The entrepreneurial journey of refugee entrepreneurship – resilience and embeddedness issues

Abstract

This cumulative dissertation explores the dynamic nature of resilience and the embedding process of refugee entrepreneurs. Due to the 2015 global refugee crisis, policymakers and academics have started paying attention to refugees' entrepreneurial potential. Compared to migrants, refugees face significant adversities due to forced displacement, such as psychological trauma, severe resource disadvantages, and substantial institutional barriers. Consequently, refugee entrepreneurs need to develop and maintain a high resilience and embedding process when integrating into the new host country. However, research on refugee entrepreneurial dynamic resilience and the embedding process remains unexplored. A few preceding studies have treated resilience as a mere personal trait of refugees and overlooked its dynamic aspect. This dissertation addresses these research gaps and explores the multi-layered nature of resilience and the embedding process in refugee entrepreneurship. It contributes to recent discussions on refugee entrepreneurial resilience and embeddedness by theorizing it as a dynamic process that takes into account both the home and host country contexts.