How refugee entrepreneurs improvise: bricolage in an emerging economy

Global migration has become a major economic, political, social and cultural issue in recent years. Although many refugees are pushed into entrepreneurship due to blocked mobility, lack of financial capital and missing intercultural resources, asylum seekers and refugees have not been in the limelight of entrepreneurship research. According to previous studies, entrepreneurs focus primarily on the resources they have on hand and tend to ignore market needs in uncovering an opportunity, a behaviour referred to as "bricolage”. In this study we discuss the theory of entrepreneurial bricolage in a refugee entrepreneurial context, using a sample of twenty Syrian entrepreneurs in the food business in Turkey. We identify various forms of bricolage used by Syrian refugee entrepreneurs in Turkey, the strategies by which those forms are employed, the mechanisms through which they are expressed and the ways in which these change during various stages of the entrepreneurial process.