Community logics enactment and refugee entrepreneurship

A growing stream of research examines how individuals and organizations re-order their post-disruption reality moving into future endeavors. A central challenge in dealing with disruptions involves navigating the paradoxical processes of escaping and integrating aspects of one’s disrupted past into the future. One research context that particularly highlights this paradox of escaping and integrating across multiple levels is the ongoing global refugee crisis. We shed light on this paradox by exploring the phenomenon of refugee entrepreneurship. We conduct a qualitative study of venturing efforts of refugee immigrants following their disruptive (and often traumatizing) forced migration from one institutional context to another. We find that they make sense of and identify with community in different ways, creating dynamics that influence organizing processes and outcomes, and develop a model of community logics enactment. In exploring these dynamics, we explain how community-based logics emerge, whereas those logics are typically taken as given. Our findings contribute to the literature on adapting to disruption by demonstrating how refugees’ efforts to escape and integrate their past anchors and orients venturing activities within (and between) communities. By doing so, our findings provide novel insights on how forced human mobility across borders translates into the emergence and workings of organizations.