Diverging Entrepreneurial Paths of Survivalist Truckers: Migrants’ Ongoing Agency in US Trucking

Görkem Dağdelen

Work, Employment & Society, 2024, vol. 38, issue 6, 1485-1505

Abstract: This article explores the formation of migrant agency by scrutinizing the decision-making processes of owner-operator truckers. Drawing on qualitative data collected among male migrants from Turkey in the US, the main finding is that migrant truckers, by making various decisions at the turning points of their career, choose one of three trucking segments and decide the number of trucks that they own. To understand the differentiated ways agency is formed, the article utilizes forms-of-capital analysis, which reveals how truckers mobilize combinations of social, economic and cultural forms of capital. The study conceptually contributes to the scholarship on migrant entrepreneurship by developing the concept of ongoing agency that combines the temporal aspects of migrant agency with the forms-of-capital analysis. This concept is used to understand how migrant truckers reconfigure their agency as they move between segments and ownership statutes over time.

Keywords: entrepreneurial survivalism; forms of capital; migrant entrepreneurship; ongoing agency; Turkish immigrants; US trucking industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170241258847 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:38:y:2024:i:6:p:1485-1505

DOI: 10.1177/09500170241258847

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().