Cultural entrepreneurship: from making culture to cultural making

Abstract

We summarize three perspectives on cultural entrepreneurship (CE). Originating in sociology, CE 1.0 focuses on making culture, or the processes by which high culture organizations and popular culture products are created. With roots in strategic management and organization theory, CE 2.0 focuses on deploying culture, or the processes by which culture constitutes a toolkit for legitimating new ventures. We interpret recent scholarship as suggesting the emergence of a third wave, CE 3.0, which emphasizes cultural making, the distributed and intertemporal processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning. We close by speculating on two issues: the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.

Keywords:

• culture
• entrepreneurship
• process
• meaning
• innovation
• narratives

Entrepreneurship and innovation have long interested diverse stakeholders, ranging from entrepreneurs and investors to policymakers and the public at large (e.g., Drucker, 1985; Schumpeter, 1934). For their part, organization and management scholars have contributed significantly to understanding the antecedents, processes, and consequences of entrepreneurship and innovation (e.g., Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1999; for recent reviews, see Garud, Tuertscher, & Van de Ven, 2013; Garud, Gehman, & Giuliani, 2014a). One notable development is the growing body of research that has approached entrepreneurship and innovation from a cultural perspective (e.g., DiMaggio, 1982; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Peterson & Berger, 1971; Wry, Lounsbury, & Glynn, 2011).

In this essay we identify three separate but related streams of research in which the concept of cultural entrepreneurship has developed. Table 1 summarizes how each of these streams has defined the concept of cultural entrepreneurship, their respective understandings of culture and entrepreneurship, and the key actors and mechanisms that have been studied. The first of these streams, which we have labeled Cultural Entrepreneurship 1.0 (CE 1.0), is rooted in sociology and focuses on what we have termed making culture, whether in terms of high culture (DiMaggio, 1982; Johnson, 2007), or popular culture (Acheson, Maule, & Filleul, 1996; Peterson & Berger, 1971; Scott, 2012). The second stream, Cultural Entrepreneurship 2.0 (CE 2.0), originated in strategic management and organization theory, and focuses on what we have termed deploying culture, whether in terms of legitimating new ventures (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Martens, Jennings, & Jennings, 2007), or new markets (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Navis & Glynn, 2010). Drawing on recent studies, we posit the emergence of a third wave, Cultural Entrepreneurship 3.0 (CE 3.0), in which the focus is on cultural making. CE 3.0 marks not so much a break with, but an evolution of, CE 2.0, bringing renewed emphasis to cultural entrepreneurship as a distributed and intertemporal process, as well the processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning.

Table 1. Varieties of Cultural Entrepreneurship.

Perspective	CE 1.0	CE 2.0	CE 3.0
Slogan	Making culture	Deploying culture	Cultural making
Definition	“The carrying out of a novel combination that results in something new and appreciated in the cultural sphere” (Swedberg, 2006, p. 260)	“The process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation” (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001, p. 545)	“A process of continual framing and reframing of future aspirations and past events, even as an entrepreneurial journey unfolds over time” (Garud et al., 2014b, p. 1489)
Concept of culture	The outcome of the “process by which urban elites forged an institutional system embodying their ideas about the high arts” (DiMaggio, 1982, p. 33)	“A flexible set of tools that can be actively and strategically created and deployed as actors struggle to make sense of the world” (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001, p. 549)	Culture is a “code of many colors” traceable in multiple registers such as values, stories, frames, toolkits and categories (Giorgi et al., 2015)
Concept of entrepreneurship	Creating organizational forms; and producing and distributing cultural products	Attracting resources and support through cultural and symbolic realms of meaning	The imagination of possible future trajectories
Key actors	Cultural capitalists (e.g., elite industrialists; monarchs)	Founders and their new ventures	Stories and their “styles” (e.g., in-progress, growth)
	Cultural workers (e.g., artists, freelancers)	Audiences (investors, competitors, consumers)	Categories and their distinguishing practices
Key mechanisms	Classification: erecting strong boundaries between art and entertainment	Storytelling: creating an appealing and coherent story about a nascent enterprise	Collective storytelling: distributed process whereby stories legitimate market categories, while coordinating and delimiting members
	Framing: developing a new etiquette of appropriation between the audience and art	Claiming an identity: making culturally resonant claims about an organization’s central, distinctive, and enduring attributes	Revised storytelling: ongoing relational, temporal and performative process of giving meaning and gaining support
Sources	Acheson et al., 1996; DiMaggio, 1982; Johnson, 2007; Jones et al., 2016; Oakley, 2014; Peterson & Berger, 1971; Scott, 2012; Swedberg, 2006;	Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2010; O’Connor, 2002; Rao, 1994; Swidler, 1986; Zhao et al., 2013;	Dalpiaz et al., 2016; Delmestri & Greenwood, 2016; Garud et al., 2014b; Giorgi et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2011; Manning & Bejarano, 2016; Massa et al., 2016; Wry et al., 2011

