An Integrative Model of Migrant Women Entrepreneurship in Family Businesses (MWE-FB): The Substratum Market System Perspective

This article develops and explains an integrative model of migrant women entrepreneurship in family businesses (MWE-FB). The model contributes to the literature in three ways. First, we offer a comprehensive summary of the findings derived from 30 articles exploring entrepreneurship at the intersection of migrant women and family businesses. Second, we extend the conventional frameworks such as the interactionist model, mixed embeddedness model, entrepreneurship imagery and disadvantage model, ethnic minority and women’s enterprise model, and resources-strategies-outcomes model by considering several additional groups of variables such as migrant women’s motives, migrant women’s conditions, distinct migrant women’s strategies, and additional outcomes. Third, we develop a distinct interpretation of the proposed model based on the substratum market system perspective. This interpretation locates family-business-driven migrant women’s entrepreneurship within fundamental authentic provisioning activities rather than the realities of opportunity search and resource utilization. The substratum interpretation indicates that service delivery strategies offer a direct path of moving from the substratum level to the formalized level of the market. This work also detects some avenues for further exploration. One of the most prevalent gaps in the extant literature on migrant women’s entrepreneurship is the exploration of entrepreneurial movement between developing countries.