Transnational Embeddedness of Nigerian Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Ghana, West Africa
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Transnational Embeddedness of Nigerian Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Ghana, West Africa Thomas Antwi Bosiakoh 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Transnationalism has provided an important optic for understanding immigrant entrepreneurship in the past three decades. However, the existing discourse often neglects Africa as a context for the articulation of immigrant entrepreneurship. Leaning on the constructivist epistemology with empirical base anchored in in-depth interviews and observational data, I explore the transnational contours and practices of Nigerian immigrants in Ghana and their entrepreneurial articulation in the country. First, I show how these immigrant entrepreneurs are embedded in multiple layers of transnationalism, namely one-way, two-way, and tripartite transnationalism. Secondly, I demonstrate the ways these entrepreneurial activities are embedded in Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) through the transnational economic opportunity structures it has created and are being exploited by the immigrants and the range of institutions, practices, and services that have emerged because of the existence of ECOWAS itself. A third dimension of transnationalism in the operation of Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurship in Ghana relates to labor recruitment through the traditional apprenticeship system, which, grounded in intersubjective field, crisscross the home and host communities. From these findings, I conclude by positioning the immigrants and their entrepreneurial processes as transnationally embedded. Keywords Immigrant entrepreneurs . Transnationalism . Transnational embeddedness .
Ghana . Nigeria
Introduction Transnational immigrant entrepreneurship scholarship has developed for almost 30 years with Europe and North America as the major contexts. A recent study (Aliaga-Isla and Rialp 2013) which purports to be “the first systematic literature review * Thomas Antwi Bosiakoh [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Antwi Bosiakoh T.
of the immigrant entrepreneurship field” (p. 820) mapped out studies in North America (USA and Canada), Europe (Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Norway, Denmark, and the UK) and Oceania (Australia). Absent in this review was Africa as a context for the articulation of immigrant entrepreneurship. Yet as pointed out by the United Nations (2016), close to a tenth of the current 244 million international migrants worldwide live on the African continent. International immigrants on the African continent are more than those in the Oceania region; also more than the combined Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania (UN 2016). Africa has thus emerged as a destination for many international migrants, and as epiphenomena of migration, immigrants in Africa also engage in (transnational) entrepreneurial pursuits. The existing studies on immigrant entrepreneurship focus mainly on the southern African region, in particular South Africa with immigrants from other African countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique. A key view
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