Reading :: Cultural Entrepreneurship

 Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities

By Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn

I have been aware of Lounsbury and Glynn’s work, but seeing a cite to this book in a professional communication manuscript spurred me to finally get a copy of this book. The book is an “elements” book, just 87 pages with references, and I ended up reading it in one sitting. It was worth it, and I’ll be returning to it as I continue to think through entrepreneurship.

The book overviews cultural entrepreneurship scholarship. In doing so, it pulls together diverse scholars’ works, helping us to see a larger body of scholarship emerging. In this scholarship’s understanding, “all forms of entrepreneurial action are fundamentally constituted by similar kinds of cultural processes” and “at the core of all entrepreneurial initiatives is a process of meaning-making” to construct organizational identity (p.1, their emphasis). This view of entrepreneurship is shared by scholars from various fields — they mention rhetoric among others — and they worry about fragmentation of scholarship, so they hope this book will yield a “more synthetic conversation” (p.3). They now define cultural entrepreneurship as “the processes by which actors draw upon cultural resources … to advance entrepreneurship or to facilitate organizational or institutional innovation” (p.3). 

They point out three biases in entrepreneurship scholarship: (1) the start-up bias (which equates entrepreneurship solely with new ventures), (2) the opportunity-discovery bias (“the overly narrow explanatory focus on the psychological or cognitive aspects of opportunity discovery”), and (3) the sole-individual bias (the focus on individuals rather than teams) (p.5). And they approve of shifts toward institutional logics, practice theories, and process approaches, all of which involve make culture more central and use flatter ontologies (p.9). Later in the book, they approve of relational ontologies for exploring identity dynamics in organizations (p.26).

Studying entrepreneurial possibilities from a cultural perspective, they say, provides a way forward for those who have argued about entrepreneurial opportunities: Are they discovered (existing in the world, waiting to be found) or created (endogenously, by the entrepreneurs themselves) (p.37)? The authors see this divide as reproducing “the unhelpful structure-versus-agency dualism” (p.38). Seeing this as a false choice, they propose “a cultural ecology of entrepreneurial possibilities, i.e., a system of interconnected options generated by the interaction of a community with its environment” (pp.38-39). They propose that “possibilities for entrepreneurial action exist at the interstices of distinct identity positions in and around institutional fields where novel entrepreneurial identities and practices may be constructed” (p.39). 

Overall, I found this book very helpful. As an overview, it does the work of a really good bibliographic essay: Drawing different scholars’ work into a larger conversation so that latecomers like myself can understand the conversation, players, and stakes. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship as a cultural practice, definitely pick it up.