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論文名稱	“Between the Mountains and Plains: Migration, Embeddedness and Belonging among Indigenous Entrepreneurs in Taiwan”
研討會開始日期	2023-11-15
研討會結束日期	2023-11-17
所有作者	Ver Steeg, J. & Verver, M. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
作者順序	第一作者
通訊作者	是
研討會名稱	” Research in Entrepreneurship and Small Business (RENT) XXXVII Conference, European Council for Small Business (ECSB)
是否具有對外公開徵稿及審稿制度	是
研討會舉行之國家	NATPOL-波蘭共和國
研討會舉行之城市	Gdansk
發表年份	2023
所屬計劃案	申請條碼： 112CIFDD600015
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[英文摘要] :
Abstract :
Objectives. Indigenous entrepreneurship (IE) is often aimed at cultural and environmental preservation within community contexts. Research typically places Indigenous entrepreneurial activities within a dichotomy of tradition versus modernity and community versus globalization, considering how outside forces affect established community dynamics and traditional ways of life. Due to this focus, issues of the migration and mobility of Indigenous entrepreneurs have been obscured in research to date. Also, with most studies examining community-based or community-owned entrepreneurship in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, less attention has been paid to Indigenous groups in Asia and to individually-owned enterprises. This research attempts to ameliorate these elisions of geography, individual narratives, and mobility by examining how migration and mobility affect IE in the pseudonymous Rukai community of Swalrawdru in southern Taiwan. We draw on the literature on embeddedness, migration and place-belonging to explain how the movement of Taiwan’s Indigenous entrepreneurs between mountain communities and the urban centers on Taiwan’s plains affects IE, provoking belonging through culture, history, community, nature, and kinship ties.

Literature/review. As a starting point, we consider two recent reviews on IE as a field of study (Croce 2017; Padilla-Meléndez et al. 2022), which elaborate research omissions and set future directions. The first, a systematic review by Croce (2017) determines that scholarship on Indigenous entrepreneurship can be classified into urban Indigenous entrepreneurship (UIE), remote IE, and rural IE. Notably, the situation is different in Taiwan because of the significance of the movement between these classifications. Thus, this research on Taiwan’s Indigenous entrepreneurs challenges that monolithic interpretation or model by incorporating aspects of both the UIE and rural models in its understanding of mixed social embeddedness. Another significant recent work, a literature review by Padilla-Meléndez and colleagues (2022) identifies dominant themes in the IE literature, including Indigenous cultures and values, environmentally sustainable activities, entrepreneurial motivation, and the role of support institutions. Next to a general absence of mobility and migration as themes in the IE literature, these reviews reveal a near complete lack of scholarship of Taiwan and of east Asia more generally. We turn to literature on embeddedness, migration, and belonging in order to situate our work. We first cover the general idea of embeddedness and its relevance to investigating the interface of entrepreneurship and socio-cultural life, and then turn to the entrepreneurship-migration interface. Subsequently, we then discuss how migration trajectories of entrepreneurs affect such aspects as business networking, knowledge or skill development, and opportunity recognition. Finally, we discuss the idea of belonging, here relying on Antonsich (2010)’s framework of place-belonging. We establish how the migration that is evident in the Rukai entrepreneurial community has significant effects on how they experience their embeddedness in and belonging to their Indigenous community, culture, and place, and, by extension, how their entrepreneurial ambitions are constructed and performed in the Indigenous context and beyond

Approach/Method This research is an instrumental case study of how migration affects IE in the Rukai mountain community Swalrawdru, located in southern Taiwan. Eight participants were identified and, through the use of a novel name/resource generator, their personal social networks were constructed. This transitioned into semi-structured interviews focusing on community embeddedness and experiences of setting up and running their entrepreneurial ventures. After the interview (in Chinese and Rukai language) and subsequent translation, the qualitative data underwent several rounds of analysis and inductive coding. Second order analysis organized major themes in embeddedness and place-belonging relevant to their participation in IE. The data is presented in the paper as a composite narrative of their migratory and entrepreneurial trajectories, considering how the research participant came to establish a business paralleling their migration from the mountains to the plains, and back to the mountains.

Results/Findings. This section draws on the results of the personal social network survey and the qualitative interview data to describe the various stages in the entrepreneurial trajectories of the research participants. A composite narrative is constructed for the eight participants, supported by quotations from the interviews to support this narrative and describe its variations. The first subsection details significant migrations away from the mountain communities, in terms of why they moved, what they hoped to gain, and what skills and experience was gained in the urban context. A second subsection will describe how the skills and experiences acquired in the plains fostered the idea of entrepreneurship, identifying such skills as running a hotel, cooking skills, bookkeeping and marketing, as well as developing a sense of business competence. A third section then details the timing and considerations that guided a return to the mountain community and the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities. Being away from the mountains was found to foster a reevaluation of their Indigenous place and, in turn, allowed participants to develop ideas of business ventures located in and connected to the Indigenous place. We will present how some participants, while residing in the plains, began to develop strong feelings of place belonging with Swalrawdru, where they sense that they belong in the mountain community while feeling some disconnect with the plains. A fourth and final section then presents how participants have translated their newfound or modified sense of belonging to their Indigenous place into an actual entrepreneurial venture. These include belonging in terms of culture, history, community, nature, spirituality, and kinship ties. We will provide examples of each of these aspects to illustrate the richness of belonging.

Value/ Implications. In this section, a summary of findings will be discussed in terms of how practices of migration and mobility occur in four distinct stages. For most IE in Swalrawdru, mobility begins with a movement away from the home village in an attempt to improve educational and career opportunities. Later comes a period of introspection, where entrepreneurs reconsider the value of the community both in terms of providing entrepreneurial opportunity and of providing a sense of belonging. Finally, upon a return to Swalrawdru, Indigenous entrepreneurs undergo the challenges and successes of community embedding. This section also revisits the literature and relates these results to previous scholarship. The paper concludes that migration affects IE by (1) providing (prospective) entrepreneurs with a diverse set of resources and (2) making more visible and tangible the value of the Indigenous place. In doing so, our unique contributions include considering the understudied topic of how migration affects IE, especially when considered as individual entrepreneurs who may find success or struggles in terms of embeddedness within their Indigenous communities. We end by reflecting on future research on how migration may affect IE beyond our research context.