Emotionalized embeddedness: extending the mixed embeddedness framework through Korean entrepreneurship in China

This study introduces an emotionalized mixed embeddedness framework to examine the entrepreneurial practices of South Korean business owners in Beijing and Shanghai. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, we analyze how emotional capital—defined as feeling capacities, emotion management skills and knowledge—is accumulated, activated, converted, and reproduced through everyday practices. In the process of emotional embeddedness, individuals interact with cross-national, national, regional, and community-level opportunity structures. We demonstrate that emotional capital mediates entrepreneurs’ navigation of market opportunities, co-ethnic tensions, institutional barriers, and geopolitical uncertainty. In particular, we show how resilience emerges as a reproduced form of emotional capital that sustains entrepreneurial persistence amid precarious conditions. By conceptualizing emotional capital as a dynamic, embodied resource shaped by its interaction with structural contexts, the study re-centers entrepreneurial agency within the mixed embeddedness framework. It also expands the scope of emotional capital theory into the domain of migrant entrepreneurship, offering a more processual account of migrant embeddedness. As China pivots toward high-skilled migration and selective inclusion, this study provides timely insights into how foreign small business owners are marginalized and yet strive to persist within the shifting policy landscape.