Advances in Cultural Entrepreneurship: Volume 80

Cultural entrepreneurship research is on the rise, with a growing community of scholars paying attention to the cultural processes and outcomes involved in entrepreneurship, strategic innovation, and change. To further develop this community, in this volume we assemble a collection of contributions showcasing two promising advances. In Section A, a first set of papers puts culture in cultural entrepreneurship by highlighting a multi-faceted view of culture and exposing new ways by which culture shapes and is shaped by entrepreneurial action. In Section B, another set of papers takes cultural entrepreneurship beyond entrepreneurship – that is, the prevalent yet narrow focus on new venture legitimation and resource acquisition – by broadening the scope of what cultural entrepreneurship entails and explains. In this introductory paper, we discuss how contributions within each section move the conversation forward and identify cross-cutting themes that can be found in both sections of this volume.

Cultural entrepreneurship research examines how actors upend the status quo by gaining the legitimacy and resources needed to advance novel ways of doing things. Extant studies, however, rarely spotlight an important tension: the pursuit of legitimacy and resources needed to advance adoption is often at odds with the desire to safeguard endeavors from external influence. While entrepreneurs are largely associated with the promotion of endeavors, they are also inclined to preserve meaningful values and practices, uphold family or ethnic legacies and traditions, and protect the integrity and authenticity of cultural products. Many of these valued outcomes are put at risk when endeavors diffuse beyond their cultural hearth and garner the interest of outsiders. How do entrepreneurs promote endeavors while protecting them from unwanted external influence? This paper sheds light on the motives, activities, and strategic approaches to entrepreneurship of actors that are both change-makers and culture-bearers. It elucidates trade-offs between evangelizing activities that promote rapid adoption of endeavors (i.e., the “hare”) and shepherding activities that safeguard the integrity of an endeavor (i.e., the “turtle”). It proposes and calls for research into alternative solutions that transcend the two approaches.

We argue that voice – the sound that people produce when they speak – is an important resource for entrepreneurs, especially when they are pitching to potential investors. We integrate evidence from entrepreneurship, social psychology and linguistics to show that the voice can be regarded both as a tool for entrepreneurs to utilize and as a vital source of information allowing listeners to make judgements about the speaker and their message. To better understand how the voice may be used and interpreted in investment pitches, we develop a model of the relationship between the entrepreneurial voice and investor judgments. Voice depends on entrepreneurs’ characteristics including gender and communication goals but can be utilized to express emotions (purposefully or not) and signal qualities such as competence and trustworthiness. How potential investors interpret these displays depends on cultural expectations and stereotypes. Our review illustrates that female entrepreneurs may find it more difficult to persuade investors due to their naturally higher voice pitch and bias against speech patterns prevalent among young women. We highlight directions for future research exploring the voice as a unique cultural resource for entrepreneurs.

Research on cultural entrepreneurship has explored the role of language in making and giving sense to novel ventures and market categories and in legitimating them. We analyze how an emerging de novo market category, quantum computing, is constructed through the use of analogies and metaphors. Through a multimodal analysis of interview and newspaper data, we find that in addition to using analogies and metaphors to highlight familiarity, actors also use such tropes to expound the weirdness of the new category, thus marking it as profoundly different and novel. Such tropes have a dual function; they draw the boundaries between science and laypeople but also arouse awe and curiosity among the audiences. Our study thus casts light on the cultural work during de novo category emergence.

I am trying to reason how cultural entrepreneurship research still could become more cultural, by developing two ideas: (1) that cultural entrepreneurship research describes the scholarly effort to inquire into how concepts, plans, recipes, rules, and instructions govern and are battled in the emergence of the organization-creation process. (2) Second, that this reveals a great affinity between the cultural and the entrepreneurial and that a more literary approach to writing cultural entrepreneurship research holds promise of a more nuanced, imaginative, and thus more cultural entrepreneurship research. In effect, the entrepreneurial process would, culturally understood, be the successful struggle to move beyond the comfortable place of dominant normality (and its assuring roles and templates) into an “un-insured” temporary space of potentialities, attractive to the imaginative mind for its motivating intimacy with hitherto undisclosed value. Most of this comes from re-reading Clifford Geertz’s (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures using Stephen Greenblatt’s (1997) The Touch of the Real as a companion. It brings me to the conclusion that we have never quite been Geertzian, and at least not Geertzian enough.

Scholars have examined the importance of culture in entrepreneurship since at least the 1970s. Lounsbury and Glynn (2001) gave these efforts new impetus by explicitly theorizing entrepreneurship as a cultural process. In the intervening 20 years, work in this area has proliferated. To date, however, this work has emphasized the positive aspects of cultural entrepreneurship almost exclusively. Not all episodes of cultural entrepreneurship are positive, though, and not all entrepreneurial stories have a happy ending. Acknowledging this, we develop a framework for investigating the dark sides of cultural entrepreneurship. We posit four pathways through which cultural entrepreneurship might lead to negative outcomes. Along one dimension, we distinguish false promises and harmful practices. The second dimension differentiates between negative outcomes and negative spillovers. We illustrate our arguments with real-world examples, and discuss how our framework signals new research opportunities related to corruption and wrongdoing, as well as the potential for cultural entrepreneurship research to focus on authenticity as well as legitimacy.

