Immigrant self-employment and transnational practices: the case of Moroccan entrepreneurs in Amsterdam and Milan

This dissertation deals with the topic of immigrant entrepreneurship and the transnational practices linked to the business (transnational immigrant entrepreneurship). In particular, the goal of the thesis is to understand how, namely thanks to what resources, they identify and seize business opportunities. In order to address this, I compared domestic and transnational Moroccan entrepreneurs in Amsterdam and Milan. Transnational immigrant entrepreneurs are immigrant entrepreneurs with a business which spans across borders and which entails economic activities linked with abroad, namely outside the country of immigration - e.g. import/export business. Domestic immigrant entrepreneurs are immigrant entrepreneurs with a business which does not have connections outside the country of immigration and which exclusively focuses on the domestic market of the country of immigration. The thesis contributes conceptually and empirically to the field of transnational immigrant entrepreneurship. Conceptually, the thesis introduces a model to analyse transnational immigrant entrepreneurship, proposing also the concept of multifocality - instead of bi-focality as used by previous literature - and re-defining the notions of structural and relational embeddedness. Empirically, the dissertation illustrates how immigrant entrepreneurs with a transnational business identify and seize business opportunities. In particular, the main contributions to the literature are to: - Investigating the dissimilarities between transnational immigrant entrepreneurs and domestic immigrant entrepreneurs concerning how they identify and seize opportunities; - Analysing possible variations among the group of transnational immigrant entrepreneurs The results are based on a research conducted on Moroccan entrepreneurs in Milan and Amsterdam (N=70), using an overall qualitative approach but which combines qualitative questions, quantitative measures and techniques from social network analysis. The research underlines that there are many differences between transnational immigrant entrepreneurs and domestic immigrant entrepreneurs, and among the transnational ones, concerning the use they do of structural embeddedness, relational embeddedness and individual characteristics for identifying and seizing business opportunities. In conclusion, this dissertation addressed transnational immigrant entrepreneurship. In particular, the main topic concerned how entrepreneurs with a transnational business identify and seize business opportunities. Proposing a partially new conceptual model for understanding transnational immigrant entrepreneurship and addressing the case of Moroccan entrepreneurs in Amsterdam and Milan, this dissertation, although with some limitations, contributes to the existing literature on the topic. In particular, it provides new insights on how immigrant entrepreneurs seize business opportunities for a transnational business, and on the variations among them.