Abstract
This thesis explores the paradoxical turn among professionally qualified and highly skilled Indian migrants in 21st-century Australia who leave secure, high-status careers in fields such as information technology and finance to establish small businesses in culturally resonant sectors such as food and yoga. It is guided by the central research question: What roles do migrant aspiration and digital platforms play in the establishment and operation of food and yoga small businesses by professionally skilled Indian migrants in 21st-century Australia?Methodologically, this thesis adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining an online survey with a one-year longitudinal case study design conducted between 2021 and 2025. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews, participant diaries, and digital ethnography. The research is situated in Western Sydney, a region marked by high concentrations of Indian migrants and vibrant cultural entrepreneurial activity. This location provides fertile ground for understanding the interplay of migration, identity, and digital practice.
The findings challenge the prevailing "blocked mobility" thesis, which posits that migrants turn to self-employment out of economic compulsion or labour market exclusion. Instead, this study demonstrates that for skilled Indian migrants, entrepreneurship emerges as a complex, emotionally mediated response to stalled career progression, systemic bias, and a yearning for cultural self-fashioning and what may be termed global Indianism. These ventures are deeply embedded in platform infrastructures, where everyday tools such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook are repurposed to create virtual ethnic enclaves, sustain micro- economies, navigate multicultural urban markets and ‘fulfil the algorithm’. At the same time, these platforms amplify emotional pressures, as curated images of transnational success feed a relentless cycle of aspirational comparison and psychosocial strain. Against a backdrop of discriminated career mobility, diasporic unsettlement, precarious belonging, vernacular understandings and the fear of failure, entrepreneurship becomes both an imagined solution and a source of risk for India’s former middle-class elites.
The thesis conceptualizes this condition as anxpiration – a state in which aspiration and anxiety are entangled through both affective and digital logics. By theorizing skilled migrant entrepreneurship through this lens, the study provides new insight into the aspiration paradox, offering an expanded understanding of structure and agency, the emotional dimensions of labour, and the future of work and belonging in multicultural Australia of the 21st century.
| Date of Thesis submission | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Liam Magee (Supervisor) & Shanti Robertson (Supervisor) |
Cite this
- Standard