No Entrepreneurship without Opportunity: The Intersection of Return Migration Research and Entrepreneurship Literature

Abstract

Abstract The article proposes a theoretical discussion at the crossroads of the return migration scholarship with the entrepreneurship research. Its main goal is to build an analytical framework in which entrepreneurial experiences of international return migrants are conceptualized. The fertile theoretical legacy within the study of entrepreneurship along with an idealized view of the positive effects of migration constitute essential premises for understanding the biased outputs of the empirical studies of entrepreneurship upon return to the origin country. Firstly, the article draws on the main lines of theorising opportunities within the Weberian and Schumpeterian theoretical traditions. Secondly, it points out how contemporary studies of entrepreneurship reinforced this perspective and placed great emphasis on individual agents able to benefit from opportunities within the return context. The final part of the paper illustrates several modalities in which scholars concerned with return migration were affected by the mythical image of the entrepreneur. As a corollary, necessity entrepreneurship is sporadically used in this niche of study and it usually has only a complementary role. The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges of transposing entrepreneurship’ theoretical insights into different empirical research designs.