Embedding against the odds: how high-skilled immigrant entrepreneurs navigate constrained ecosystems through strategic networking

Despite the centrality of social networks in entrepreneurial success, research on entrepreneurial ecosystems and embeddedness often adopts a structuralist lens, portraying networks as stable, readily available components that facilitate access to resources and opportunities. This perspective underplays entrepreneurs’ strategic agency, particularly in constrained ecosystems where access to networks is uneven and exclusionary. Anchored in mixed embeddedness theory, this study investigates how high-skilled immigrant entrepreneurs construct and mobilize social networks for business success and considers the implications of these strategies for ecosystem development. Based on semi-structured interviews with 22 high-skilled immigrant entrepreneurs in New Zealand, supported by egocentric social network analysis and archival sources, the study identifies three distinct but non-exclusive networking strategies: network adaptation, network bricolage, and strategic exit. These strategies show how entrepreneurs navigate exclusionary environments by adapting to local expectations, circumventing constraints through transnational networks, or pursuing strategic exit through relocation or external reorientation towards more enabling ecosystems. Theoretically, the study contributes to mixed embeddedness theory by introducing the concept of agentic embeddedness, which positions embeddedness as actively constructed, negotiated, and reconfigured rather than structurally given. Practically, it offers insights for designing more inclusive ecosystems that support integration, retention and long-term success of immigrant entrepreneurs in host-country context.