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

This paper demonstrates how our sense of identity can emerge out of mere markers of social distinction that may have no innate significance, but, nevertheless, spread to various aspects of our lives and be the root of conflict. The basis of such conflicts could arise from the use of race to form conditional judgments about people’s behavior. Moreover, there are contexts where racial conflict is inevitable even though, if individuals had common knowledge of one another’s preferences, there would be no conflict. It is argued that this kind of conflict, where many individuals have no innate aggressive preference, is widespread and understanding the process that gives rise to such conflict is the key to crafting effective policy that contains it. JEL classification numbers:

Conventional wisdom suggests that when institutional logics overlap, the production of hybrids signifies collapse, blending, or easy coexistence. The author provides an alternative interpretation: hybrids can maintain a distinctive boundary and can emerge from contestation, not coexistence. This alternative interpretation is grounded in an analysis of a critical moment at the academic-commercial boundary: the enforcement of patents to a key technology on academic geneticists. In their reaction to commercial encroachment, skilled actors (scientists) took the resources of the commercial logic and transformed their meaning to establish hybrid strategies that preserved the distinctive institutions. Thus, hybrids must be reconsidered as emerging from conflict and produced through boundary work to maintain the distinction and resilience of logics. Institutions with overlapping boundaries shape much of contemporary social life, forming a complex zone where action is governed by multiple and varied logics (Friedland and Alford 1991). By combining a wealth 1 My thanks to Ezra Zuckerman for his patient and generous advice on this article.

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.

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.

Abstract: How do firms respond to technical change? The role of managerial cognitive frames has not been fully exploited in existing explanations for why firms do or do not make strategic choices to invest in new technologies. Yet, it seems likely that they should play a critical part in determining strategic choices since they shape management’s perceptions about the environment and technology and about what action should be taken. This paper reports on a longitudinal field study examining the micro mechanisms of strategic choices about technology in one communications technology firm as it responded to the a radical transformation resulting from the fiber-optics revolution. Drawing on framing theory in the social movements literature, I develop a model of the role of cognitive frames in strategy-making dynamics as they are produced in the course of situated action. I propose that frames and framing strategies are tightly intertwined with interests and political strategies in producing strategic choices about technology investment. Looking at strategy-making in this way opens up the possibility for examining cognition not simply as frames nor even as a situated process of framing but as a politically charged and self-conscious process for negotiating meaning. A close examination of these framing contests sheds light on the tensions between adaptation and inertia that are central to research in the management of technology field.

We extend research on the diffusion of corporate practices by providing a framework for studying practice variation during diffusion processes. Specifically, we theorize about how population-level mechanisms of diffusion link with organization-level mechanisms of implementation that lead to the adaptation of practices. We also identify technical, cultural, and political elements of fit (or misfit) between diffusing practices and adopters and analyze how the process of attaining fit across these elements can trigger different patterns of adaptation. An extensive body of research on the diffusion of practices has significantly enhanced our understanding of “how things—ideas and practices—get from here to there ” (Katz, 1999: 145), largely by developing parsimonious models that draw on economic (e.g., Banerjee, 1992;

It seems that as long as there has been life insurance, there have been insured people willing to sell their policies for cash. And as long as people have been willing to trade policies for cash, the legitamacy of the practice has been questioned. Although legal, exchanges of life insurance policies remained informal and diffuse in the United States for most of the 20 th century. It was only in the 1990s, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, that a wave of entrepreneurs began to systematically organize the sale of life insurance policies among strangers. Some immediately denounced this new market as a moral abomination. Others hailed it as a godsend to the dying. And a few in the industry dismissed such comments as irrational, arguing that this exchange is no different from any other type of sale. In the secondary market for life insurance, people use a settlement contract to buy and sell the life insurance policies of the wealthy, the elderly, and the terminally ill. In a typical transaction, an insured person sells her policy for a lump sum. The new owner, now the beneficiary of the policy, proceeds to pay the premiums to the insurance company. When the original policyholder dies, the new owner receives the full death