Although our review is necessarily selective and stylized, it serves as the basis for identifying several points of convergence and divergence, as well as some potentially fruitful avenues for future CE research. We conclude by offering speculations and provocations concerning two issues: the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.

Varieties of Cultural Entrepreneurship

Cultural Entrepreneurship 1.0: making Culture

DiMaggio (1982) appears to have been the first scholar to explicitly discuss “cultural entrepreneurship.” However, he used the term only twice: in the paper’s title and a subheading. And while DiMaggio never defined the concept per se, the paper’s subtitle is suggestive: “the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America.” Two notions were nevertheless central to his conceptualization of cultural entrepreneurship.

First, DiMaggio distinguished high culture, or “what goes on in museums, opera houses, symphony halls and theaters” (p. 33) from popular culture, whether of the folk or commercial varieties. Drawing on case studies of the founding of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (in 1870) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (in 1881), DiMaggio argued that between 1850 and 1900 two distinct cultural modes emerged in the US: the private or semiprivate nonprofit cultural institution, and the commercial popular-culture industry. Second, he focused on “the process by which urban elites forged an institutional system embodying their ideas about the high arts” (p. 33). ¹ He further explicated three “concurrent but analytically distinct” processes (p. 35): entrepreneurship (creating an organizational form the elite could control and govern), classification (erecting strong boundaries between art and entertainment), and framing (developing a new etiquette of appropriation between the audience and art).

DiMaggio’s emphasis on high culture begs consideration of its alter: popular culture, or what others have termed cultural industries (Hirsch, 1972, 2000). Here the focus is on cultural products, defined as “nonmaterial goods, directed at a mass public of consumers, for whom they serve an esthetic, rather than a clearly utilitarian function” (Hirsch, 1972, p. 639). Although several papers within this stream have been framed explicitly in terms of cultural entrepreneurship, earlier research was not. A notable example is Peterson and Berger’s (1971) study of entrepreneurship in the popular music industry. On their account, such entrepreneurship was a strategy whereby large organizations attempted to cope with turbulent market environments. Building on Schumpeter (1934), they conceived of entrepreneurship “as a novel recombination of preexisting elements,” while stressing that “the art of recombination extends to the moral, cultural, and social organizational spheres as well” (Peterson & Berger, 1971, p. 103, 104).

By comparison, Acheson and colleagues (1996) specifically framed their study of the Banff Television Festival (held annually since 1981) as an example of cultural entrepreneurship. Their analysis highlighted: “team entrepreneurship, the not-for-profit structure, and a dependence on both fees and private and public patronage for covering expenses” (Acheson, et al., 1996, p. 336). Other examples noted by these authors included World’s Fairs, travelling artists, film festivals, as well as national, regional, or local events celebrating visual art, theater, music, and dance (see also Leadbeater & Oakley, 1999; Scott, 2012).

Together, these literatures constitute Cultural Entrepreneurship 1.0, defined as “the carrying out of a novel combination that results in something new and appreciated in the cultural sphere” (Swedberg, 2006, p. 260). In a slogan, this approach focuses on “making culture,” especially organizational forms, governance structures, and cultural products, ranging from museums, symphonies, and operas (DiMaggio, 1982; Johnson, 2007), to pop music firms, film festivals, and do-it-yourself music producers (Acheson et al., 1996; Peterson & Berger, 1971). Connecting this eclectic body of research is a view of culture as a sector or set of industries, and a focus on entrepreneurship taking place within this domain.

Cultural Entrepreneurship 2.0: deploying Culture

As part of the cultural turn within the field of management and organization studies (Weber & Dacin, 2011), Lounsbury and Glynn (2001) inaugurated a second approach to cultural entrepreneurship. They built on Swidler’s (1986) conception of culture “as a flexible set of tools that can be actively and strategically created and deployed as actors struggle to make sense of the world” (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001, p. 549; see also Rao, 1994). Entrepreneurs by extension were conceptualized as potentially skilled cultural operators, interested in shaping how target audiences (e.g., investors, customers, employees) interpret their entrepreneurial ideas and ventures. Accordingly, a key consideration within this stream of literature is the acquisition of legitimacy, whether at the organizational (Martens et al., 2007; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002) or field level (Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Navis & Glynn, 2010).

