Between The Mountains And Plains: Migration, Embeddedness And Belonging Among Indigenous Entrepreneurs In Taiwan

Indigenous entrepreneurship (IE) is generally considered to emerge within culturally and geographically monolithic communities, with academic literature presupposing those communities are stationary. This paper is among the first to investigate the role of migration and mobility in IE, developing an instrumental case study of Swalrawdru, a pseudonymous Rukai mountain community in Taiwan. Eight research participants were identified who migrated from the mountains to the cities of the plains when they were young and later returned to the mountains to establish a business. Through the use of a short survey and semi-structured interviews, we analyze the experiences of these Rukai entrepreneurs to consider the ways in which this mountain-plain mobility affects entrepreneurial aspirations and outcomes. In doing so, first, we challenge the dominant monolithic model in IE research. Second, we contribute to the migrant entrepreneurship (ME) literature. The Rukai entrepreneurs are embedded in mountain and plain settings, mirroring the focus within the prominent “mixed embeddedness†perspective on ethnic and non-ethnic networks and resources. However, we go beyond this focus on structural embeddedness to suggest that indigenous entrepreneurs’ aspirations and choices are inspired not by their mixed embeddedness per se, but rather by the place-belonging generated in the process of migration.