Gender and Transnational Dynamics in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of Chinese-Owned Nail Salons in New York City.

Immigrant enterprises, especially those in the service sector of the urban economy, are largely gendered and seemingly localized. However, the intersection of gender and transnationalism is often overlooked in the research literature. To fill this gap, we draw on the literature of mixed embeddedness and transnationalism to advance an analytical framework of simultaneous embeddedness to explain the gendered pattern of immigrant entrepreneurship. We do so by taking an in-depth look at a female-dominant industry – Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City. Using data collected from face-to-face interviews and on-site observations in New York City, as well as archival records and media reports about labor-market dynamics in both the United States and China, we find that the development of Chinese-owned nail salons is shaped by contextual factors in both home and host countries beyond socioeconomic characteristics of individual entrepreneurs. Home-country factors in China include labor-force demographics, access to economic opportunities, and the gap between education and career aspiration among young women. These home-country factors are intertwined with changes in US immigration policy, local labor-market reception, and gender discrimination, which function to exacerbate the problem of labor shortage for Chinese-owned nail salons in New York City. We discuss the significance of simultaneous embeddedness and gender in understanding contemporary immigrant entrepreneurship. 摘要: 国际移民企业，特别是那些在地方经济中服务行业的小企业，大多是高度性别化和本地化的。然而，现有关于国际移民创业的文献往往忽视了性别和跨国因素的互动。为了弥补这一欠缺，笔者在混合嵌入模型和跨国主义理论的基础上构建了一个新的分析框架—并行嵌入，并以纽约市华人美甲业为例，通过分析面对面访谈和现场观察所收集的数据以及从中国和美国两处收集到的有关文档资料和媒体报道，探讨性别化的跨国动态如何影响移民创业。本文发现，纽约华人美甲业的发展不仅仅受到个体社会经济特征的影响，还受到来自移居国和祖籍国多层结构因素的影响。祖籍国（中国）的结构因素包括: 劳动力人口特征的变化，更高经济回报的女性就业机会的增加、年轻女性受教育水平和职业发展追求之间的差距等等。而这些祖籍国因素又进一步和移居国（美国）移民政策的变化、当地劳动力市场开放情况和性别歧视等因素相交织，结果导致了纽约市华人美甲业劳动力短缺问题的恶化，对此行业的发展产生负面影响。笔者在文末讨论了并行嵌入模型以及性别因素在当代国际移民创业研究中的重要性。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]