Growth The Missing Ingredient of Immigrant Entrepreneurship

This thesis muses the question; how do we understand firm growth in immigrant owned firms? Two literature streams are proposed to be relevant. Firstly, theimmigrant entrepreneurship field, which is developing and becoming increasinglysophisticated. Though despite appeals from within the field, that we need a widerspan of concepts to explain the changing heterogeneity and fabric of immigrantentrepreneurship in 2015, an understanding of firm growth in immigrant firms isconspicuous in its relative absence from the field. This conspicuousness is amplifiedby a recent flurry of interest in the mainstream media, who are quick to point to thestandout examples and success stories of firm growth by immigrant firms. Immigrantentrepreneurs are no longer confined to low-value and competitively saturatedactivities, ethno-cultural niches and arduous survival orientations. Though, we canfind immigrant entrepreneurs growing their firms in the whole spectrum ofindustries. The immigrant entrepreneurship research field has a hard time explainingthis progressive trend. Extant literature has tended to present a skewed image ofimmigrant entrepreneurship; one explanation for this is that the field is theoreticallyill suited and has lacked the conceptual precursors to grasp the phenomenon of firmgrowth in immigrant firms. The second relevant stream of research is that of‘mainstream’ firm growth, which is undoubtedly valuable in explaining firm growthin general. However, it is understood to be unsympathetic to the nuances andspecificity of immigrant entrepreneurship, which remains infused with ethno-culturalcharacteristics and circumscribed by negative structural impediments, includingdiscrimination and racism. Thus, merely casting a blanket of previous ‘mainstream’growth research over a population of immigrant entrepreneurs is an inadequateapproach. It is proposed, given these limitations that these streams of literature needto be considered together. This thesis builds an integrated approach to understandfirm growth in immigrant firms, which is steeped in the firm growth literature, butremains sensitive to the specificity of immigrant entrepreneurship. A number ofresearch propositions are made and discussed, the culmination of which is a suggested research agenda for firm growth in immigrant owned firms