Women, immigration and entrepreneurship in Spain: A confluence of debates in the face of a complex reality

Entrepreneurship Experiences among Vietnamese Marriage Immigrant Women in Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Taiwan has experienced growing numbers of commercially arranged marriages between Vietnamese women and socioeconomically disadvantaged Taiwanese men. Most Vietnamese marriage immigrant women proactively engage in the labor market due to the heavy financial burden of their Taiwanese and natal families. Employing a sociocultural and post-structural feminist approach, this study draws from life-story interviews of 13 married Vietnamese women to investigate the entrepreneurship experiences among Vietnamese marriage immigrant women in Taiwan. These women are pushed and pulled towards creating demanding micro-entrepreneurships based on their self-employed socialization, thereby fulfilling family obligations and achieving career goals. Targeting their host market, these women operate their businesses using Taiwanese customer networks and their institutionalized learning and sustainable resilience while negotiating self-identity. Running entrepreneurships empowers these women, facilitating their self-identity, social integration, family position within the boundaries of gender, family expectations, and business while they struggle with unexpected challenges. Clearly, these individuals and their significant others, homeland culture and socialization, and their life experiences and positions in Taiwan shape these immigrant women’s businesses and their sense of meaning. This study extends the feminist perspective of this topic, focusing on the sustainable agency and sense of competence of female marriage immigrants.

“People like us”: experiencing difference in the working life of immigrant women

Purpose

The main aim of this article is to research the lived experience of difference. In this article, the authors are interested in the field of working life in the context of entrepreneurship among Turkish women in Sweden.

Design/methodology/approach

The article is based on the stories of two immigrant women entrepreneurs who reflect upon their experience of working life in the context of migration to Sweden. These two stories provide a ground for a discussion regarding the responding to and re‐making of difference by individual subjects. The authors’ analysis is grounded in discursive approaches to narratives, particularly in the positioning analysis.

Findings

In their discussion, the authors focus on the field of work to discuss the changing conditions that affect and are affected by particular constructions of difference in a migration context. In this, the authors present how difference is experienced and put into use differently by the individuals, even under very similar descriptive categories of difference.

Originality/value

This article contributes with an experiential account of difference. It favors the notion of lived experiences within the intersecting structures in the analysis of complex interactions between structures, agents, times and spaces. It demonstrates the importance of attending to spatial, temporal, structural and subjective dimensions of difference.