Resumo

Female entrepreneurship (FENT) scholarly has long been presented as one primarily driven by necessity, outlining the fragilities and gendered social processes that push women into entrepreneurial pursuits as mainly a means to find independence, self-assurance, financial relief, or even a more balanced lifestyle to keep looking after the family. Existing research in the field has also identified differences between the motivations and barriers to female self-employment in developing and developed countries.

Although many scholars have examined various institutional elements that influence FENT, only a few have shed light on the factors influencing immigrant women businesses’ establishment in a foreign environment, especially regarding issues of cultural assimilation and integration among pre-existent networks with native citizens, later generations of immigrants, and other ethnic communities in the event of multicultural, global cities. Hence, this paper aims to propose an integrative framework to analyze immigrant women’s entrepreneurial process.

To attain this paper’s main objective, the fundamental concepts concerning Institutional Theory have been covered, such as Scott’s (2014) three institutional pillars (normative, regulatory, and cultural-cognitive), legitimacy, isomorphism, institutional change, and organizational fields, and Mixed Embeddedness—a consistent theoretical approach commonly used in the field—has been revisited in a gender-oriented perspective.

It is argued that what prevented such an integrative model from being consolidated was the fact ME alone as a theoretical lens was unable to capture the redistributive and reciprocity behaviors that exist alongside market behaviors in modern society. Therefore, the integrative logic pursued here (realized in the reciprocity or social circulation strategy) is characterized by collaboration between actors and involves integrating information and resources to increase mutual value. Conversely, the redistributive logic is characterized by the diffusion of hegemonic practices and behaviors.

This study reinforces Corrêa et al.’s (2020) recommendation to analyze the ways in which repercussions of the reciprocity-and-redistribution dynamics affect the entrepreneurial trajectory of different social actors to uncover its relational nature, one thing that can only be done by the structuralist dimension of ME in combination with the functionalist epistemological dimension of Institutional Theory. Using the former alone might incur a perpetuation of the previous conflict between agents’ decisions and sensemaking being shaped by structures under a ‘utility-maximization principle’.

Corrêa, V. S., Vale, G. M. V., Melo, P. L. de R., & Cruz, M. de A. (2020). O “problema da imersão” nos estudos do empreendedorismo: Uma proposição teórica. Revista de Administração Contemporânea, 24(3), 232–244. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-7849rac2020190096 Ram, M., Jones, T., & Villares-Varela, M. (2017). Migrant entrepreneurship: Reflections on research and practice. International Small Business Journal: Researching Entrepreneurship, 35(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266242616678051 Scott, W. R. (2014). Institutions and organizations: Ideas, interests, and identities. SAGE.