Advancing the views on migrant and diaspora entrepreneurs in international entrepreneurship

Abstract

We start challenging the basis of what constitutes the international and the entrepreneur in international entrepreneurship (IE) by relating international entrepreneurship to migration, migrants and diasporas, and their transnational and international ventures as dimensions rarely studied. This discussion focusing on the individual, human level—beyond the entrepreneurship-firm level—brings the actor and agency dimensions in the forefront of business activity regarding international entrepreneurship. There is a myriad of theoretical and analytical challenges in the literature in studying migrants that start from ambiguous terms and definitions and continue to different national systems of assessing and reporting migrantness. Such complexity generates cases of entrepreneurs who are not within any mainstream categories, highlighting a lack of appropriate definitions and working criteria. There is no consensus on the inclusion of migrant entrepreneurs and their position in international entrepreneurship, as views differ between partial inclusions; “ Diasporans who establish new ventures in their countries of origin comprise a special case of international ethnic entrepreneurship ” (Riddle and Brinkerhoff 2011 , 670) and partial exclusion; “ we exclude studies on transnational, ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship from this review. This follows Drori et al. ( 2009 , 1003) who observe that ‘while in principle, transnational entrepreneurship is fundamentally compatible with IEs entrepreneurial initiative the approach and domain differ markedly from IE’” (Jones et al. 2011 , 644).

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