Digital ethnicity affordances: from a liability to an asset in immigrant entrepreneurship

Purpose This paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities overcome the liability of newness and foreignness an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as asset in business. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts inductive multiple case approach using social media content. data consist over 3,500 posts, images screenshots from Facebook, Instagram webpages seven successful Vietnamese restaurants Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted NVivo. Findings findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts mediate facilitate three performances together turn a asset: (i) preserving performance through ethnicising, (ii) embracing generativitising (iii) appropriating fusionising. results support introduction conceptual framework depicting interwoven duality horizontal vertical boundary blurring, which former takes place between offline online spaces businesses, latter occurs home host country attachment businesses. Originality/value responds calls for understanding foreignness. It offers fresh look at ethnicity, has been seen negative light field entrepreneurship. illuminates used resource entrepreneurship, specifically platforms.