Immigrant Entrepreneurship Identity

These study objectives are to better understanding of immigrant entrepreneurial identity formation from the perspective of autobiographical narrative analysis. Studies on immigrant entrepreneurship identity has been dominated by works of scholars who basically fall into two main steams. The first one deals with such issues as ethnic, female entrepreneurship, and in many cases it reduces immigrant entrepreneurship identity to ethno-cultural phenomenon, which exists outside or at least in the margins of official economy and mainstream society. The second research stream elaborates on rapidly emerging field of transnationalism studies. From the perspective of identity, transnational entrepreneurs are considered as new “nomads” who migrate from
Finally, it is shown how narratives of opportunity discovery and exploitation integrate new immigrant entrepreneurial experiences into the structure of personal identity. Entrepreneurial narratives Over the last three decades we have been witnessing a so called “linguistic turn” in social sciences which is inspired by postmodernism. As Spector-Mersel (2010) notes, the narrative, borrowed from humanities, especially from literary scholarship, penetrates many different social disciplines: psychology, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics. Acknowledging all difficulties to narrow down the term “postmodernism”, one should recognize the key figures of linguistic turn, such as J. F. Lyotard, F. Lacane, M. Foucault, Derrida. In a nutshell, postmodern paradigm stress that language, discourse, and narrative should not
From the epistemological and ontological point of view, narrative analysis is considered as the most typical form of social life (Czarniawska, 2010), as a form of knowledge, and a form of communication. The term „narrative “includes different types of stories, such as personal and family histories, myths, fairy tales, novels or mundane stories, that are used to explain or justify our actions and behaviours (Smith and Anderson, 2004). From the perspective of narrative paradigm, rather than search for cause-effect relationships and seek to explain human actions, the author has to look at them through the lenses of interrelatedness of narrative events. Downing (2005) suggests that on subconscious level the author always look for the plot because the interrelatedness of actors and events enables the author to explain and to make sense of their experience. As Barry and Elmes (1997) put it, the narrative “sees” independent and disconnected elements of existence as related parts of a whole. In process of narration, the person selectively picks up remembered episodes (events) and puts them together into plots. Personal narratives do not replicate the reality, but reinterpret it by creating new plots. Interpretation is done accordingly to personal understanding about which parts or episodes better explain personal