Who will I be? Refugee entrepreneurship and founder identity

We conducted a 27-month field study of 23 North Korean Defector (NKD) founders. Founders responded in three different ways to the disparaging default social identities they encountered by self-categorizing into three “avowed” social identities, which served as aspirations for how they would build their ventures. Founders generated sensemaking narratives that explained their behavior – to themselves and to others – by anchoring on the past, present, or future circumstances and claiming individual capabilities to build their ventures. The resulting ventures were characterized by distinctive missions, branding, and hiring preferences and therefore by patterned differences in the roles founders played. We contribute to scholarly understanding of refugee entrepreneurship by showing that the ways in which refugee founders respond to being in a new country and constructing new identities is more varied – because it is embedded in their responses to local social evaluations – than prior research has portrayed. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory (FIDT) by expanding prior understanding of how social identities drive founder role creation. Overall, we show the extension of refugee founder agency as they move from self-categorizing into avowed social identities to embedding themselves in the concrete social relations required to perform a role.