First, Lounsbury and Glynn (2001) proposed storytelling as a critical mechanism by which actors establish their legitimacy. In their formulation, entrepreneurial stories must have narrative fidelity, claim a distinct identity, and relate this identity within broader socio-cultural understandings. These propositions were investigated by Martens et al. (2007, p. 1107), who provided “the first systematic, large-sample test of the overarching claim that effective storytelling can facilitate external resource acquisition.” Using a mixed methods research design, they studied semiconductor, biotechnology, and Internet content provider firms that completed an initial public offering (IPO). Consistent with Lounsbury and Glynn’s propositions, they found that entrepreneurial narratives positively influenced resource providers over and above information about a firm’s resource endowments.

Second, building on the work of Aldrich and Fiol (1994), Lounsbury and Glynn argued that entrepreneurial storytelling would be most consequential in the case of unfamiliar ideas or in nascent contexts. Further, they reasoned that the content of entrepreneurial stories likely would shift over time, with a greater emphasis on establishing distinctiveness as the entrepreneurial context gains in legitimacy. Some of these temporal dynamics were later explored by Navis and Glynn (2010) in their study of the emergence of satellite radio. Covering 1990 to 2005, their study found that early on entrepreneurs and their audiences were focused on establishing and assessing the legitimacy of this new market. As the field of satellite radio gained legitimacy, however, the focus shifted to differentiating the firms within the market.

As with the CE 1.0 stream, a few notable studies have not been framed explicitly in terms of cultural entrepreneurship. Reflecting on his study of the early America automobile industry, for instance, Rao (1994, p. 41) concluded: “Culture becomes a tool kit or a menu from which actors choose options rather than a unified whole which pushes actors in prespecified directions and entrepreneurs become skilled users of cultural tool kits rather than cultural dopes (Swidler, 1986).” Similarly germane are scholars who have approached the question of entrepreneurship from a narrative perspective (e.g., Gartner, 2007; Garud et al., 2014a; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004). For instance, based on a ten-month ethnographic study, O’Connor (2002) traced how CustomerBuzz’s founder and CEO used different types of stories to justify the company’s existence, convince others to contribute critical resources, and articulate key decisions.

Overall, we label this body of research Cultural Entrepreneurship 2.0, defined as “the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation” (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001, p. 545). Here the focus is on “deploying culture,” in the sense that entrepreneurship entails efforts to legitimate a nascent venture by stitching together available cultural bits and pieces into a coherent and compelling identity. The cultural resources involved have ranged from company and product names (Glynn & Abzug, 2002; Zhao, Ishihara, & Lounsbury, 2013) to stories about market opportunities, business models, and future profits (Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2010; O’Connor, 2002). From this perspective, culture is conceived as a consequential aspect of any entrepreneurial domain, and the scholarly focus is whether and how entrepreneurs deploy cultural resources to legitimate their new ideas and ventures.

Cultural Entrepreneurship 3.0: cultural Making

Although described sequentially, the two preceding approaches to cultural entrepreneurship developed somewhat in parallel, though rarely crossed paths. Whereas CE 1.0 has become an evocative label for theorizing change agents in the arts and cultural industries, CE 2.0 has gained currency among management and organization scholars interested in new venture creation. At the same time, there is burgeoning work which blurs some of these boundaries, suggesting the emergence of a third wave of research, which we have labeled Cultural Entrepreneurship 3.0. The focus of this new wave of cultural entrepreneurship research is not easily categorized as making or deploying culture. Instead, this research draws attention to “cultural making,” or the extent to which culture is both a medium (a “deploying”) and outcome (a “making”) of entrepreneurial action. At the same time, this emerging scholarship brings renewed attention to the “many faces” of culture (for a review, see Giorgi, Lockwood, & Glynn, 2015), drawing on diverse conceptions of culture, ranging from frames and values to toolkits and categories. Thus, CE 3.0 both extends and elaborates core elements of CE 2.0, while integrating theoretical insights and empirical interests from CE 1.0.

