Social entrepreneurs from marginalized communities who are at the center of the issues they aim to address are engaging in opportunity creation processes to tackle large scale societal challenges. This qualitative study explores how social entrepreneurs with a migrant background create opportunities to address migration issues and how their actions relate to their identity. We found that their approach towards opportunity creation and their identity are entangled with and emanate from three main problems, namely adversities that migrants face, exclusion from solutions, and the stigma associated with the label “migrant.” The social entrepreneurs develop three interrelated mechanisms that are mutually reinforcing: navigating multiple systems by accessing resources through adaptive perseverance and by having an interconnected view; including the excluded by building bridges with an insider understanding and by having an empathic comprehension; and empowering their own community by elevating the status of the migrant community and by reclaiming their own identity. Our study shows how opportunity creation is influenced by and in turn influences the entrepreneur’s social identity contributing to the entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship literatures by building on concepts that have viewed entrepreneurship as a form of necessity and by developing our understanding of social entrepreneurs’ opportunity creation process."

Read more

Naimi, A., Hehenberger, L., Bacq, S. C. & Kickul, J. R. (2020). How social entrepreneurs with a migrant background create opportunities for their own community. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020 (1), pp. 18946-18946. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.18946abstract.