To encapsulate: Refugee entrepreneurship studies have applied the concept of resilience to describe entrepreneurs' personal traits. In contrast, based on the 52 interviews with nascent refugee entrepreneurs in Germany, this study discovered that refugee entrepreneurs are constantly tense between maintaining and losing their entrepreneurial resilience. The findings highlight the fragile, unstable nature of refugees' resilience, which is influenced by individual, relational, and institutional levels during venture development. Refugees' mental conditions and socio-economic environments can positively and negatively impact their resilience. Therefore, this study demonstrates the importance of understanding refugees' resilience as a dynamic process rather than a static personal characteristic. It also contributes to the recent discussions on refugee entrepreneurial resilience by theorizing it as a dynamic process and identifying multi-level influencing factors.
If interested, please take a look at our most recent article published in European Management Journal:
