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The aim of this chapter is to advance an understanding of the value of informal entrepreneurial activities in relation to context using an institutional perspective arguing that heterogeneity in institutional embeddedness affects the value individuals attach to entrepreneurial actions.

We draw empirically on 100 interviews with individuals engaged in informal cross-border activities in eight EU border regions across four countries that have experienced changes of regulatory, economic and social nature.

The analysis offers important insights on how three institutional logics – market, state and community – guide entrepreneurial action at the micro-level and affect value creation. Our evidence supports the use of these activities to fulfil important economic functions and to nurture family and social relations in closely-knit communities. Differences in the embeddedness of individuals in each of these logics contributed to their perception of the value of their informal entrepreneurial actions along economic and social dimensions at the individual, community and society level and also at the short and long run.

Our main contributions lie in extending discussions of economic and social value of informal entrepreneurial activities and in providing a dynamic view of the value of informal entrepreneurial activities that account for changes or shifts in institutional logics, the responses they generate and the value created as a result.

In this chapter, we advance an understanding of entrepreneurial resourcefulness in relation to context by focusing on challenging and sometimes outright hostile environments and the way they shape, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial resourcefulness. Drawing on selective evidence from several projects in post-socialist countries in both Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia and other published research covering these countries, we argue for contextualized conceptualizations of resourcefulness. More specifically we emphasize that temporal, historical, socio-spatial, and institutional contexts are antecedents and boundaries for entrepreneurial behavior, while at the same time allowing for human agency. This is visible in individuals’ actions to negotiate, reenact, and cross these boundaries, and as a result, intentionally or inadvertently contributing to changing contexts. We suggest that resourcefulness is a dynamic concept encompassing multiple practices, which change over time, and it results from a close interplay of multiple contexts with entrepreneurial behavior. We also propose that from a theoretical point of view, resourcefulness not only needs to be contextualized, but it also needs to be explored together with its contextual outcomes – the value it creates and adds at different levels of society.

Transnational migrant entrepreneurship is an increasingly important and multi-faceted process. Because of the ‘double transition’ of Albanian migrants, in terms of migration (spatial transition) and in terms of transition from socialism to capitalism and more specifically the absence of entrepreneurship experience in their homeland during the communist regime, we might think of Albanians as being in a weak position for mastering entrepreneurship. But, paradoxically, the evidence tends to prove the opposite. Albanians have succeeded in identifying various entrepreneurial opportunities, and are nowadays increasingly engaging in a wider range of entrepreneurial activities. The overall aim of this chapter thus is to analyse the causes and consequences of transnational entrepreneurship among Albanian migrants doing business with Albania and Albanian returnees pursuing business activities with their former destination countries. For this purpose, the author draws on face-to-face interviews with 50 Albanian migrant entrepreneurs engaged in cross-border economic activities in Albania, Italy and Greece, supplemented by further interviews with key informants, as well as government policy documents. The analysis in this chapter offers important insights into the two main types of entrepreneur, which are ‘necessity’ and ‘opportunity’ entrepreneurs; the emergence of academic entrepreneurship among Albanian transnational entrepreneurs; and the contribution of transnational migrant entrepreneurs in terms of added value at the individual and community levels, as well as potentially impacting on the country’s economic and social development.

This chapter seeks to engage with and extend the current debate in the literature of ethnic entrepreneurship. It critiques the concept of ethnic entrepreneurship and its theoretical underpinnings. It argues that research in ethnic entrepreneurship bears little reflection of the current changes and new realities in the composition of modern societies. Based on qualitative primary data from interviews combined with secondary sources of data, it suggests that the term ‘ethnic entrepreneurship’ is discriminatory and creates a narrative of Othering in the discourse of entrepreneurship, thus, portraying entrepreneurship as a western phenomenon. It argues that it is contradictory to think entrepreneurship is fundamentally contextual, socially and culturally embedded, and then define enterprise with ethnic bias. The concept of ethnic entrepreneurship propagates entrepreneurial Othering and a reductionist view of non-western forms of entrepreneurship. What constitutes ethnic enterprise should not be based on the identity of the owner. The ethnic enterprise is not confined to a geographical boundary; and the ethnic economy and the mainstream economy are not mutually exclusive. In this era of superdiversity and globalisation, researchers are encouraged to rethink the concept of ethnic entrepreneurship and embrace difference without Othering.

This chapter explores how challenges potentially encourage refugees to engage in entrepreneurial activities and which adaptive mechanisms they employ in order to overcome the challenges. Semi-structured interviews with 12 refugee entrepreneurs were conducted in order to understand the underlying processes of the dynamics of challenges and adaptive mechanism within which the entrepreneurial outcomes emerged. The empirical findings of the study are evaluated in line with the parameters of the challenge-based model of entrepreneurship. A more nuanced picture of underdog entrepreneurs emerges along with a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial activities of refugees.

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.

A growing number of individuals identify as cosmopolitans, that is, citizens of the world. They voluntarily move from country to country in pursuit of self-fulfilment in both life and work, and construct a cosmopolitan identity in the process. With the help of three entrepreneurial narratives the authors investigated how cosmopolitan disposition affects entrepreneurial behaviour. The authors found that cosmopolitan entrepreneurs share many common entrepreneurial characteristics, such as openness to opportunities, a need for achievement and the locus of control. However, they also challenge the understanding of entrepreneurship by downplaying the role of environment and interpreting success in an unconventional way. The study demonstrates that this growing group of entrepreneurs deserves more attention from entrepreneurship scholars.