Digital (Dis-)embeddedness of Immigrant Entrepreneurs from China in Den Haag

Digital technologies allow immigrant entrepreneurs to expand their space-based businesses to online places. Spaces of Chinatown emphasize locational ties, while digital places like WeChat highlight emotional significance to cultural identity. We emphasize digital place-making practices employed in immigrant entrepreneurial activities such as accessing of information, building networks of support, and managing identity. While digital place-making like adopting Uber Eats has created competency issues, we argue that cultural challenges are equally significant.<br/>We adopt a relational relationship to emphasize the importance of familial networks, ethnic enclaves, and community resources in supporting immigrant entrepreneurship by providing access to information, capital, mentorship, and customer bases. Specifically, we study the role of technology in facilitating or impeding immigrant entrepreneurship by allowing for (dis)-embeddedness with host, co-ethnic, and home networks. We take a culture-oriented approach by using Chinese concepts, which can enhance the understanding of social networks on which (dis)embeddedness depends. To understand the liminality of digital practices, we interviewed 20 Chinese entrepreneurs in Den Haag, Netherlands along with ethnographic engagement by volunteering at their business establishments. Axial coding of the transcripts revealed three categories of relationship types, digital non-use, and (dis)embeddedness.<br/>We find that the important position their physical spaces of business, and by extension the relationships, play in their professional and personal identities influence their embrace of, or lack thereof, digital place-making. We argue that these strategic choices are influenced, and complicated, by their need to embed themselves into both the host society and co-ethnic immigrant entrepreneurial networks, as well as manage existing relationships with family and the home country. We find the emergence of social support dominated by three co-ethnic relationships in digital communication, namely, Jiaoyi in family business, Jiaoqing in business partnership, and Jiaowang in business community engagement. These three types of social support regulate immigrant entrepreneurial relationships, creating varied dependencies and tensions in digital place-making.<br/>Jiaoyi from family presents the first tension as intergenerational compulsion, characterized as home country identity-weakening and host country identity-strengthening. Jiaoqing from partnerships suggests a second tension arising from simultaneous competitive and collaborative relationships with co-ethnic business partners. Jiaowang from the ethnic community emerges as the third tension from communal hierarchy inherited from identity of the home country. We emphasize these three tensions in response to the notion that place-making is essentially a networked process, with digital tools providing social environments for greater embeddedness.<br/>We challenge the widespread view that digital place-making largely be considered in the context of digital inclusion. This study introduces the concept of (dis-)embeddedness to identify a salient behavior: immigrant entrepreneurs selectively dis-engage or engage in digital non-use to adjust to<br/>the complexities and particular structures of their social networks. We find that in running intergenerational family businesses, engaging in complex competitive-collaborative partnerships, and negotiating inherited power hierarchies from the home country, immigrant entrepreneurs employ distinct digital non-use patterns. The three digital relationship patterns observed illuminate the liminal nature of connection and separation between digital place or physical space for immigrants juggling virtual spaces with physical places of business.