How Entrepreneurs Become Skilled Cultural Operators

Abstract

Cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management perspectives portray entrepreneurs as skilled cultural operators and often assume them to be capable from the outset to purposefully use ‘cultural resources’ in order to motivate resource-holding audiences to support their new ventures. We problematize this premise and develop a model of how entrepreneurs become skilful cultural operators and develop the cultural competences necessary for creating and growing their ventures. The model is grounded in a case study of an entrepreneur who set up shop and sought to acquire resources in a culturally unfamiliar setting. Our model proposes that two adaptive sensemaking processes – approval-driven sensemaking and autonomy-driven sensemaking – jointly facilitate the gradual development of cultural competences. These processes jointly enable entrepreneurs to gain cultural awareness and calibrate their symbolic enactments. Specifically, while approval-driven sensemaking facilitates recognizing cultural resources to symbolically couple a venture’s identity claims more tightly with the cultural frames of targeted audiences and gain legitimate distinctiveness, autonomy-driven sensemaking enables recognizing cultural constraints and more effective symbolic decoupling to shield the venture from constraining cultural frames and defend the venture’s autonomy and resources. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the theoretical implications of our study for cultural entrepreneurship and symbolic management research.

Cultural entrepreneurship: from making culture to cultural making

“…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(Garud et al, , p. 1483.…”

Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-ups?

“…Further, upon transcription, the interviewees were sent copies for respondent validation before analysis (Bryman and Bell 2015, 630;Hartley 2004). Inter-rater reliability checks were secured through online and personal meetings, founding the bases of the discussion whereby relevant concepts and themes were drawn from the transcribed material via an illustrative case design (Yin 2012). This served to guide the study and more general discussion along the research process.…”

BeyondHomo Entrepreneurus: Judgment and the Theory of Cultural Entrepreneurship

“…Moreover, scholars have highlighted how the effects of entrepreneurial stories on entrepreneurial identity and legitimacy are shaped by category and market dynamics (e.g., Zhao et al, , ), institutional pluralism and complexity (Greenwood et al, ; Kraatz and Block, ), and the existence of multiple audiences (Fisher et al, ). While findings have revealed that astute cultural communications coupled with appropriate behavioral signals enable capital acquisition, these developments have more richly theorized how cultural context plays a key role in shaping how entrepreneurs act as ‘skilled cultural operators’ who are able to harness cultural resources in the pursuit of firm goals (e.g., see Rao, ; Sarasvathy, ; Überbacher et al, ). In addition, capital acquisition provides new feedstock for subsequent storytelling, highlighting the iterative and recursive nature of cultural entrepreneurship.…”

“…Here, we focus on three aspects of these facets. First, as Lounsbury and Glynn (, p. 560) noted, one implication of their model is that organizations likely must ‘continually make and remake stories to maintain their identity and status.’ Such iterative dynamics are evident, for instance, in work by Überbacher et al (, p. 927), who sought to understand the ‘processes and the corresponding trials, errors and setbacks involved when entrepreneurs mobilize their cultural toolkits and try to acquire legitimacy and resources for their ventures.’ Thus, recent work has made explicit the iterative dynamism in entrepreneurial storytelling.…”

“…While findings have revealed that astute cultural communications coupled with appropriate behavioral signals enable capital acquisition, these developments have more richly theorized how cultural context plays a key role in shaping how entrepreneurs act as 'skilled cultural operators' who are able to harness cultural resources in the pursuit of firm goals (e.g., see Rao, 1994;Sarasvathy, 2008;Überbacher et al, 2015). In addition, capital acquisition provides new feedstock for subsequent storytelling, highlighting the iterative and recursive nature of cultural entrepreneurship.…”