Refugee Entrepreneurship as Career ‘Re’construction: A Dual Embeddedness Perspective.

In this paper, we bring together career construction and dual
embeddedness theories to examine how refugees reconstruct their careers
after their arrivals in host countries. Based on in-depth data from 11
recently arrived refugees in Germany, we use comparative case study as a
method to examine and theorize the relationship between dual embeddedness
and refugee career reconstruction path. The results bring forth the
notion of job creation as well as two mechanisms - information search and
willingness to cope with uncertainty - through which refugees reconstruct
their career, each of which has different implications for the degree of
refugee career reconstruction. By combining behavioral with social
network theories, we discuss the nature of job creation and job seeking,
and offer new insights into both the career construction and dual
embeddedness literatures as well as practical recommendations for refugee
integration.