Studying 'up' in migrant entrepreneurship Privileged migrant entrepreneurs in Wroclaw, Poland

While most studies of migrant entrepreneurship focus on disadvantaged migrants from the ‘global South’, this study does the opposite and explores the entrepreneurial activities of migrants from economically advanced countries. In doing so, the study fills a gap in the literature by studying ‘up’ (Nader 1972; Gusterson 1997; Aguiar 2012) and, subsequently, creates a counterpoint against which it critically examines the current ‘downward’ facing theoretical approaches within the field of migrant entrepreneurship. Moreover, this study carries wider implications in terms of global inequality by closely scrutinising entrepreneurs from some of the world’s wealthiest nations and positioning these findings against those from those from some of the poorest. Data is drawn primarily from 65 qualitative interviews with 41 migrant entrepreneurs from core-states (the UK, the USA, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Portugal, Canada, Australia, and Israel) and 24 from periphery-states (Ukraine, Belarus, India, Nigeria, and South Africa) in the shared ‘middle-ground’, semi-periphery environment of Wroclaw, Poland. Guided by the principles of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967), the study reveals previously invisible assumptions and structures, subsequently offering several empirical contributions to the field of migration and migrant entrepreneurship. In order to account for these findings, a theoretical contribution is also offered by proposing the concept of ‘Global-embeddedness’. In doing so, the study reinforces calls for scholars to ‘jettison’ the nation-state as the largest unit of analysis (Schiller & Faist 2013: 5) and extends such a multilateral, global approach into the field of migrant entrepreneurship.