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.