Cultural Entrepreneurship and Field Dynamics: Narrative strategies for distinctive identities in unsettled fields

Abstract

This paper analyses how cultural entrepreneurs populating an unsettled organizational field may construct their identities as the field evolves. While extant studies in cultural entrepreneurship have recognized the importance of context, they mostly operationalize it as a stable source of standards. By adopting a field perspective, the present study instead offers a dynamic contextualization of cultural entrepreneurship. Applying computational and interpretative text-analytical methods to the empirical setting of the emerging Italian drone field, the results indicate that cultural entrepreneurs may follow different strategies to construct a distinctive identity narrative under specific field formation processes. The paper contributes to the literature by providing a model of cultural entrepreneurship under field-level change conditions. This model, by spotlighting unsettled fields’ evolving semantic dimensions, demonstrates how cultural entrepreneurs may be able to construct distinctive identities even when their field’s meaning system is far from stable, and the criteria to evaluate a venture’s legitimacy are still being developed.