The Invisible Factors That Break Socio-cultural Wall : A qualitative study on immigrant entrepreneurship

Sammanfattning: Research Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the socio-cultural barriers that self-employed immigrant entrepreneur’s face and the overcoming factors that help them to survive. Research Questions: 1. What are the socio-cultural barriers that immigrant entrepreneurs face in the context of self- employment? 2. What are the factors that help immigrant entrepreneurs to overcome the socio-cultural barriers? Methodology: This study is followed by qualitative research and explorative approach. The data collection was done by semi-structured interviews. Ten immigrant entrepreneurs are the convenience sample of our study. Findings: Language, legislation and lack of trust are the most unfavorable socio-cultural barriers that self-employed immigrant entrepreneurs face in the host country. Result shows that knowing the right information is important for immigrant entrepreneurs. For technology, immigrant entrepreneurs are now learning more about it by themselves. Besides, technology helps them to learn the language faster as it is more convenient than in school. Their previous experience and transnational identity are their biggest strength that helped them to break the socio-cultural wall. Immigrant entrepreneurs are often influenced by the native people in a positive way and that influences drive them to learn new things to overcome those barriers. The co-ethnic networks do not always play a positive role rather this study found that these networks actually play a dual role. Research Limitations: All of our sample are collected from Sweden, but for language and laws, the result might vary from person to person from different corners of the wall. This study was concerned with the self-employed entrepreneurs; not with the large level of enterprises.