‘The Opportunity to Reinvent Ourselves’: Structure and Agency in Migrant Entrepreneurship

This paper combines an agentic perspective from social cognitive theory with a mixed-embeddedness approach to explore the interplay between migrant entrepreneurs’ agency and the environment, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We used a qualitative longitudinal approach to explore the case of Brazilian entrepreneurs in Western Australia (n=23). The findings illustrate how migrants’ entrepreneurial agency occurs in a systematic manner in response to perceived contextual conditions, and suggest that 1) intentionality, forethought, and self-reflectiveness direct entrepreneurial behaviour in response to contextual factors at both meso- and macro-levels; and 2) self-reflectiveness can play a particularly important role in directing intentional actions when agentic behaviour is embedded in a VUCA context. Findings also shed light on the role played by Australia’s migration policies in shaping migrants’ initiatives and establishing opportunity structures.