Refugee entrepreneurship in a non-western country: How do Syrian refugee entrepreneurs respond to diaspora consciousness and negative prejudice?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to identify how the diaspora consciousness of Syrian entrepreneurs in Egypt might affect their business practices. The research sample comprises semi-structured interviews with Syrian refugee owners of small and medium-sized businesses in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts from the interviews. The findings showed that diaspora consciousness stimulates Syrian refugees to actively engage in three categories of business-related practices: contextual (expanding entrepreneurial activities outside their host country, desire to constitute a Western country-based business venture), functional (reliance on a value chain within the same nationality, tending to adopt shadow economy practices), and procedural practices (preferring to develop family businesses, establishing only small and medium-sized enterprises). This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on refugee entrepreneurship in which empirical studies on the effect of diaspora consciousness on the business practices of refugee entrepreneurs have been limited so far.