Cultural Entrepreneurship as a Distributed and Intertemporal Process

Both CE 1.0 and 2.0 considered cultural entrepreneurship as a process (e.g., DiMaggio, 1982; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). For CE 1.0, this took the form of a process of cultural change; culture provided the setting or the stage on which entrepreneurship took place (e.g., for a review, see Jones, Svejenova, Pedersen, & Townley, 2016). For CE 2.0, this entailed a cultural process of change; culture provided the toolkit constitutive of entrepreneurial action. Taking both insights as a starting point, several recent studies have elaborated the notion of cultural entrepreneurship as a distributed and intertemporal process.

First, cultural entrepreneurship is a distributed process. Both CE 1.0 and 2.0 articulated cultural entrepreneurship as a collective (rather than individual) accomplishment (e.g., Acheson et al., 1996; DiMaggio, 1982; Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2010). CE 3.0 adds an emphasis on the extent to which the actors involved may ebb and flow, or play fluid roles; projects may encompass diverse and even discordant aspirations; and artifacts and materiality may play a critical role in shaping these processes. For instance, Wry et al. (2011) theorized legitimation as a distributed storytelling process, but importantly, argued it need not be consensual. While certain actors may coordinate their “growth stories” to expand the market in which they all co-evolve, diverging interests and varying interpretations may also push others to tell competing stories. In doing so, Wry and colleagues offered a corrective to overly agentic conceptions that sometimes crept into CE 2.0 research. The distributed nature of the CE 3.0 process is exemplified in Jones and colleagues’ (Jones, Maoret, Massa, & Svejenova, 2011) study of the creation, contestation, and legitimation of “modern architecture.” In this case, the process was distributed across contending professionals, clients, logics, and materials, among others. Thus, CE 3.0 draws renewed attention to the role of politics and power in entrepreneurial action. CE 3.0 also dissolves prior dichotomies, such as between entrepreneurs and audiences, and producers and consumers. In contexts such as crowdfunding, for instance, the same audience members may be investors, customers, and suppliers at different points in the journey (Manning & Bejarano, 2016). This suggests the need for further understanding of cultural entrepreneurship as a constitutive process in which entrepreneurship, opportunities, and contexts are mutually implicated even as the entrepreneurial journey unfolds (Garud et al., 2014a).

Second, cultural entrepreneurship is an intertemporal process. Cultural entrepreneurship is not a one-time accomplishment, but an ongoing process affected by the way in which the implicated actors, artifacts, and events unfold over time. For instance, as Lounsbury and Glynn (2001, p. 560) pointed out, cultural entrepreneurs “continually make and remake stories to maintain their identity and status.” Taking such a premise seriously, Garud, Schildt, and Lant (2014b) highlighted a paradox at the heart of cultural entrepreneurship. In order to gain legitimacy entrepreneurs create expectations about the future, but these expectations are bound to be disappointed, thereby undermining their legitimacy (e.g., see Überbacher, Jacobs, & Cornelissen, 2015). Thus, CE 3.0 foregrounds the tensions posed by entrepreneurial legitimation efforts, and extends Lounsbury and Glynn’s original model by highlighting the “legitimacy challenges and jolts that firms confront in fulfilling the expectations set, and the process of revising stories to maintain or regain legitimacy if threatened or lost” (Garud et al., 2014b, p. 1483). More generally, CE 3.0 is more sensitive to the recursive relationships between past, present, and future (Ricoeur, 1988). Entrepreneurs can forge new paths by going back to the future: while their projective narratives are constrained by past events, past events also can be re-narrated at each new horizon. Given these insights, further research is needed on how entrepreneurial narratives “construct time” (Manning & Bejarano, 2016, p. 1), and how this storytelling unfolds at different points in time (Garud et al., 2014b).

Embracing the Multiplicity and Fluidity of Cultural Meanings

Whether intended or not, both CE 1.0 and 2.0 implied a somewhat consensual and unproblematic view of culture. Within the CE 1.0 stream, for instance, the categorization of symphonies and operas as high culture, and music and film festivals as popular culture was not problematic (e.g., Acheson et al., 1996; DiMaggio, 1982; Johnson, 2007; Peterson & Berger, 1971). In a similar vein, for CE 2.0, the use of cultural as legitimating toolkit seems to imply the meanings associated with the various cultural bits and pieces is relatively shared (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2011). By comparison, emerging research from CE 3.0 seems to relax such assumptions. Instead, there is an interest in understanding how entrepreneurial action can create value across multiple repertoires and registers of meaning, and how such cultural meanings emerge and transform (Giorgi et al., 2015).

