Social Responsibility from the Perspective of Different Generations of Immigrant Entrepreneurs: The Unappreciated Benefits

Abstract

Immigrant businesses represent a very large percentage of SMEs in Canada. Significant attention has been given to the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship and their economic contribution to developed countries. However, little is known about the social contributions of these immigrant entrepreneurs to the host country. While the values of immigrant entrepreneurs are rooted in their home culture, they continue to evolve their beliefs and values to integrate into the host country. Emerging literature also affirms that the behaviour of second generation is different from the first generation immigrants. It is known that immigrants’ small business social responsibility (SBSR) is influenced by their home context, but how the host country context influences the SBSR behaviour of different generations is rarely explored. The objective of this study is to understand how society and culture integrate to shape immigrant social responsibility behavior and contributions, with focus on comparing first and second generation. Drawing from mixed embeddedness approach and culture values lens, I theorize about the influence of home country culture and host country context on immigrants SBSR behaviour and the potential consequences of differences in embeddedness on their contributions to the host country. Drawing on 20 detailed semi-structured interviews, I find that irrespective of the differences in generation, immigrants SBSR contributions are influenced by their home culture, their network composition, and the extent to which they are embedded in the host county. At the theoretical level, the mixed embeddedness approach has been augmented by applying it in the field of SBSR. In addition, the study fills a gap by introducing second generation immigrant entrepreneurs’ in SBSR context.