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In this study, the authors develop in-depth understanding of how refugee entrepreneurs navigate institutional voids in market participation in Malaysia. The authors employ an inductive research design consistent with recent research investigating adversity and disadvantaged entrepreneurship. The findings of this study reveal that refugees adopted different, gendered approaches to navigate institutional voids in market participation. The women refugees in this study anchored towards safety by leveraging legitimacy of market intermediaries (e.g. social ventures and refugee support organisations) to gain protection for entrepreneurial activities and access markets while conducting their labour at home. The men refugees in this study engaged in harbouring – concealing entrepreneurial activities in the local community or under others’ identities to protect income-generating opportunities. The findings of this study thus provide nuance and demonstrate plurality in how refugee entrepreneurs navigate institutional voids, contributing towards more holistic understanding of refugee entrepreneurship, offering insights for development agencies, policy-makers, and other institutions on how to support refugees’ entrepreneurial activities.

The immature research endeavor on refugee entrepreneurship has not adequately covered the success factors of refugees. The current work aims to address this gap through the theory of planned behavior and the theory of procedural utility to identify the success factors of refugee entrepreneurs in the tourism and hospitality industry.

The current work is based on a qualitative approach drawing on data from 24 semistructured interviews with refugee entrepreneurs in Istanbul-Türkiye.

The thematic analysis of the data set revolved around three interrelated themes: personal, organizational and environmental factors, which offer a better understanding of the elements defining successful refugee entrepreneurs.

The paper also offers various practical implications and policy recommendations for the economic integration of refugee entrepreneurs in the public and private sectors.

The results enhance the understanding of successful refugee entrepreneurship in their new hosting environment, contributing to the existing research agenda by identifying the key themes of refugee entrepreneurs’ success factors.

This study aims to understand the challenges facing Syrian refugee entrepreneurs in Jordan and offers professional support to refugee entrepreneurs, with a view to improve their economic and social status, aid cultural integration and ultimately to help turn their business idea into reality.

A total of 62 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Syrian refugees in Jordan.

The study reveals that refugee entrepreneurs are both entrepreneurs of necessity and opportunity. Refugee entrepreneurship improves social welfare and drives economic growth. Nevertheless, refugee entrepreneurship faces many challenges and difficulties, mainly in terms of financing difficulties, cultural differences and a lack of business management skills.

Future studies could investigate if the research results can be generalised to global refugee entrepreneurship by gathering data from other countries and comparing the subsequent results with this research.

The research shows that programmes and instruments should be created to support refugee entrepreneurship. It is also suggested that both social and economic support is needed to prompt refugee entrepreneurs. International cooperation and international organisations are important to support refugees and support countries that receive them, with a view to reduce the economic burden on these countries, which will in turn improve the quality of life for refugees.

The increasing number of refugees is becoming a very serious social issue. The international community should contribute to helping those refugees through economic, social and cultural integrations.

This paper focuses refugee entrepreneurship to understand refugees’ entrepreneurial behaviour and any challenges facing Syrian entrepreneurship in Jordan.

The world is currently facing one of the most significant refugee crises in history, posing challenges to policymakers in host countries needing to facilitate socio-economic integration of refugees urgently. Policymakers and scholars have started shedding light on the entrepreneurial potential of refugees. Refugees confront considerable institutional barriers in their new environments. Particularly challenging is that they lose connection to their home country ecosystem through forced displacement and are not yet well-embedded in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem of the host country. The disconnection to the local ecosystem hinders refugees from accessing various resources essential to entrepreneurial activities. Against this background, this chapter illuminates the role of business incubators in integrating refugee entrepreneurs into the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, paying particular attention to relational dynamics within incubators. This study conducts explorative qualitative research with a single case study of a German business incubator for refugees. This study identifies three types of relational dynamics that characterise operation of refugee business incubators and two mechanisms constructive and descriptive to their mission. Finally, this study derives practical implications for refugee business incubators and policymakers in refugee-hosting countries.

Forcibly displaced refugee entrepreneurs face extra challenges that are beyond the barriers that face immigrants and hosts in their journey towards starting up, growing and developing their businesses. This study aims to critically examine the opportunity identification (OI) of forcibly displaced refugee minority women entrepreneurs in Glasgow.

Qualitative semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 10 participants were conducted, including 6 forcibly displaced women entrepreneurs and 4 stakeholders. A six-step thematic framework for data analysis with NVivo 11 was used.