First, there is the question of how cultural entrepreneurship might create value across multiple repertoires or registers (Stark, 2009; Weber, 2005). Here attention is drawn to multivocality of value, or the extent to which value creation can be justified by more than one legitimating principle or rationalizing account (e.g., Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012). For instance, over a 30-year period, Alessi, an Italian manufacturing company, was able to create and pursue new market opportunities by combining logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production (Dalpiaz, Rindova, & Ravasi, 2016). In the process, the company demonstrated value in multiple registers: high quality products, economic profits, hedonic pleasure, and mass market appeal. Whereas Alessi transformed its customer base entirely, in other cases, organizations may need to remake themselves to remain relevant given the changing tastes of their core customers. In addition to highlighting the importance of comprehensibility and justification in the context of new venture creation, Cornelissen and Clarke (2010) theorized how increased uncertainty and decreased legitimacy would prompt entrepreneurs to adapt or replace the analogies and metaphors they used to justify their ventures.

Second, there are questions about the emergence and fluidity of cultural meanings (Jones et al., 2011). Glynn and Lounsbury (2005) showed how in the wake of resource constraints the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra drew on more mainstream or pop interpretations of classical music, thereby posing a threat to its traditional highbrow canon. Similarly, Delmestri and Greenwood (2016) theorized a process of “allusion” whereby the cultural status and meaning of grappa was transformed, from a low-status product in the 1970s into a luxury liqueur on par with cognac and whiskey. By the same token, entrepreneurial narratives need not “fill in” meanings; they also can equip audiences with cultural toolkits for imbuing their own actions with meaning (Mitnick & Ryan, 2015). More recently, Massa and colleagues (Massa, Helms, Voronov, & Wang, 2016) examined how winemakers in Ontario, Canada, utilized different “vinicultural templates,” essentially toolkits which transformed customers into evangelists.

Looking ahead we see an opportunity for greater engagement between cultural entrepreneurship and issues of celebrity, reputation, and emotions, among others (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008; Massa et al., 2016; Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006). We also see opportunities for scholars to extend work on cultural entrepreneurship to emerging topics such as social entrepreneurship and hybrid organizations (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Grimes, McMullen, Vogus, & Miller, 2013), as well as sustainable and responsible innovation (Ferraro et al., 2015, Pandza & Ellwood, 2013), all domains of entrepreneurship and innovation which are clearly culturally located, and yet, surprisingly have yet to be studied through a cultural lens. At the same time, some methodological innovation may be necessary to capture the resulting accumulation of evaluative criteria and multiplicity of registers in which entrepreneurial action might create value. Notably, the explosion of digital media has solved the problem of finding new and interesting data. But the huge volumes of ever updating information have created a new problem: how to harness these data in rigorous and relevant ways? Emerging examples include creative pairing of digital textual and visual data with other conventional data sources to examine new questions, or to shed new light on perennial ones (Etzion & Aragon-Correa, 2016; Gehman & Grimes, 2016; Hannigan, 2015).

Some Speculations and Provocations

So far, we have delineated two perspectives on cultural entrepreneurship, and posited the emergence of a third perspective, which both extends the original impetus behind CE 2.0, and incorporates important ideas from CE 1.0. Rather than merely balkanizing the landscape, our goal has been to spark some creative friction. Although space constraints have required us to be rather selective and stylized, we hope nonetheless our analysis will prove generative. In the space that remains, we offer some speculations and provocations regarding perspectives and problems that cultural entrepreneurship scholars may wish to consider in the future, labeled here as the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.

The Performativity of Cultural Entrepreneurship

Recently there has been considerable interest in the concept of performativity (for reviews, see Cochoy, Giraudeau, & McFall, 2010; Gond, Cabantous, Harding, & Learmonth, 2016; Muniesa, 2014). The concept derives from Austin (1962), who observed the importance of performative utterances, or speech acts in which to say something is to do something. For instance, when a couple declares “I do,” they are not reporting on a state of affairs, but bringing it about through their utterances.

While performativity is no doubt germane to many domains of organization and management scholarship, it seems especially relevant to our understanding of entrepreneurship. For starters, a core aspect of entrepreneurship is the ability to intervene in the world, to bring new worlds to life. What matters is not whether entrepreneurial stories accurately depict reality, but the extent to which they cultivate meaning and catalyze action. Garud and colleagues (Garud et al., 2014b) noted how the expectations that entrepreneurial narratives raise are neither true or false, but more or less robust depending on their connections to other actors, artifacts, and emergent actions. Others have made similar observations about the performativity of business models (Doganova & Eyquem-Renault, 2009; Perkmann & Spicer, 2010), the performativity of cultural analogies (Etzion & Ferraro, 2010; Glaser, Fiss, & Kennedy, 2016), the creation of new practices (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007), and entrepreneurial journeys more generally (Garud & Gehman, 2016).

