Abstract
Building on the social network and strategic entrepreneurship literature, we investigate the overall relationship between returnee entrepreneurs’ networks in different periods and locations, domestic resource acquisitions and firm performance. While the labor mobility literature emphasizes the “gone but not forgotten” networks in the prior location of migrants, other studies argue that returnees suffer from a lack of local networks. Our findings show that returnee entrepreneurs are different in the extent of their home country embeddedness while they are overseas, which indicates different degrees of enduring networks in the home countries. The effect of home country embeddedness improves the performance of returnee entrepreneurship via domestic resource acquisition, and this effect could be substituted by pre-overseas local ties and the presence of local top management team (TMT) members. This study extends returnee research by shedding light on the importance of network maintenance in determining whether the home country’s network endures or decays and by highlighting the interactions of ties in the different periods of pre-overseas, during overseas, and after return.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Journal of World Business |
Volume | 54 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 6 Sept 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan 2019 |
Keywords
- returnee entrepreneurship
- home country embeddedness
- gone but not forgotten
- resource acquisition