The Agency of Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Biographies of the Self-Employed in Ethnic and Occupational Niches of the Urban Labor Market

Through an analysis of interview data and biographies of entrepreneurship, we demonstrate in this article the diverse paths to immigrant self-employment across a range of immigrant populations. We address the utilization of ethnic and occupational niches for establishing businesses and the resources that immigrant entrepreneurs draw upon as they move into self-employment. By drawing on the concept of biographical embeddedness and by emphasizing the agency of individual actors and their motivational and experiential resources, this article moves the analysis of immigrant entrepreneurs beyond the "disadvantage hypothesis" that has characterized much of the previous work on this subject.