Preprint

Cultural Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Potential through Value Creation

Authors:
  • King's College London
Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.
To read the file of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

This thesis explores the challenges and opportunities of cultural entrepreneurship, exploring current conceptualisations of cultural entrepreneurs and to find new perspectives and recommendations for cultural entrepreneurs of the future. Cultural entrepreneurship is a contested, yet essential aspect of the growth of artists and arts organisations globally. Though there are similarities, this research demonstrates that cultural entrepreneurs from different backgrounds, industries and of varied sizes need different things and have different barriers so cannot be understood in the same way. Digital technologies and local networks do offer new possibilities for innovation however these are limited in scope and require further investigation and investment. Despite psychological, political and financial barriers to entrepreneurship in the creative industries, finding a balance between artistic, social, economic and institutional innovation for the various actors throughout the arts offers key insights to how artists and arts organisations can be more entrepreneurial.

No file available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the file of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Article
Full-text available
London is a global media city where over 30 per cent of the workforce is from black and ethnic minorities. Yet only seven per cent of those in media production come from these minorities, and they are concentrated in lower level and non-mainstream jobs. The authors argue that the anachronistic survival of institutional racism is not simply about the survival of a discriminatory ‘monoculture’. While racism is enabled by the major casualisation of the industry, it is also functional, helping to defend a stable process of elite formation and defence in a key area of capitalist ideological production. This racism is about power and the authors' research into why ethnic minority professionals quit London's media production sector also explains how this power imbalance deters resistance.
Article
Full-text available
“Arts entrepreneurship” is beginning to emerge from its infancy as a field of study in US higher education institutions. “Cultural Entrepreneurship”, especially as conceived of in European contexts, developed earlier and on a somewhat different but parallel track. As Kuhlke, Schramme, and Kooyman [(2015). Introduction. Creating cultural capital: Cultural entrepreneurship in theory, pedagogy and practice. Delft: Eburon] note, “In Europe, courses began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s … primarily providing an established business school education with an industry-specific focus on the new and emerging creative economy.” Conversely, the development of “arts entrepreneurship” courses and programmes in the US have been driven as much or more from interest within arts disciplines or even from within the career services units of arts conservatories as a means toward supporting artist self-sufficiency and career self-management. This paper looks at the conceptual development of “arts entrepreneurship” in the US as differentiated from “cultural entrepreneurship” in Europe and elsewhere. Its intention is to uncover where the two strands of education (and research) are the same, and where they are different. In addition to a review of existing literature on European cultural entrepreneurship, US data is drawn from a new survey and inventory of US arts entrepreneurship programmes developed for the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru).
Article
Full-text available
Communities of practice are emerging as an innovative approach to faculty development. While collaborative learning is becoming popular in the classroom, autonomy and individualism continue to dominate the culture of higher education for faculty. However, as we begin to recognize that old solutions to new problems are no longer effective, there is a growing desire for innovative engagement requiring the embrace of multiple perspectives. This takes the development of new habits of mind and discourse. For my dissertation, I engaged in a qualitative study with my colleagues where we experimented with generative approaches to dialogue in a community of practice. It became apparent that creating supportive, collegial spaces where we can explore beyond the edge of what we currently know can help us bridge across differences, harness the potential within diversity, and step into the emerging future. However, it also became apparent that this quality of dialogue is not easy.
Article
Full-text available
Grounded theory is a qualitative research approach that uses inductive analysis as a principal technique. Yet, researchers who embrace this approach often use sensitizing concepts to guide their analysis. In this article, the author examines the relationship between sensitizing concepts and grounded theory. Furthermore, he illustrates the application of sensitizing concepts in a study of community-based antipoverty projects in Jamaica. The article contains commentary about trustworthiness techniques, the coding process, and the constant comparative method of analysis, as well as a synopsis of study findings.
Article
Full-text available
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.
