Critical factors influencing brazilian women’s entrepreneurial process in Germany and Sweden

Abstract

Female entrepreneurship (FENT) has sparked the interest of academics and policymakers due to its economic and social significance. Although researchers have examined various factors that influence the female entrepreneurial process, little is known about immigrant women entrepreneurship, só as to promote an interconnection between individual actions stemming from informal institutions and the regulatory and normative pressures of formal institutions. This gap is even more significant when we consider the scarcity in the literature on the results of businesses led by Brazilian women abroad, where they are believed to suffer the só-called “triple disadvantage” for being women, immigrants, and natives of a developing country. Therefore, this work presents an integrated framework between Neo-institutional theory (Neo-IT) and Mixed Embeddedness (ME) to investigate the outcomes of Brazilian women’s entrepreneurial processes in two Western Europe countries. In order to achieve this primary objective, data regarding the entrepreneurial trajectories, organizational practices, and institutional structures of sixty migrant businesswomen living in Germany and Sweden have been collected online, through hybrid semi-structured interviews. Interviewees have been invited in an earlier step of the research through online questionnaires carried out in Facebook Brazilian expat communities. In terms of methodological design, the present study fits into the embedded type of dual case study (YIN, 2018). The analysis followed Gioia’s et al. (2013) inductive qualitative analysis protocol. The results delineate the steps towards Brazilian migrant women entrepreneurs’ creation of a unique institutional field in these targeted countries, based on regulatory, normative, and cognitive mechanisms that shape the selection criteria of their networking formation and the very institutionalization of these distinctive fields overseas through the dissemination of their entrepreneurial processes’ outcomes. One of its limitations, though, is that it has focused on any kind of entrepreneurial activity owned by Brazilian women in Germany and Sweden, regardless of their business sector or formality/informality status. This implies that the outcomes identified herein may not yet be totally consolidated in the showcased businesses, as many might be classified in the early or maturing stage of migrant women entrepreneurs’ (MWEs) entrepreneurial processes. Additionally, we did not distinguish between businesses created exclusively by migrant women to those created in partnership with their spouses or other family members. Consequently, the great incidence of copreneurship brings into question whether MWE’s businesses classification would fall under traditional definitions of minority family business or female entrepreneurship. Sometimes, in the migratory context, such definitions seemed to be blurred by gender intersections and contextual factors. Findings from this study could be used as an instrument to support public policies for fostering more equative participation of immigrant women in business venturing as well as to the Brazilian government to prevent the evasion of potential entrepreneurs. In terms of theoretical contribution, this research expands the current body of knowledge of immigrant entrepreneurship in Europe and of Brazilian entrepreneurship overseas by proposing an integrative review of both Institutional theory and Mixed embeddedness, in order to provide a consistent possible solution to both Neo-IT’s top-down perspective’s prevalence and Granovetter’s (1973, 1985) embeddedness problem found in the extant literature.