Abstract

The paper starts with an overview on the growing literature on immigrants entrepreneurship, aiming at developing a research approach on this topic within action-theory framework. It then presents a typology of different kinds of economy characterized by a high immigrants entrepreneurship rate, taking into account two distinct variables: the embeddedness, on one hand, and the territorial pattern on the other. The theoretical framework pointed out in the first part of the article is then applied on two immigrants entrepreneurs groups: Italian ice-cream makers and "pizzaioli", placed in the German city of Frankfurt am Main. The former shows a more complex embeddedness of its economic action and transnational business activities, the latter is shaped by smaller and more bounded networks and it is involved in a local level.