Immigrant entrepreneurship in Norway

Abstract

The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to add to the knowledge about immigrant entrepreneurship in Norway and to test the existing theories relating to immigrant entrepreneurship. In this work, an immigrant entrepreneur is defined as a business owner born outside Norway with both parents born abroad who is involved into the activities characterised by economic innovation, organisation creation, and profit-seeking in the market sector. Four papers are included in this dissertation. The first paper focuses on relationships between national culture, home-country educational attainment and intergroup differences in self-employment levels. The next paper investigates the reasons why immigrant owned firms demonstrate lower survival rate then the firms owned by native Norwegians. The question of selective migration and brain drain is in focus for the paper utilising primary data on representative samples of Russian immigrants to Norway and their stay-at-home peers. The methodological paper is devoted to the ethical aspects of research on immigrant entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that immigrants’ home-country national culture and educational attainment are good predictors of intergroup differences in self-employment levels. The findings on business survival suggest that both propensity to engage into self-employment and ability to survive as self-employed may determine the current level of self-employment in an immigrant group. The findings also indicate the presence of selective migration with respect to entrepreneurial characteristics. As considering ethics of research on immigrant entrepreneurs, lower average levels of education, unfamiliarity with local culture and social context, economic dependency, links to the home country and coethnic community, special legal position, and linguistic disadvantages are identified as potential sources of ethical ambiguity. Several implications of this thesis may be useful for practitioners and policy makers in sending and receiving countries.