Sensemaking in-between the known and the unknown: Narratives of immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States

ABSTRACT

In today's hyperconnected, fast-changing environment, where uncertainty is the only certainty, individuals often find themselves in ambiguity, in-between the known and the unknown times and spaces. During ambiguous transitions, individuals deliberately engage in a cognitive process to make sense of their circumstances by generating the stories of who they are and what is happening. These stories ongoingly update a mental map that enacts a more ordered environment under liminality. This qualitative research collected and analyzed the narratives of 20 relatively resourceful immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States to explore their sensemaking during immigration, entrepreneurship, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This purposeful sampling was informed by the concept of the hybrid identity of immigrants and the emerging evidence that some resourceful immigrant entrepreneurs rely on diverse repertoires of approaches to travel across the complexity of multilayered cultural and institutional contexts. By exploring the sensemaking narratives of these immigrant entrepreneurs, the study investigated how they navigated the tensions in-between two spaces (home culture and host culture) and two times (pre-COVID-19 and during prolonged COVID-19). As a result, this study excavated detailed cognitive processes (mental dialogues weaving different elements into a holistic narrative), influencing factors (backgrounds and surroundings), and characteristics (disequilibrium, ambivalence, and randomness) of sensemaking in uncertainty and ambiguity with rich empirical accounts. Furthermore, the investigation resulted in three overarching findings. First, the study detangled multilayered contextual factors at three levels-global/national/regional, community/institutional, and family/individual-dynamically influencing immigrant entrepreneurs. Second, the study found insights into immigrant entrepreneurs' identity and strategies for navigating continuous changes. Identity was constructed with both solid and fluid stories of participants' values/beliefs, self-evaluations, feelings, and sense of belonging. Immigrant entrepreneurs switched on different modes of actions (develop, strive, quest, create, reflect, and retreat) and strategies (hybrid, match & connect, niche, flow, and bricolage) to respond to changing contexts. Intellectual humility facilitated the cognitive process of immigrant entrepreneurs in shifting their approaches. Third, the study highlighted the narrative mode of thinking, allowing participants to resolve identity paralysis and integrate ambivalence using metaphors and dialectical sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)