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.
In this article, we suggest that the transactive memory system (TMS) and boundary-spanning literatures are useful for understanding how individuals in team-based collectives can be structured to improve within-and between-team coordination. We argue that such coordination can be facilitated-or thwarted-by boundary-spanning behaviors and patterns of knowledge exchange within and between teams. Our theorizing explains how an existing team TMS can offset the within-team coordination burdens typically associated with boundary spanning and we offer predictions about how these factors interrelate to affect TMS and coordination over time. Finally, our theory underscores significant implications and provides insights for how management practices might improve coordination within and between teams.
In this study, we explored team roles in virtual, partially distributed teams, or vPDTs (teams with at least one co-located subgroup and at least two subgroups that are geographically dispersed but that collaborate virtually). Past research on virtual teams emphasizes the importance of team dynamics. We argue that the following three roles are particularly important for high functioning virtual teams: Project Coordinator, Implementer and CompleterFinisher. We hypothesized that the highest performing vPDTs will have 1) a single Project Coordinator for each subgroup, 2) multiple Implementers within the team, and 3) fewerCompleter-Finishers within the team. A sample of 28 vPDTs with members working on two different continents provides support for the second and third hypothesized relationships, but not the first.
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