Findings revealed that forcibly displaced refugee women’s entrepreneurial opportunities occur through a dynamic identification, discovery, recognition and exploitation of opportunities. Women-led businesses remain underdeveloped due to restrictions imposed by the Scottish Government, Westminster Government and local council authorities.

This study was only conducted in Glasgow areas, although this is where most of the forcibly displaced groups live. The research team suggests that further studies with a large sample cutting across more local authorities beyond Glasgow should be conducted.

The empirical findings serve practitioners, local authorities business managers, researchers and policymakers. The study reveals a gap and lack of support and specific training and programmes that could positively benefit forcibly displaced refugee women entrepreneurs within the host communities.

The novelty of this study lies in the research topic which is still understudied. This is together with the new empirical findings of entrepreneurial OI and the provision of insights related to challenges facing forcibly displaced refugee women entrepreneurs in Glasgow.

This article develops an innovative multidisciplinary conceptual framework in the field of refugee entrepreneurship by combining the theory of mixed embeddedness with the concepts of intersectionality and agency. Focusing on the phenomenon of refugee entrepreneurship, this conceptual framework addresses the following questions: how is entrepreneurship informed by the various intersectional positions of refugees? And how do refugees exert their agency based on these intersecting identities?

By revising the mixed embeddedness approach and combining it with an intersectional approach, this study aims to develop a multidimensional conceptual framework.

This research illustrates how the intersectional positions of refugees impact their entrepreneurial motivations, resources and strategies. The authors' findings show that refugee entrepreneurship not only contributes to the economic independence of refugees in new societies but also creates opportunities for refugees to exert their agency.

This conceptual framework can be applied in empirical research and accordingly contributes to refugee entrepreneurship studies and intersectionality theory.

The study deploys Anthias' intersectional framework of social spaces and her concept of translocational positionality to explore the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugee entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the study aims to assess how migrant identities require a specific form of business support.

A total of 32 semi-structured interviews with 14 refugee entrepreneurs and 18 business support agents were conducted between April and October 2022 and, together with field notes, were combined for thematic analysis in NVivo 12.

Organisational, representational, intersubjective and experiential barriers combined to create practical and psychological deterrents to entrepreneurship for refugees. However, an explicitly humanistic and de-centred approach to business support was (partially) able to counter such barriers.

Policymakers and business support agencies should consider intersectional characteristics and the importance of a compassionate and individual approach when designing business support programmes for refugee entrepreneurs.

Two intersectional concepts of social spaces and translocational positionality are brought into conversation with each other, creating a novel approach to framing the barriers to entrepreneurship for refugees.

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.

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.

A burgeoning stream of tourism and hospitality research highlights the role of entrepreneurship in bringing about positive social and economic outcomes for both refugees themselves and their host countries. Yet little has been done so far both in mainstream entrepreneurship research and tourism scholarship to explore how motivations influence perceived entrepreneurial success of refugees and how this eventually affects their subjective well-being. To address this gap, the present study aims to propose and empirically test a conceptual model postulating relationships between contextual and individual entrepreneurial motives, perceptions of entrepreneurial success and life satisfaction.

This study draws on quantitative data collected through 172 surveys of refugee entrepreneurs venturing in different subsectors within tourism and hospitality in Turkey and the UK. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the proposed theoretical model.

The results reveal that contextual and individual entrepreneurial motives have a significant positive impact on perceived entrepreneurial success. As predicted, perceived entrepreneurial success is found to have a significant positive impact on life satisfaction. A multigroup analysis involving host country (Turkey vs the UK) and mode of entry (founder vs takeover) indicates no significant difference based on host country, whereas the strength of relationships for takeovers is relatively greater as compared to founders.

This study advocates that the reductionist approach viewing refugees as temporary “outsiders” who are in consistent need of public provision, and welfare services should not prevail against their ability to achieve self-efficiency through entrepreneurship. Hence, policies need to be oriented toward supporting refugee entrepreneurial activities over various business stages and modes of entry. More importantly, ensuring high success rates among refugee entrepreneurs should be viewed as a pivotal tool to address the well-being of refugees, their families and their fellows.

While previous research identifies drivers of entrepreneurship success and the potential favorable outcomes, none of these studies empirically models refugee entrepreneurship motives, self-reported entrepreneurial success and life satisfaction as a distinct and growing cohort of entrepreneurs. This study makes significant theoretical contributions to the corpus of literature on the social outcomes of entrepreneurship and provides timely implications for policymakers to use entrepreneurship as a market-based solution to address refugees’ subjective well-being.