Article
Full-text available
Over the last 15 years, business model innovation (BMI) has gained an increasing amount of attention in management research and among practitioners. The emerging BMI literature addresses an important phenomenon but lacks theoretical underpinning, and empirical inquiry is not cumulative. Thus, a concerted research effort seems warranted. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature on BMI. We identify and analyze 150 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on BMI published between 2000 and 2015. We provide the first comprehensive systematic review of the BMI literature, include a critical assessment of these research efforts, and offer suggestions for future research. We argue that the literature faces problems with respect to construct clarity and has gaps with respect to the identification of antecedent conditions, contingencies, and outcomes. We identify important avenues for future research and show how the complexity theory, innovation, and other streams of literature can help overcome many of the gaps in the BMI literature.
Chapter
Full-text available
Entrepreneurship research can be broadly placed into three categories: that which examines the people (entrepreneurs); that which examines the process and that which examines the entrepreneurial or business opportunities. This chapter specifically looks at social entrepreneurial opportunities and the process of identifying and evaluating these types of opportunities. I address three important questions: What makes social entrepreneurial opportunities different from other types of opportunities? What makes social entrepreneurship special? How do social entrepreneurs find social entrepreneurial opportunities?
Article
Full-text available
The concept of communities of practice has generated considerable debate among scholars of management. Attention has shifted from a concern with the transmission and reproduction of knowledge towards their utility for enhancing innovative potential. Questions of governance, power, collaboration and control have all entered the debate with different theorizations emerging from a wide mix of empirical research. We appraise these key findings through a critical review of the literature. From a divergent range of findings, we identify four main ways in which communities of practice enable and constrain innovative capabilities as (a) enablers of learning for innovation, (b) situated platforms for professional occupations, (c) dispersed collaborative environments and (d) governance structures designed for purpose. Our conclusion signals the way forward for further research that could be used to improve our understanding of different contextual forms and how they may align with organizations in enabling rather than constraining innovative capabilities.
Article
Full-text available
Creative industries are among the fastest-growing and most important sectors of European and North American economies. Their growth depends on continuous innovation, which is important in many industries and also challenging to manage because of inherent tensions. Creative industries, similar to many industries, depend not only on novelty to attract consumers, but also on familiarity to aid comprehension and stabilize demand for cultural products. Agents in the creative industries play with these tensions, generating novelty that shifts industries’ labels and boundaries. This tension and agency makes them a valuable setting for advancing theoretical ideas on who drives innovation, from mavericks that challenge conventions to mainstreams that build upon them. We trace this history and then turn to the five papers in the special issue, which examine in depth how mavericks, misfits, mainstreams and amphibians in various creative domains, from artistic perfumery to choreography, engage with innovation and address tensions. These processes of innovation point to future research that explores and exploits the role of materiality in meaning making, the role of capitals in translation processes and the dynamics of value and evaluation.
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to assess the current potential of community entrepreneurship in neighbourhood revitalisation in the US and the UK. The global economic crisis has had a major impact on government spending for urban regeneration. In the context of these austerity regimes, in many European countries, community entrepreneurship and active citizenship are increasingly considered as a means to continue small-scale urban revitalisation. This paper investigates recent literature on both British community enterprises (CEs) and American community development corporations (CDCs). Design/methodology/approach – Starting from a seminal article, this paper reviews literature focusing on the role of CEs and CDCs in neighbourhood revitalisation. Differences and similarities are analysed, taking into account national context differences. Findings – While CDCs have a relatively successful record in affordable housing production in distressed areas, CDCs are fundamentally limited in terms of reversing processes of community decline. CEs in the UK have focused on non-housing issues. Research limitations/implications – This paper asks the question what CEs can learn from CDCs in terms of scope, aims, strategies, accountability, assets and partnerships with public and private actors. However, a systematic literature review has not been conducted. Originality/value – This comparison reveals not only similarities but also differences with regard to aims, organisational characteristics, cooperation on multiple scales and community participation. Apart from lessons that can be learned, this paper provides recommendations for further research that should cover the lack of empirical evidence in this field.
Article
Full-text available
The term 'cultural intermediaries' is good to think with. It has been a productive device for examining the producers of symbolic value in various industries, commodity chains and urban spaces, highlighting such issues as the blurring of work and leisure, the conservatism of 'new' and 'creative' work, and the material practices involved in the promotion of consumption (e.g.
