Deepening the Liaison: Mixed Embeddedness and Economic Sociology

Mixed Embeddedness is a consolidated approach to investigate entrepreneurial migrant minorities that has informed numerous empirical studies. This paper takes a theoretical perspective, establishing a dialog with the major traditions of economic sociology to extend this approach in two directions: i) it adds a micro-level theory of action to permit closer scrutiny of the mechanisms that generate migrant entrepreneurship; and ii) it considers the normative and cultural aspects of embeddedness from a neo-institutionalist standpoint in order to gain a more complete understanding of the processes whereby migrant enterprises take a particular shape once they have been set up, and the spatial patterns they assume.