Refugee Entrepreneurship and Organizing Social Integration: Insights from Organizational Theory

With the population of refugees across the world at an all time high, the challenge of how to aid refugees has emerged as one of the most important challenges of our time. Meeting this challenge is not merely a technical issue – it also necessitates a thorough understanding of how this crisis can be managed, and how refugees can be included and integrated into their new surroundings. Surprisingly, though, there is a dearth of academic work at the intersection of refugee studies and both entrepreneurship and management theory. This limitation is also a missed opportunity for developing theoretical insights that can enrich and expand scholarly understanding in the aforementioned areas; entrepreneurship can explain the phenomenon of refugees defying institutional arrangements and exercising agency in rebuilding their lives, while organizational theory can shed light into the micro processes at work during such an endeavor. Further, research at this intersection can inform the theoretical understanding of organizational processes of initiatives that originate outside the refugee communities but which aim to benefit them. For these reasons, entrepreneurial organizing by and for refugees lies at the core of the proposed symposium, offering opportunities for scholars interested in organization management and entrepreneurship to ponder and build on work that can hopefully have both theoretical and practical relevance. The studies included herein broach issues related to: (1) new venture legitimation and cultural entrepreneurship, (2) emotions-driven institutional work, (3) compassionate organizing and (4) innovation in institutional voids."