Cultural Entrepreneurs: Identity and becoming a cultural entrepreneur

This paper seeks to investigate the cultural entrepreneur’s identity in relation to popular notions of the entrepreneur by focusing on the lived experience of cultural entrepreneurship. The interplay and contradictions between different values and identities revealed in this study challenge narrow definitions of the entrepreneur. The cultural entrepreneurs’ stories reveal means of subverting or re-interpreting identities within an urban milieu in which the cultural entrepreneur operates in a social milieu. Some of the tensions described are linked to the specificity of cultural work but other challenges have more universal implications for entrepreneurship studies. Beyond the caricatures usually associated with western traditions, this study explores entrepreneurial identities and characteristics from a broader range of experiences, re-imagining the hero entrepreneur