Article
This study examines the self-employment behavior of artists. Using data from the Current Population Survey between 2003 and 2015, we estimate a series of logit models to predict transitions from paid employment to self-employment in the arts. The results show that artists disproportionately freelance and frequently switch in and out of self-employment compared to all other professional workers. We also find that artists exhibit unique entrepreneurial profiles, particularly in terms of their demographic and employment characteristics. In particular, artist workers are considerably more likely to attain self-employment status when living in a city with a high saturation of artist occupations.
Article
This article has two aims. Firstly, it challenges the assumption in both policy and media studies of race that increasing the number of minorities in the media will automatically lead to more diverse content. Secondly, it highlights how cultural distribution is a critical, yet under-researched, moment for racialised minorities working in the arts. Using a case study on ‘British Asian theatre’, the article problematises a particular cultural policy approach that emphasises the need to attract ‘new audiences’. While the emphasis on bringing marginalised audiences to the arts is welcome, this article argues that attempts to address racial inequalities in production and consumption in this way, reinforce rather than dismantle them.
Article
Even when shocks in a firm's environment are predictable, their consequences are not. Using the relocation of the Dallas Cowboys Stadium as a rich case of such a disruption, we investigate how combinations of strategic interpretation and spatial distance influence incumbent business owners' decisions to pursue temporal adaptation as a response. Temporal adaptation (TA) comprises timing rather than content changes by the firm seeking to adjust to the reconfigured environment. Survey data from 168 business owners show that strategic interpretation directly influences TA decisions. However, the effect of strategic interpretation on the TA decision is moderated by the spatial (geographic) distance of the incumbent firm from the locus of the disruption. Furthermore, results suggest that through strategic interpretation, spatial distance also indirectly affects the business owners' decisions to make temporal changes. Data collected 1.5 and 4 years later suggest that TA responses are related to performance and may be indicative of a particular type of TA, organizational entrainment (OE), which concerns the synchronization of organizational activity cycles with cycles in the environment
Article
Social innovation (SI) is a complex construct that is lacking a unifying paradigm in social sciences. However, together with the recent attention towards social change, it requires a theoretical perspective that analyzes the construct within its institutional context (IC) without forgetting that the term is socially constructed. This current study aims to contribute to the literature by exploring and describing the inter-linkages between institutional voids (IVs)/institutional supports (ISs) perspectives and SI process by positioning the actor as the catalyzer and the change-agent. The study tries to explore if existing IVs or supports, which are embedded in social-welfare, commercial or public-sector logics, stimulate SI and result in the development of these ideas. The research setting is deliberately selected as a developing country that deals with plenty of IVs and suffers from the lack of ISs; a research setting that exhibits a high degree of heterogeneity and a low institutionalization level. The results indicate that IVs stimulate SIs mostly at the incremental and institutional level where IS is inadequate. The heterogeneity of IVs and a low degree of institutionalization result in the heterogeneity of actions undertaken for SI. Implications for practitioners and scholars are recommended at the end of the paper.
Article
According to existing literature, the core of social entrepreneurship (SE) knowledge is evolving and, as such, it has made important contributions to theoretical definitions and essential characterizations. However, more theoretical issues need to be addressed before the SE field can be fully explained and understood. In particular, the authors observe in the literature that, within empirical or conceptual studies, almost all authors use the term ‘value’, but seemingly assume the dimensions of value rather than define or analyse its connotations and components. This paper uses the value construct and its multi-faceted dimensions to deconstruct the way in which value is created in the SE context. The authors argue that an analysis based on value generation, value capture and value sharing provides important insights into the specificity of SE research and can facilitate future theorizing. Through the conceptual lens of this central concept of value emanating from value theory and business model literature, the authors abductively analyse and classify the studies, providing a practical resource. The authors discuss the phenomenon, presenting an integrative framework that facilitates a clearer understanding of the social value creation process and suggest future research areas as openings for theory development in relation to value creation, its main components and flows.