Management research has begun to explore how cultural entrepreneurs use established or declining societal traditions to create distinctive new ventures and products. In this study, we propose an alternative pathway for creating entrepreneurial opportunities, that is, through leveraging extinct societal traditions. Extinct societal traditions yield opportunities to create highly distinctive products and ventures, yet their use entails substantial challenges. To understand how entrepreneurs can successfully leverage extinct societal traditions, we investigate the case of The Merchant of Venice, an Italian venture established in 2013 that produces luxury perfumes based on the perfume-making tradition that flourished in Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and disappeared afterwards. Our study illuminates how cultural entrepreneurs can leverage extinct societal traditions by (a) exhuming lost knowledge and practices, (b) validating them as an authentic and appreciable tradition of a given community and territory, and (c) elevating their meaningfulness as core to place identity. Our study contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and traditions by revealing the distinct challenges that resurrecting extinct traditions entail, enriching the understanding of types, goals, and processes of cultural entrepreneurship, and widening current knowledge of the roles of tradition custodians.

This paper examines how cultural holes that exist at the intersection of institutional fields influence the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Through an exploration of physician-founded ambulatory surgery centers in the United States, we examine how the presence of cultural holes presented doctors with alternative beliefs, values, and practices to overcome the cultural constraints around entrepreneurship within the medical profession. In doing so, this study extends cultural entrepreneurship research by bringing cultural holes to the forefront, empirically showing how they facilitate entrepreneurial action and proposing other contexts where cultural holes may affect entrepreneurial actions and outcomes.

Entrepreneurs frequently tout how their ideas and innovations will become the “next big thing.” Yet, many such innovations – after the initial excitement and an upsurge in expectations – may experience a bust following the initial boom. We develop a conceptual framework to theorize how entrepreneurs may attract attention and garner support from wider stakeholders through the use of framing strategies. Yet, these framing activities will also invite more diverse participants and lead to an increasingly incoherent and imbalanced frame at the collective level, making it challenging to maintain resonance among key stakeholders, in turn hampering the healthy development of the nascent market in the long run. Looking beyond just the positive and short-term effects of cultural entrepreneurship on market emergence, we offer a more balanced view by examining the potential downsides of entrepreneurial legitimacy-building strategies.

Market actors are simultaneously constrained and enabled by the structures they operate within, which opens opportunities for strategic actors. We build on cultural entrepreneurship and market category research to advance an agency-based perspective that brings together research streams on positioning for optimal distinctiveness and shaping with category strategy. We distinguish legitimating narratives for an individual position from initiatives aimed at category construction, and propose that linking these is a basis for strategic advantage. Market transformation involves strategic actors crafting differentiating stories that make an individual position compelling, and then extending these narratives to construct an abstract schema that creatively combines cultural defaults. We further highlight that transformative agency requires an engaged audience, such that stakeholders are willing to consider a new narrative.

Extant research presents firms’ purpose as a consensual and positive attribute. This paper introduces an alternative perspective, which sees firms’ purposefulness as defined in relation to specific audiences. A firm’s purposefulness to a focal audience can be either positive or negative. Audiences find firms with which they share a common prioritization of issues more purposeful in absolute terms. Audiences find firms with which they share a common understanding of issues positively purposeful. Conversely, audiences find firms with an opposite understanding of issues negatively purposeful. Audiences harness specific resources to support firms they find positively purposeful and to oppose firms they find negatively purposeful. This paper introduces topic modeling and word embeddings as two techniques to operationalize this audience-based approach to purposefulness.

Entrepreneurship evolves in and around fields, particularly around the creation of opportunities. A central problem remains that entrepreneurial opportunities are both distributed among and co-created by embedded actors. We propose framing this in cultural terms as a “multiverse problem,” whereby entrepreneurial possibilities are understood within the bounds of a field, but also through traversing adjacent topographies. We argue that a focus on entrepreneurial moments captures important dynamics that bring together adjacent possibles, leading to drastically different pathways. The usefulness of this argument is illustrated in this paper through the articulation of a cultural cartographic approach to mapping and realizing entrepreneurial possibilities. We develop four principles of cultural cartography, apply them to several examples, and demonstrate implications to cultural entrepreneurship and adjacent theoretical traditions.

In this paper, we reflect on the origins and development of our theory of cultural entrepreneurship. We highlight the serendipity that was part of its genesis, and note how our arguments and thinking evolved over time with the literature. We conclude by suggesting some fruitful lines of scholarly focus moving forward, and emphasize the importance of context and cultural process in understanding our own ideational development as well as those of all entrepreneurs – whether they are involved in creating a high tech venture, solving a social problem, transforming a corporation or public agency, or contributing to some other socio-economic process.