-2000s. The authors critically assess the main research findings, identify key concepts and models that have been developed over the past decade, and offer new theoretical insight into the ever-changing global dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship. Although the focus is on the USA, the authors also include some seminal research based in other Western countries of immigrant reception.

Based on a critical review of existing research that has been published between 2004 and the present, the authors highlight main trends and variations of the entrepreneurial endeavors among diasporic migrants, address the emerging forces shaping immigrant entrepreneurship, highlight theoretical advances in the field of entrepreneurship studies, and suggest new directions for future research. The authors note that the changing trends and ethnonational variations are caused not only by unequal access to human capital, social capital, financial capital, and cross-border venture capital on the part of individual entrepreneurs, but also by differences in broader structural circumstances in the home country and/or host country and interaction between national/local and transnational/global forces. The authors discuss new theoretical advances, identify gaps and raise questions for future research.

The review offers important insight into the ever-changing local and global dynamics of immigrant entrepreneurship and broadens the established conceptual and theoretical models in the sociology of immigrant/ethnic entrepreneurship.

Given the importance of immigration and immigrant entrepreneurs in advanced economies, the authors take an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective to study the home-country benefits possessed by immigrant entrepreneurs and how home-country entrepreneurial ecosystem factors affect immigrant entrepreneurial motivations, activities and outcomes.

This conceptual research paper follows McGaghie, Bordage and Shea's (2001) four-step new theory creation process, which suggests that new theories can be created through facts extraction from the extant literature.

The authors propose that although immigrant entrepreneurs are unable to take full benefit of the host-country entrepreneurial ecosystem due to blocked mobility, they do have capabilities to access and use their home-country entrepreneurial resources and opportunities. The authors further propose that home-country entrepreneurial capital can be systemically analyzed through the framework of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The results imply that immigrant entrepreneurship as a social and economic phenomenon can be studied more holistically from both host- and home-country perspectives compared to the traditional research boundary of the host-country only.

The research focuses on the identification of home-country effects on immigrant entrepreneurship through the lens of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Testable propositions provide directions for future empirical research on the field of immigrant entrepreneurship from a home-country perspective. The research concludes that a holistic immigrant entrepreneurship study should consider dual (host- and home-country) entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Immigrant entrepreneurs benefit from both host- and home-country entrepreneurial ecosystems. This paper suggests co-effects of dual entrepreneurial ecosystems lead to a high rate of entrepreneurship and business success within some immigrant groups. Policymakers can increase economic activities by developing and deploying programs to encourage immigrants to embed in host- and home-country entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Based on the framework of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, this paper brings a novel perspective to examining home-country effects on immigrant entrepreneurship. It theoretically conceptualizes that immigrants have higher entrepreneurship rates than native-born populations because they have access to extra home-country entrepreneurial capital.

Years of research into immigrant entrepreneurship motivation (IEM) call for a synthesis of the field to note field developments and identify thematic antecedents and measurement elements. The paper aims to fill this literature review gap in IEM field. Improving existing analytical frameworks and establishing a research agenda are also goals of the research.

Adopting the PRISMA procedure, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. This produced 53 IEM research papers (internationally, from 1974 to 2020) from a database search and other sources, each of which was reviewed based on extracted variables, findings and suggestions. A well-accepted entrepreneurial motivation model is used for thematic measurement analyzes.

IEM research has gained attention over the past 25 years as to the number of publications, research foci and antecedent discoveries. The review suggests that there are six motivational thematic dimensions: individual characteristics, personal experiences and circumstances, personal values, business ideas and opportunities, goal-setting and self-efficacy and immigrant entrepreneurial ecosystem (IEE). The results also reveal a relationship between entrepreneurship motivations and the IEE which is one of the keys recommended future research strands.

This research contributes to entrepreneurship literature by providing a chronological timeline of IEM field development and antecedent discoveries. The review suggests applying the IEE and its associated components to investigate host and home countries’ interactive effects on IEM.

The research provides guidance for policymakers and practitioners concerning available policy instruments and IEM determinants in addition to individual factors.

This study is the first SLR on IEM. It presents a holistic view of the IEM field.

This study aims to identify the intentions of immigrant entrepreneurs to start new projects by investigating the role of influence of institutional support, social context, cultural intelligence, self-efficacy, optimizing personality traits and hierarchy legitimacy on intentions to start new ventures. In addition, the strength of the relationship for such factors and intentions to start new ventures was determined through the moderator role of easy access to venture capital.

To this end, this study complements the academic literature by integrating the structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. Thus, the MCDM (i.e. analytic hierarchy process and vlsekriterijumska optimizcija i kaompromisno resenje [VIKOR]) is an effective approach to solving the problem of complexity and evaluation (i.e. multiple evaluation criteria, important criteria and data variation). Hence, to complete the strategic guideline solution, this study uses a survey for collecting data from 202 immigrants in Malaysia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Singapore.

The results from SEM prove several critical factors of immigrants’ entrepreneurs. These factors of immigrants’ entrepreneurs can be vital for academics and host countries. By focusing on these aspects and by developing some personality traits (such as self-efficacy and optimal personality traits), these factors can contribute a good deal to increasing the capabilities of immigrant’s entrepreneurs toward entrepreneurial intentions. In the validation, the statistical objective method indicates that the immigrants' prioritizations in all countries are supported by the systematic ranking. Thus, entrepreneurial intentions for immigrants can pursue the order proven by the VIKOR results.

This study has some significant practical and theoretical implications. Practically, the study findings will enable managers to develop strategies to support immigrants for entrepreneurial intentions to start new ventures.

The novelty of the context under given circumstances of global environment adds to the originality of this study. Several previous studies have also emphasized the need for this type of study in other contexts. The findings can call managers’ attention toward a critical issue of immigrants’ entrepreneurial intentions to start new ventures.