Article
Deals with issues and topics about entrepreneurship in relation to arts.<br /
Chapter
This chapter explores enterprise pedagogies in media courses by drawing on the experience of postgraduate students in higher education (HE). The risks and challenges associated with media work are discussed with reference to two key discourses: firstly, literature from media and cultural studies, which tends to be critical of ideas of entrepreneurship (see Banks and Hesmondhalgh, 2009; McGuigan, 2010; Oakley, 2011); and secondly, investigating enterprise education literature in general and as it applies specifically to media education. Entrepreneurship in media education is explored through a case-study based upon observations in the classroom, along with interviews and feedback from postgraduate media students. The case-study builds upon earlier research conducted by Carey and Naudin (2006), and on a recognition that entrepreneurship and self-employment are increasingly important in UK media courses, as discussed in the report Creating Entrepreneurshi? (ADM-HEA and NESTA, 2007).
Chapter
To adapt and horribly mangle Marx’s great lines, cultural workers are entrepreneurial, but not as they please and not under self- selected circumstances (Marx 1852/2005). One of several paradoxes of a group of workers, alternately celebrated (Handy 1995, Florida 2002) and the subject of concern (McRobbie 2002, Ross 2003) is that, like Marx’s revolutionaries, they are sometimes creating something that did not exist before, but in an environment of increasing precariousness and constraint. The entrepreneurialism they display is often of the forced, or at least adaptive, kind. They set up businesses because that is the easiest way to carry out their practice. They get premises because they need to work away from the kitchen table. They take on projects to pay the rent, and other projects on the back of that, because they now have new expertise. They socialise relentlessly to the point where it resembles work more than play. They often articulate social and political concerns about the kind of work they do; but they carry it out while exploiting themselves and others, often with the barest of acknowledgement.
Article
The book shows how class has not disappeared, but is known and spoken in a myriad of different ways, always working through other categorisations of nation, race, gender and sexuality and across different sites: through popular culture, political rhetoric and academic theory. In particular attention is given to how new forms of personhood are being generated through mechanisms of giving value to culture, and how what we come to know and assume to be a 'self' is always a classed formation.
Article
Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage has become a major area of research in strategic management. Building on the assumptions that strategic resources are heterogeneously distributed across firms and that these differences are stable over time, this article examines the link between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Four empirical indicators of the potential of firm resources to generate sustained competitive advantage-value, rareness, imitability, and substitutability are discussed. The model is applied by analyzing the potential of several firm resources for generating sustained competitive advantages. The article concludes by examining implications of this firm resource model of sustained competitive advantage for other business disciplines.
Article
Arts Entrepreneurship education as a field continues to grow, but misperceptions of entrepreneurship seem to cause confusion among arts students, faculty, and administrators regarding the value of entrepreneurial training to higher education arts programs. These misperceptions are explored to determine if entrepreneurship, for artists, is harmful or helpful. By articulating the theoretical essence of entrepreneurship, it is suggested that entrepreneurial action is profoundly synergetic with artistic action and purpose, and that arts faculty and administrators can embrace entrepreneurship education and its value to aspiring professional artists.
Article
We adopt a blended value framework with implications for how business schools and educators can design, implement, and measure social entrepreneurship programs. The framework stresses both social and economic value creation and presents a unique opportunity and environment for business schools and their faculty to teach courses focused on the theory and practical skills needed to educate future social entrepreneurs. We advance a conceptual model that considers intrauniversity resources and activities, as well as partnerships with the greater social entrepreneurship community. We outline foundational pedagogical themes from both social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education that can enhance students' social entrepreneurship selfefficacy. Finally, we present recommendations for implementing the blended value framework with a focus on how educators can develop initiatives inside and outside their schools and universities.
Article
Social entrepreneurs face unique challenges in their dual pursuit of social and financial value creation to address pressing societal problems. While social entrepreneurs' behaviour and actions have been highlighted as an important source of creativity and innovation, this issue has largely been underresearched in the field of entrepreneurship. This paper explores the role of social entrepreneurs' bricolage behaviour in enabling their enterprises to scale their operations. The authors test their hypothesis on a unique database of 123 social enterprises using an online survey. They find a positive relationship between entrepreneurial bricolage and the scaling of social impact. The paper concludes with study implications, post hoc analyses and limitations and directions for future research.
Book
Artists, musicians, actors, singers, designers and other creative individuals need to understand basic business concepts if they are to successfully pursue their chosen artistic profession. These skills have historically not been taught to creative students, which leaves them unprepared to make a living from their creative efforts. This book will teach the basics of business in a way that is relevant to the challenges of running a small business marketing a creative product.