A Structured Literature Review of Immigrant Entrepreneurship. Insights from Italy

This paper reviews the field of immigrant entrepreneurship in Italy, through a Structured Literature Review (SLR), in order to develop insights into how this field is emerging, to offer a critique of the research to date and outline future research opportunities. Immigrant entrepreneurship is a multi-faceted phenomenon and three approaches, - the structural approach, the cultural approach and the Mixed Embeddedness perspective-, addressing both economic and socio-cultural factors, have been used as a starting point to examine literature on this topic. Despite the fact that the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship is in the focus of multiple disciplines, there is still a considerable gap in the academic literature regarding to an exact definition of it. The present research addresses the issue of a substantial lack of an acceptable interdisciplinary definition of “immigrant” and “immigrant entrepreneurship” by means of synthesizing existing literature on the matter and identifying the most current and relevant concepts through the coding method. The research pointed out also the limited contribution of management and accounting studies in deepening the immigrant entrepreneurship phenomenon. Considering the development of this phenomenon in the new era of globalization and the growing of recent flows of immigration in all continents, particularly in Europe, we claim for the need to fulfil this gap through further studies. In this regard, this empirical research provide useful insights in pointing out some research path to cultivate in the future.