Space and place in immigrant entrepreneurship literature in the Nordic countries: A systematic literature review

Abstract

In recent decades, immigrant entrepreneurship research has developed from exploring a niche economic activity to being a lens through which to explore wider social and economic processes. As the topic grows in importance, research on immigrant entrepreneurship in Nordic contexts is joining these trends, but the unique settings of the region might have been neglected. Space and place underpin many explorations of immigrant entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries, from absolute conceptions of space and place to sensitive portraits of social complexity. Thus, the question the authors address is how space and place are articulated, presented, and interpreted within immigrant entrepreneurship literature in and about the Nordic context. From a systematic literature review of academic articles covering Nordic countries and immigrant entrepreneurship between 2000 and 2019, they found that space and place play a role in immigrant entrepreneurship in Nordic research. However, opportunities remain to engage theoretically with these concepts in order to develop research aimed at understanding immigrant entrepreneurship in the Nordic countries and contribute to a growing need to understand space and place in entrepreneurial activities generally. The authors conclude that there are five potential strategies for incorporating space and place in future research.

Immigrant entrepreneurship and gender dimensions: A systematic review

“…In this regard, Bird and Wennberg (2016) and You and Zhou, (2021) have mentioned that even among Chinese migrants in the USA, female immigrants struggle more in terms of social and human capital compared to male immigrants while starting their own enterprises. For these reasons, even though the number of female immigrant entrepreneurship activities in the destination countries is increasing, the dominance of male immigrants continues (Barth & Zalkat, 2020).This also became a reason in the immigrant entrepreneurship literature to focus more on male immigrants in regard to labour market participation in all forms (Webster & Kontkanen, 2021).…”

Antecedents of immigrants’ entrepreneurial intention formation process: an empirical study of immigrant entrepreneurs in Canada

“…Finally, IEI is a psychological state of mind and there are many more individual and social variables that could also be integrated into the model. We have also assumed Canada as a given background of space and place in relation to immigrant entrepreneurship (Webster and Kontkanen, 2021) except the entrepreneurial cultural difference, institutional supports, and personal network in the host market. Future studies on IEI might consider other individual, and contextual variables related to Canadian space and place that facilitate or create constraints in the IEI formation process.…”

“…Literature on immigrant entrepreneurship insists on the propensity of entrepreneurs to rely on ethnic networks to mobilize resources that are useful for the creation of their business (Dheer and Lenartowicz, 2018;Webster and Kontkanen, 2021;Zhu et al, 2023). This understanding enlightens Granovetter's (1985) use of the social embeddedness concept to measure the effects of social networks on economic behaviour.…”

Discussions and applications of the organizational culture in telecommuting contexts

“…These documents were analyzed using reading matrices, and the main theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions were identified. This step considered scientific articles, research result book chapters, research reports, and sector reports, following the guidance provided by experts in systematic literature reviews [23]- [26].…”