Toward a More Cultural Understanding of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

I am trying to reason how cultural entrepreneurship research still could become more cultural, by developing two ideas: (1) that cultural entrepreneurship research describes the scholarly effort to inquire into how concepts, plans, recipes, rules, and instructions govern and are battled in the emergence of the organization-creation process. (2) Second, that this reveals a great affinity between the cultural and the entrepreneurial and that a more literary approach to writing cultural entrepreneurship research holds promise of a more nuanced, imaginative, and thus more cultural entrepreneurship research. In effect, the entrepreneurial process would, culturally understood, be the successful struggle to move beyond the comfortable place of dominant normality (and its assuring roles and templates) into an “un-insured” temporary space of potentialities, attractive to the imaginative mind for its motivating intimacy with hitherto undisclosed value. Most of this comes from re-reading Clifford Geertz’s (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures using Stephen Greenblatt’s (1997) The Touch of the Real as a companion. It brings me to the conclusion that we have never quite been Geertzian, and at least not Geertzian enough.

Citation

Hjorth, D. (2022), "Toward a More Cultural Understanding of Entrepreneurship", Lockwood, C. and Soublière, J.-F. (Ed.) Advances in Cultural Entrepreneurship (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 80), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 81-96. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20220000080006