Jihye Kim addresses “the distinguishing characteristic of Koreans in Argentina”: a “longstanding and enduring affinity with the garment industry” (p. 3). By focusing on Koreans in Argentina, Kim's study offers a welcome corrective to the “regional bias” (p. 6) of studies on Korean immigrant entrepreneurship, whose theories and methods have emerged predominantly from the context of the United States. Drawing on the concept of “mixed embeddedness,” Kim takes a mixed-methods approach, analyzing secondary quantitative data alongside qualitative data gathered from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in Argentina. From Sweatshop to Fashion Shop is organized roughly chronologically, from the agricultural projects that constituted the first immigration ventures from South Korea to Argentina in the 1960s to the challenges facing Korean Argentine entrepreneurs in the early twenty-first century. This is a durational approach that contrasts with the relatively shorter observational window of previous studies on immigrant entrepreneurship.
Chapter 1 analyzes when and...
