BEND BUT DON’T BREAK: A CASE STUDY ON THE CO-CREATING STRATEGY OF A CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS

Cultural entrepreneurship dynamics have attracted considerable interest of management scholars in the last years. Research in this field has so far focused the level of analysis on the cultural entrepreneur as individual or network agency, without extensively examining a broader concept of collective agency. By investigating the case study of a three-dimensional entrepreneur in the field of the publishing industry that acts as a bookseller, as an independent publisher and as a cultural mediator, the study explores the actual possibilities of cultural entrepreneurship. We developed content analysis of three corpora of documents, tracing the evolving of the narratives in the entrepreneurial journey. Our findings position the cultural entrepreneurship on the level of a recursive collective co- creation narrative between the entrepreneur himself and different stakeholders over time. In a journey of continuous experimentation, the cultural entrepreneur evolves to a cultural mediator, in order to overcome the duality between his cultural and economic aspirations through the immersion in the social context where he works and through the use of the book as a cultural and social artifact