Breaking Boundaries: Exploring the Process of Intersective Market Activity of Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the Context of High Economic Inequality
运用结构化理论，基于南非移民创业者的纵向数据，揭示了移民创业如何在高经济不平等和排斥环境中通过跨群体市场活动打破社会边界，并改变东道国社会结构的过程。
Abstract We explore immigrant entrepreneurship using structuration theory to understand how migrant‐led venture creation conducts socially‐intersective market activity in the host country of high economic inequality and social exclusion. Applying Gidden's structuration theory to immigrant entrepreneurship (1994), we unravel the co‐evolutionary process of both the entrepreneurial agent and the social structure of the host country via three phases of venture creation. We collected and examined original and longitudinal empirical data of eight South African‐based immigrant entrepreneurs using a process‐oriented theory‐building approach. Our findings unveil a process by which home and host institutions shape immigrant entrepreneurial agency to identify non‐ethnic business opportunities and to form relationships across diverse actors that counter existing norms of intergroup segregation and hostility. The process illustrates how an immigrant's social orientation to his/her host country's structure changes over time, and symbiotically, how the immigrant entrepreneur's actions – which break socially constructed boundaries – also change the social structure.