Economy of marginality and familiarity: Making sense of South Asian migrant breakout business in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article examines an emerging phenomenon within the South Asian economy in Hong Kong: Disadvantaged entrepreneurs, mainly from Pakistan, Nepal and India, have adopted breakout strategies to target other disadvantaged migrants, particularly Indonesian and Filipino foreign domestic workers. This challenges the widely shared assumption that breakout strategies of migrant entrepreneurs address primarily the mainstream population. By applying Erving Goffman’s notion of frame, we focus on how these entrepreneurs understand and interpret their (change of) market orientation in the context of a specific entrepreneurial environment, where power asymmetries exist in the economic and political constellation between the ethnic majority and various groups of migrants. Regarding methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted, and analyses were done based on 15 business units with 19 migrant entrepreneurs targeting other marginalised migrant groups with whom they share stigmatisation by the ethnic majority. The findings reveal that four frames around “marginality” and “familiarity” play a crucial role in shaping South Asian migrant entrepreneurs’ market orientation and strategies: a) shared experiences of discrimination, b) unwanted locality as resources, c) common culture, and d) race-based affinity and sympathy. These results contribute to the debates by adding a rather neglected form of market orientation to the diversification of migrant entrepreneurial strategies in existing literature, supplementing the economic and social explanations by applying a cultural sociological perspective of social inequality, and critically reviewing the assumption that breakout automatically generates economic success and social mobility.