Power engagement in migrant women’s entrepreneurship

This paper questions the form of power attributed to migrant women entrepreneurs often emanating from their pre-established social positions, which limits their engagements to mere reaction and adaptation to dominant power holders (i.e. specific groups, contexts, structures). Drawing on the life stories of four migrant women entrepreneurs of Turkish origin in Sweden and the Netherlands, we examine how they experience power as an embodied and affective phenomenon through a multiple case study approach. Going beyond the positional power attributed to women, we adopt a critical feminist perspective on power and demonstrate how migrant women entrepreneurs actively exercise different ‘modalities of power’ (power-over, power-to and power-with) and build ‘power agility’. The study contributes to migrant women’s entrepreneurship by uncovering their power as an emergent attribute rather than as a fixed parameter and by articulating how this ‘agility’ is at the core of migrant women entrepreneurs’ capacity to generate transformative effects crossing over individual, relational, contextual, and systemic aspects and levels.