Solomon Akele Abebe

Postdoctoral fellow

Refugee Entrepreneurship : Towards a Nuanced Understanding of the Phenomenon

Author

Solomon Akele Abebe

Summary, in English

Forced cross-border migration and entrepreneurship have persisted as perennial themes throughout the annals of human history. However, the recent ‘refugee crisis’ has sparked a resurgence of interest in their interplay under the rubric of ‘refugee entrepreneurship’. While its territory is not entirely uncharted, a surge in scholarly urgency and heightened scientific production have significantly expanded the corpus of refugee entrepreneurship
literature. Yet, despite the contributions to date, this research area faces several challenges—spanning domain-specific and methodological issues to theoretical concerns—calling for further scholarly endeavour.

This thesis ventures into this emerging yet rapidly progressing research area, providing a nuanced investigation of the phenomenon and unravelling its complexities through a weave of systematic, methodological, theoretical, and empirical analyses across four interlinked studies. Systematically, it navigates the landscape of refugee entrepreneurship research, mapping its intellectual territory across various academic disciplines and consolidating existing knowledge. Methodologically, the thesis introduces an innovative sampling approach that pertains to the specificity of entrepreneurial refugees in terms of their ‘hidden’ nature and initial placement within the host country post-relocation. Theoretically, it offers a balanced perspective on the agency-structure dialectic, capturing the dynamics of refugee entrepreneurship through the interplay between refugees’ voluntary pursuit of entrepreneurship and adverse circumstances and structural constraints linked with forced migration.

This dissertation is a testament to the growing recognition of refugee entrepreneurship as a specific area of scholarship, underscoring its contributions to research, policy, and practice. Through its comprehensive analysis, this volume lays the groundwork for further investigations, striving for a deeper understanding of this intricate phenomenon.

Department/s