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This study explores how the family influences the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) process in immigrant businesses.

The paper draws on inductive multiple-case studies using 34 in-depth interviews. This paper relies on three cases of immigrant entrepreneurs originating from Mexico and Colombia that established firms in Sweden.

The results suggest that EO development trajectories vary in the presence of family roles (i.e. inspirers, backers and partners), resulting in the immigrant family business configurations of family-role-influenced proactiveness, risk-taking and innovation.

The immigrant family configurations drive three EO-enabling scenarios: (1) home-country framing, (2) family backing and (3) transnational translating. Immigrant family dynamics facilitate the development of EO over time through reciprocal interaction processes across contexts. This study indicates that, through family dynamics, EO develops as mutually interactive processes between the immigrant entrepreneur's family in the home and host countries.

This paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities to overcome the liability of newness and foreignness and how an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as an asset in business.

The study adopts an inductive multiple case study approach using social media content. The data consist of over 3,500 posts, images and screenshots from Facebook, Instagram and the webpages of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted using NVivo.

The findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts can mediate and facilitate three digital performances that together can turn ethnicity from a liability to an asset: (i) preserving performance through digital ethnicising, (ii) embracing performance through digital generativitising and (iii) appropriating performance through digital fusionising. The results support the introduction of a conceptual framework depicting the interwoven duality of horizontal and vertical boundary blurring, in which the former takes place between the offline and online spaces of immigrant businesses, and the latter occurs between the home and host country attachment of the immigrant businesses.

This study responds to calls for understanding how immigrant entrepreneurs can overcome the liability of foreignness. It offers a fresh look at ethnicity, which has been seen in a negative light in the field of immigrant entrepreneurship. This study illuminates that ethnicity can be used as a resource in immigrant entrepreneurship, specifically through the use of digital artifacts and digital platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct an inductive case study to understand how the opportunity creation process leads to integration.

It examines four cases of immigrant entrepreneurs of Cameroonian, Lebanese, Mexican and Assyrian origins who founded their businesses in Sweden. The study relies on process-oriented theory building and develops an inductive model of integration as an opportunity creation process.

The suggested model shows immigrants’ acculturation into the host society via three successive phases: breaking-ice, breaking-in and breaking-out. In the breaking-ice phase, immigrants trigger entrepreneurial ideas to overcome the disadvantages that they face as immigrants in the host country. In the breaking-in phase, immigrants articulate their entrepreneurial ideas by bonding with the ethnic community. In the breaking-out phase, the immigrants reorient their entrepreneurial ideas by desegregating them locally. The paper concludes by elaborating theoretical and practical implications of the research.

Immigrants act when they are socially excluded and discriminated in the labor market by developing business ideas and becoming entrepreneurs. By practicing the new language and accommodating native customers’ preferences, immigrants reorient their entrepreneurial ideas. The immigrants tailor their ideas to suit their new customers by strengthening their sense of belonging to the local community.

This article aims to clarify the role of social capital and social capital inequality embedded in bank ties in enabling and diversifying new firms' debt use.

The study adopts a quantitative method, using an unbalanced longitudinal dataset covering three years–2011, 2013 and 2015–from a project on small manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam. The sample consists of 513 firm-year observations.

Network extensity and network mobilisation increase new firms' debt use. Differences in ascribed and attained social statuses (i.e. gender, generation, business association membership and political affiliation) result in social capital inequality between entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who are of a younger generation, have higher levels of education and are not members of the Communist Party benefit less from social capital than those who are older, have less education and are party members.

The effects of access to and the use of the social capital embedded in bank ties on new firms' debt use are both studied. The sources of social capital inequality are investigated at the individual level through distinguishing ascribed and attained social statuses and explained by two mechanisms: capital deficit and return deficit. The moderating effects of social capital inequality are also examined.

This article studies the moderating effect of institutional pressures on the impact of bank ties on the capital structure of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

The study uses an unbalanced longitudinal dataset covering three years—2011, 2013 and 2015—from a project on small manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam. The sample consists of 7,680 firm-year observations.

Pressures from formal and informal institutions lessen the positive effect of bank ties on the capital structure of SMEs. These moderating effects are more salient in regions having lower institutional quality.

Empirically showing how institutional factors can be investigated together with relational factors to explain the capital structure of SMEs in a developing economy. Distinguishing between formal and informal institutional pressures and revealing their indirect effect on SMEs' capital structure through impacting the effect of bank ties.