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The main aim of this article is to research the lived experience of difference. In this article, the authors are interested in the field of working life in the context of entrepreneurship among Turkish women in Sweden.

The article is based on the stories of two immigrant women entrepreneurs who reflect upon their experience of working life in the context of migration to Sweden. These two stories provide a ground for a discussion regarding the responding to and re‐making of difference by individual subjects. The authors’ analysis is grounded in discursive approaches to narratives, particularly in the positioning analysis.

In their discussion, the authors focus on the field of work to discuss the changing conditions that affect and are affected by particular constructions of difference in a migration context. In this, the authors present how difference is experienced and put into use differently by the individuals, even under very similar descriptive categories of difference.

This article contributes with an experiential account of difference. It favors the notion of lived experiences within the intersecting structures in the analysis of complex interactions between structures, agents, times and spaces. It demonstrates the importance of attending to spatial, temporal, structural and subjective dimensions of difference.

While migrant women entrepreneurs (MWE) have been studied extensively through the lenses of gender and ethnicity, social class, as an axis of difference, received scant attention in entrepreneurship and migrant enterprise literature. The purpose of this paper is to make an intersectional analysis on migrant women’s cultural capital development processes on the basis of not only gender and ethnicity, but also class relations.

The study draws on empirical insights generated through listening to the life story narratives of 17 women entrepreneurs from Turkey. This is a small, yet diverse group consisting of women who followed their male kin who have migrated to Sweden in the late 1960s as a labour force, and of highly educated political refugee women who have migrated to Sweden following the military coup in Turkey in the 1980s.

By linking pre-migration and post-migration lives through Bourdieusian class analysis, the analysis yielded three distinct types of habitus of the women-intersectional identity constructed through interweaving of certain historical and cultural practices and conditions, labelled as women (immigrant) entrepreneurs, migrant (women) entrepreneurs and hybrid entrepreneurs. Life stories demonstrated the ways the MWE relationally defined, and in turn, contested being the right kind of entrepreneur drawing on their type of habitus and forms of cultural capital within the rules of the game in the specific context of entrepreneurship.

This study shows how MWE generate diverse, yet at times similar, but historically and culturally conditioned responses in actively shaping the relationship between entrepreneurial resources and context-specific structural powers and aspects. This way, the study calls for enriching the extant debate on migrant women entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it suggests that the strategic fit between resources and opportunities does not entail an automatic and arbitrary process. Rather, it takes an effort and contestation carried out by the entrepreneurial actors, among whom the individual entrepreneur is the primary actor. In particular, it draws attention to the conditions of possibilities for agency as a result of struggle and intersectional power relations: social class, ethnicity and gender, which provide a differential degree of powers to the individual entrepreneur.