Cultural Entrepreneurship

This book explores the lived experience of cultural entrepreneurship examining the challenges associated with cultural labour including the insecurities of managing precarious working conditions. Drawing on interviews conducted with cultural workers, Cultural Entrepreneurship focuses on how individuals articulate their experience of entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative industries. Noting the importance of place, the local cultural milieu is examined as a means of situating entrepreneurial practices through cultural and enterprise policies, local networks, and significant relationships. Within this framework, the cultural entrepreneurs’ stories reveal means of subverting or re-interpreting identities and the possibility for ‘rethinking cultural entrepreneurship.’ Aimed at researchers, academics and students investigating cultural entrepreneurship, cultural policy and cultural labour, Cultural Entrepreneurship will additionally be of value to creative industry consultants, cultural policymakers, and those setting up creative enterprises. Researchers from fields such as geography, investigating different aspects of the cultural industries in relation to cultural policy and place, will also find this book to be a useful contribution.

The Business of Culture examines the rise of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople who risked financial well-being and reputation by investing in multiple cultural enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rich in biographical detail, the interlinked case studies featured in this volume introduce three distinct archetypes: the cultural personality, the tycoon, and the collective enterprise. These portraits reveal how rapidly evolving technologies and growing transregional ties created fertile conditions for business success in the cultural sphere. They also highlight strategies used by cultural entrepreneurs around the world today.

This book seeks to widen perspectives on entrepreneurship by drawing attention to the diverse and partly new forms of entrepreneurial practice in Africa since the 1990s. Contrary to widespread assertions, figures of success have been regularly observed in Africa since pre-colonial times. The contributions account for these historical continuities in entrepreneurship, and identify the specifically new political and economic context within which individuals currently probe and invent novel forms of enterprise. Based on ethnographically contextualized life stories and case studies of female and male entrepreneurs, the volume offers a vivid and multi-perspectival account of their strategies, visions and ventures in domains as varied as religious proselytism, politics, tourism, media, music, prostitution, funeral organization, and education. African cultural entrepreneurs have a significant economic impact, attract the attention of large groups of people, serve as role models for many youths, and contribute to the formation of new popular cultures.

This Element provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and seeks to lay the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda at the interface of organization theory and entrepreneurship. Its scholarly agenda includes a range of phenomena from the legitimation of new ventures, to the construction of novel or alternative organizational or collective identities, and, at even more macro levels, to the emergence of new entrepreneurial possibilities and market categories. Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn develop novel theoretical arguments and discuss the implications for mainstream entrepreneurship research, focusing on the study of entrepreneurial processes and possibilities.

Even though the study of innovation and entrepreneurship is a diverse, multi-disciplinary endeavour, the role of culture is often neglected or under-emphasized. Building on the cultural turn that has swept across the social sciences and humanities over the past couple of decades, Culture, Innovation and Entrepreneurship provides cutting-edge theoretical and empirical insights about how culture shapes innovation and entrepreneurship. It features novel contributions that enhance our understanding about a variety of important theoretical issues related to symbolic management, framing, legitimacy, optimal distinctiveness, institutional logics and the dynamics of cultural entrepreneurship in and across organizations. This book also addresses a diverse range of topics such as the design of craft goods, the creation of the Guggenheim museum, entrepreneurial ecosystems, open innovation, crowdfunding, the mafia and grand challenges. The chapters in this volume will be of interest to a diverse array of scholars, from those interested in entrepreneurship and innovation to cultural studies, contemporary social theory, organization studies and management. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Innovation: Organization and Management.

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion. Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of "pioneer entrepreneurs"—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.

Cultural Values and Entrepreneurship aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of which elements of ‘culture’ influence, or are influenced by, entrepreneurial activity. Differences in entrepreneurial activity among countries, and regions within those countries, are persistent and cannot be fully explained by institutional and economic variables. A substantial number of these differences have been attributed to culture, and it is clear that some socio-cultural practices, values and norms are more conducive to driving or inhibiting entrepreneurial intentions and activity. However, we need to dig deeper into ‘how’ and ‘why’ cultural practices, and underlying values and norms, matter in entrepreneurial action, in order to more fully understand the complexities of the processes, without making cross-cultural or cross-national generalisations. Unique cultural, national, and institutional contexts present different practices in terms of opportunities and challenges for driving entrepreneurial action. The contributions in this book consider some of the many different facets of the culture-entrepreneurship relationship, and offer valuable insights to our understanding of the field. This book was originally published as a special issue of Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.

In recent years, the global creative economy has experienced unprecedented growth. Considerable research has been conducted to determine what exactly the creative economy is, what occupations are grouped together as such, and how it is to be measured. Organizations on various scales, from the United Nations to local governments, have released ‘creative’ or ‘cultural’ economy reports, developed policies for creative urban renewal, and directed attention to creative placemaking – the purposeful infusion of creative activity into specific urban environments. Parallel to these research and policy interests, academic institutions and professional organizations have begun a serious discussion about training programs for future professionals in the creative and cultural industries. We now have entire colleges offering undergraduate and graduate programs, leading to degrees in arts management, arts entrepreneurship, cultural management, cultural entrepreneurship or cultural economics. And many professional organizations offer specialized training and certificates in cultural heritage, museums studies, entertainment and film. In this book, we bring together over fifty scholars from across the globe to shed light on what we collectively call ‘cultural entrepreneurship’ – the training of professionals for the creative industries who will be change agents and resourceful visionaries that organize cultural, financial, social and human capital, to generate revenue from a cultural and creative activity. Part I of this volume begins with the observation that the creative industries - and the cultural entrepreneurship generated within them - are a global phenomenon. An increasingly mobile, international workforce is moving cultural goods and services across national boundaries at unprecedented rates. As a result, the education of cultural professionals engaged in global commerce has become equally internationalized. Part II looks into the emergence of cultural entrepreneurship as a new academic discipline, and interrogates the theoretical foundations that inform the pedagogy and training for the creative industries. Design thinking, humanities, poetics, risk, strategy and the artist/entrepreneur dichotomy are at the heart of this discussion. Part III showcases the design of cultural entrepreneurship curricula, and the pedagogies employed in teaching artists and culture industry specialists. Our authors examine pedagogy and curriculum at various scales and in national and international contexts, from the creation of entire new schools to undergraduate/graduate programs. Part IV provides case studies that focus on industry- or sector-specific training, skills-based courses (information technology, social media, entrepreneurial competitions), and more. Part V concludes the book with selected examples of practitioner training for the cultural industries, as it is offered outside of academia. In addition, this section provides examples of how professionals outside of academia have informed academic training and course work. Readers will find conceptual frameworks for building new programs for the creative industries, examples of pedagogical approaches and skillsbased training that are based on research and student assessments, and concrete examples of program and course implementation.