Nostalgia as a Catalyst for Home-Return Entrepreneurship Among Chinese Migrant Workers

Most existing studies focus on the objective factors that influence migrant workers’ decisions to return to their hometowns to start businesses, while paying little attention to the subjective factor of “nostalgia,” a psychological state reflecting emotional ties to a place. To address this gap, this study constructs a theoretical model integrating place attachment theory, motivational theory, and social cognitive theory to investigate the influence of nostalgia on migrant workers’ home-return entrepreneurial behavior. The empirical results indicate a significant positive relationship between nostalgia (within the Chinese socio-cultural context) and home-return entrepreneurial behavior. Specifically, emotional nostalgia boosts all three motivations (survival, social, and achievement), whereas identity nostalgia primarily fuels survival motivation with less impact on social and achievement goals. Home-return entrepreneurial motivations mediate the relationship between nostalgia and entrepreneurial behavior. Furthermore, policy and market environments moderate the impact of entrepreneurial motivations on behavior. The market environment significantly moderates the mediating effect of motivations, whereas the moderating effect of the policy environment on this mediation is non-significant. This study elucidates the role of nostalgia, shaped by China’s dual urban-rural structure, in driving migrant worker entrepreneurial, revealing the underlying psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions, thereby contributing novel theoretical perspectives to the entrepreneurship literature.