The concept of cultural entrepreneurship itself is performative, as testified by its mobilization in popular discourse. For instance, it has been promoted on Twitter (e.g., #CultEnt), hailed by advertising agencies (Fenton, 2012), taught in programming at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia (Harvard Innovation Lab, 2016; University of British Columbia, 2016), and advocated in mainstream media (Tullin, 2012). Looking ahead, cultural entrepreneurship appears well positioned for investigating performativity in two ways: the performativity of the entrepreneurial action under study; and the performativity of our theories in constituting the very domain of our inquiry.

The Cult of Entrepreneurship: Wizards, Captives, or Zombies?

Building on these insights, we now turn our attention to the performativity of the cultural underpinnings of entrepreneurship as a late modern phenomenon. For one thing, entrepreneurship has become a powerful conceptual attractor, hailed in glowing tones by high-powered actors from government, industry, and academe (e.g., Drucker, 1985; Schumpeter, 1934). To put it rather starkly, we appear to be living in a worldwide “cult of the entrepreneur” (e.g., Rackoff, 2014). And yet, despite this celebrity, scholars have scarcely considered the cultural foundations on which the phenomenon of entrepreneurship rests (for an exception, see Carruthers & Espeland, 1991). We see this grand narrative of entrepreneurship taking three potential trajectories, which raise different sets of issues posed here as a question of wizards, captives, or zombies.

First, are entrepreneurs the wizards of our age, capable of conjuring economic prosperity, interpersonal fulfillment, and even societal progress, all with the wave of their wands? On this account, entrepreneurship can be seen as an emancipatory process that challenges the economic, social, institutional, and cultural status quo (e.g., Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009). Or, second, is entrepreneurship simply a dangerous and exploitative cultural trope? Understanding this question seems particularly urgent given concerns about the vanishing corporation and the Uberization of our economy (e.g., Davis, 2016), leaving in its wake legions of unintended entrepreneurs – precarious and contingent workers, desperately seeking meaningful employment (e.g., see Oakley, 2014 on “forced entrepreneurship”). Finally, a third possibility is a zombie takeover of the domain of entrepreneurship. As entrepreneurship pervades university pedagogy, it seems the zombies could reach one of two maxima. At one extreme, the world will be populated by entrepreneurial automatons, a provocative oxymoron to say the least. At the other extreme, destructive creation could overwhelm creative destruction (Garud, Gehman, & Giuliani, 2016; Raju, 2016; Schumpeter, 1934), disrupting the fabric of society.

Looking across these possibilities, it seems important to ask: What are the cultural conditions necessary for the possibility of entrepreneurship as a (il)legitimate field of activity? Inquiring into the mechanisms behind the rise of entrepreneurship as a cultural phenomenon, as well as the contingencies associated with its breakdowns would appear to be an important task for scholars from across multiple disciplines, but especially scholars of cultural entrepreneurship.

Conclusion

Over the past several decades, cultural entrepreneurship has emerged as a vibrant and fertile scholarly domain. On our account, this work has shifted from a focus on making culture to deploying culture. Building on this foundation, we have suggested scholars are currently engaged in a third wave of research focused on cultural making, the distributed and intertemporal processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning. We look forward to being part of the unfolding journey.

Acknowledgements

We thank Michael Lounsbury for his editorial direction, as well as Tyler Wry, Felipe Massa, Stephan Manning, Mary Ann Glynn, and Raghu Garud for their generous comments and suggestions. We also thank the many people who have been involved in building and sustaining the cultural entrepreneurship community, especially the organizers, presenters, and participants of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting professional development workshops held annually from 2011 to 2016, as well as workshops at the University of Leeds Business School in 2010 and 2013.

Notes

1. Relative to this stream, Johnson’s (2007) study of the founding of the Paris Opera (in 1669) is notable. She clarified DiMaggio’s focus on “entrepreneurship in the arts,” while explicating her own preference for cultural rather than institutional entrepreneurship “because it calls to mind the wide array of cultural phenomena that are involved in entrepreneurship … but that may not yet have been firmly institutionalized in a given historical context” (Johnson, 2007, p. 99, footnote 2).