We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation. We propose a framework that focuses on how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity that serves as a touchstone upon which legitimacy may be conferred by investors, competitors, and consumers, opening up access to new capital and market opportunities. Stories help create competitive advantage for entrepreneurs through focal content shaped by two key forms of entrepreneurial capital: firm-specific resource capital and industry-level institutional capital. We illustrate our ideas with anecdotal entrepreneurial stories that range from contemporary high-technology accounts to the evolution of the mutual fund industry. Propositions are offered to guide future empirical research based on our framework. Theoretically, we aim to extend recent efforts to synthesize strategic and institutional perspectives by incorporating insights from contemporary approaches to culture and organizational identity. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. It is a virtual truism that stories of entrepreneurs have long been celebrated in the media, trade

More than a decade ago, Low and MacMillan identified three elements indispensable to an understanding of entrepreneurial success: process, context, and outcomes. Since their critique, three important advances include (a) a shift in theoretical emphasis from the characteristics of entrepreneurs as individuals to the consequences of their actions, (b) a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurs use knowledge, networks, and resources to construct firms, and (c) a more sophisticated taxonomy of environmental forces at different levels of analysis (population, community, and society) that affect entrepreneurship. Although our knowledge of entrepreneurial activities has increased dramatically, we still have much to learn about how process and context interact to shape the outcome of entrepreneurial efforts. From an evolutionary approach, process and context (strategy and environment) interact in a recursive continuous process, driving the fate of entrepreneurial efforts. Thus, integrating co...

* This paper draws on ongoing collaborative research with László Pólos, Glenn Carroll, and Jim Baron. Over the past two decades, macro research on organizations has converged on a research strategy of analyzing the life histories of (all) organizations in specified populations. An organizational population is regarded as a collection of organizations with a common form. The development and refinement of this strategy has been beneficial in promoting certain craft standards then largely lacking in organizational research and in increasing the comparability of findings across studies. Yet, continued progress requires that the theoretical foundations of this approach be reworked. In particular, the basic concept of form lacks a clear specification. Current work continues to refer to initial formulations that spelled out only partial definitions (e.g., Hannan and Freeman 1977; 1984). As a result, guidelines for a crucial step in empirical research—the specification of meaningful population boundaries—are less than clear. As this style of research has diffused broadly beyond the relatively homogeneous group of organizational ecologists, such lack of clarity has become increasingly problematic. Fortunately, several strands of work have advanced our understanding of the issues involved

As massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds grow in popularity, the investigation of culture in synthetic environments has become of interest. One representation of culture in games is the narrative provided in MMORPGs ’ quest sets: tasks given to players that provide a view of the artificial cultures... Researchers have used specific quests to advance arguments about game cultures. We expand on this previous work by examining the complete quest set for the MMORPG World of Warcraft, subdividing it into three corpora: two for the quests intended for players in one of the two ingame factions, one for those that can be completed by members of either faction. In order to determine salient cultural and narrative elements highlighted in the text, we performed relational text analysis on these corpora, looking for shared textual relationships. We find that while all three corpora possess diverse and unique terms the only relationships present in the corpora at least 5 % of the time are those emphasizing the relationships between players, enemies, and quest giving computer-controlled characters. From this we suggest that it’s important that game designers leverage extra-quest data if they want to get messages about the game world to the player.

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An initial exploration into the issue of information quality evaluation across different cultural and community contexts based on data collected from the Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias showed that different Wikipedia communities may have different understandings of and models for quality. It also showed the feasibility of using some article edit-based metrics for automated quality measurement across different Wikipedia contexts. A model for measuring context similarity was developed and used to evaluate the relationship between similarities in sociocultural factors and the understanding of information quality by the three Wikipedia communities.

Using ‘general trust in institutions ’ and ‘concepts of nature ’ as examples, the article analyzes the influence of cultural factors on sense-making of food biotechnology and the resulting public attitudes in the USA and Germany. According to the hypotheses investigated, different levels of trust and appreciation of nature explain part of the well-known differences in attitudes between both countries. The analysis of a crosscultural survey of the general population shows that appreciation of nature is a predictor of attitudes in both countries. The higher appreciation of nature in Germany partly explains why attitudes towards food biotechnology are more negative in Germany than in the USA. The relationship between trust and attitudes is more

*Order of authorship is alphabetical to denote equal contribution. Direct correspondence to Kraig

We are grateful to FacilityEast members and Hardware Inc. Facility managers for allowing us access to their worklives and workspaces. This work has been funded by National Science Foundation grant number IIS-0085725. Please do not cite or distribute without authors ’ permission.

1 This is a working draft of my dissertation introduction. The dissertation research was supported by a