The Multi-Capital Playbook: Explaining Immigrant Entrepreneurship Through the Forms of Capital

Immigrant entrepreneurship unfolds through the mobilisation, conversion, and revaluation of diverse resources rather than through static endowments. This chapter introduces a multi-capital playbook that integrates financial, human, cultural, social, symbolic, and spiritual capitals into a single processual lens. We argue that venture trajectories hinge on conversion capacity: the ability to transform trust into finance, origin-country skills into host-market credibility, and weak-tie or transnational networks into opportunities for scale. Symbolic capital in the form of credibility, reputation, and legitimacy emerges as both outcome and catalyst, shaping access to credit, procurement, and regulatory acceptance. The playbook explains why some ventures break out of saturated niches while others remain marginalised, highlighting risks such as over-embeddedness, credential discounting, and failed translation. By synthesising fragmented literatures, the chapter offers a coherent framework for analysing how entrepreneurs recombine capital across institutional settings and concludes with implications for theory, policy, and practice.