Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business

Abstract This chapter investigates the ways in which systems psychodynamic theory and practice can contribute to our understanding of how ethnic minority enterprises operate in superdiverse urban settings. Systems psychodynamics is an approach that explores the interaction between collective structures, norms, and practices in social systems and the perception, motivations, and emotions of minority entrepreneurs within those systems. The chapter argues that the systems psychodynamic literature can be combined with perspectives on superdiversity to extend our thinking about the psychodynamics of migrant business. Focusing on systems psychodynamics provides an opportunity to highlight the contextually specific ways in which unconscious dynamics, emotional responses, and social power relations within the migrant business combine to promote and to prevent enterprise. This can be seen as a way of promoting employment and local development, while also kick-starting broader business regeneration. The chapter reviews the key ideas and controversies of minority entrepreneurship. It illuminates how systems psychodynamic theory can enrich our understanding of the ways in which ethnic minority enterprises interconnect in encounters whose participants have different biographies, trajectories, and linguistic histories. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how a synthesis of systems psychodynamics and diversity sheds new light on the complex and nuanced experience of ethnic minority enterprises and the work territory they are creating for themselves. Exploring migrant enterprise as an organizational system creates a distinctive new perspective for systems psychodynamic and superdiversity perspectives and helps us to identify and articulate new implications for small firms’ research and practice.