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Public sector management, stakeholder management, collaboration and strategy.

Undergraduate (final-year) or master's-level students (Master in Public Administration, Master in Management). Designed for courses in nonprofit management, public administration and/or international development. Can also be used in any course, such as strategic management, sustainable development or corporate social responsibility, that covers stakeholder theory, or stakeholder management as a topic.

Decentralization has changed the way core services are delivered to local populations in sub-Saharan Africa. This in turn has forced nongovernmental organizations, international aid agencies, corporations and other development partners to change the way they engage with government in their shared efforts to help improve the living conditions of people living under the threshold of poverty in this and other parts of the world. This modular ethnographic teaching case uses the specific example of the water sector in Malawi to help highlight the complexity of multiple stakeholder relations in an international development context.

Upon completion of this case, students should be able to: identify and understand the different goals and issues that individual stakeholders in cross-sector partnerships are dealing with; identify and understand the power/control dynamics at play in these relationships; analyse the advantages and disadvantages associated with different ways of coordinating multi-stakeholder partnerships; and develop recommendations for structuring multi-stakeholder relationships in developing and emerging markets that balance efficient service provision with concern for individual stakeholder priorities.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.