Pushed or pulled? Entrepreneurial behaviour among immigrants as a strategy to cope with negative social identity

Abstract

Migratory movements are one of the most remarkable demographic, social and psychological phenomena in today’s world. For the people involved, these migrations pose a radical change in environment and in their lives as they face adaptation to new perceptions, values and behaviours. All these lead to major challenges and repercussions for their personal and social identities. Using the Theory of Social Identity as our interpretative framework, together with a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews, we have researched the entrepreneurial behaviour seen in 94 immigrants. We show the strategies adopted by these immigrants for personal mobility, social creativity and social competition to cope with the negative social identity derived from the occupational segregation and socio-labour exclusion they experience in the labour market and as mechanisms for psychosocial adaptation to the social, political, economic and labour characteristics in their environment.