Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Cultural entrepreneurship—that is, research on the cultural means and processes of entrepreneurship, innovation, and change—has become a robust framework for understanding how a variety of new possibilities come to fruition (Lockwood et al., 2026; Lounsbury & Glynn, 2019). For instance, entrepreneurs tap into their cultural context with stories, materials, and practices that present unfamiliar endeavors in understandable terms (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Younger et al., 2025). Innovators develop new products and experiences that extend and sometimes challenge shared understandings (Navis & Glynn, 2010; Weber et al., 2008). And change agents pioneer new ways of understanding or re-engineer old ones (Augustine et al., 2019; Reinecke & Ansari, 2021). As a broad domain, cultural entrepreneurship highlights the cultural dynamics at play in a wide range of innovative and entrepreneurial processes and outcomes (Soublière & Lockwood, 2022).

Adopting a cultural entrepreneurship lens, this sub-theme turns attention to how culture provides the rules of the game, that is, the shared interpretive frameworks and taken-for-granted assumptions that shape entrepreneurial action, and how, in turn, entrepreneurial action also shapes these rules as new possibilities emerge and take hold. Drawing on diverse traditions of cultural entrepreneurship, we examine how entrepreneurial actors—be they individuals, organizations, or broader collectives—mobilize, express, and produce culture in their efforts. Focusing on how entrepreneurial actors play by the rules, we examine how actors mobilize various cultural elements—that is, vocabularies, practices, identities, places, logics, values, and beliefs—to rally support, earn appreciation, and achieve desirable outcomes (Kimmitt et al., 2024; Taeuscher et al., 2022). Focusing on how actors bend the rules, we see entrepreneurial efforts as forms of cultural expression, examining how actors combine cultural elements in unique ways that pique the interest of, and sometimes provoke, audiences (Dalpiaz & Cavotta, 2019; Dalpiaz et al., 2016). Focusing on how actors rewrite the rules, we examine how actors produce new cultural elements as they create new market categories or transform existing ones (Lockwood et al., 2023; Rhee et al., 2025).

Moreover, we also account for how entrepreneurial actors may seek to game the rules, drawing attention to the dark sides of cultural entrepreneurship (Gehman & Wry, 2022). As actors seek to rally support, for instance, they may deceive their audiences or engage in objectionable practices (Garud et al., 2025). Similarly, as actors attempt to entice audiences with unfamiliar cultural practices, they may also misappropriate the culture of others (Munir et al., 2021). By interrogating how actors work to game the rules, we draw attention to power dynamics that shape whose possibilities come into being or not (Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009), as diverse actors promote or resist innovation and change (Grodal, 2018), and might not necessarily play fair.

Our aspiration with this sub-theme is to build on these ideas to cultivate a generative dialogue on how culture shapes and is shaped by entrepreneurial action. We invite contributors who examine cultural entrepreneurship both conceptually and empirically, and as understood from a diversity of scholarly traditions and methodological approaches (Giorgi et al., 2015). By welcoming diverse perspectives, this sub-theme looks beyond economic and technological dimensions and conceptualizes entrepreneurship as a fundamentally cultural undertaking, emphasizing the contextual, relational, and human processes of entrepreneurship, innovation, and change.
 

• Augustine, G., Soderstrom, S., Milner, D., & Weber, K. (2019). Constructing a distant future: Imaginaries in geoengineering. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1930–1960. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.0059
• Dalpiaz, E., & Cavotta, V. (2019). A double-edged sword: Cultural entrepreneurship and the mobilisation of morally tainted cultural resources. Innovation, 21(1), 214–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2018.1479188
• Dalpiaz, E., Rindova, V. P., & Ravasi, D. (2016). Combining logics to transform organizational agency: Blending industry and art at Alessi. Administrative Science Quarterly, 61(3), 347–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839216636103
• Garud, R., Snihur, Y., Thomas, L. D. W., & Phillips, N. (2025). The dark side of entrepreneurial framing: A process model of deception and legitimacy loss. Academy of Management Review, 50(2), 299–317. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2022.0213
• Gehman, J., & Wry, T. (2022). Cultural entrepreneurship: Theorizing the dark sides. In C. Lockwood & J.-F. Soublière (Eds.), Advances in cultural entrepreneurship (Vol. 80, pp. 97–110). Emerald Group Publishing.
• Giorgi, S., Lockwood, C., & Glynn, M. A. (2015). The many faces of culture: Making sense of 30 years of research on culture in organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 9(1), 1–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2015.1007645
• Grodal, S. (2018). Field expansion and contraction: How communities shape social and symbolic boundaries. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(4), 783–818. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839217744555
• Kimmitt, J., Kibler, E., Schildt, H., & Oinas, P. (2024). Place in entrepreneurial storytelling: A study of cultural entrepreneurship in a deprived context. Journal of Management Studies, 61(3), 1036–1073. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12912
• Lockwood, C., Glynn, M. A., & Giorgi, S. (2023). Polishing the gilt edge: Elite category endurance and symbolic boundaries in U.S. luxury hotels, 1790–2015. Academy of Management Journal, 66(1), 9–42. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2020.0201
• Lockwood, C., Soublière, J.-F., & Gehman, J. (2026). The cogs and wheels of cultural entrepreneurship: The becoming of new possibilities. Academy of Management Annals, 20(1), 76–120. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2023.0203
• Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M. A. (2001). Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources. Strategic Management Journal, 22(6–7), 545–564. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.188
• Lounsbury, M., & Glynn, M. A. (2019). Cultural entrepreneurship: A new agenda for the study of entrepreneurial processes and possibilities. Cambridge University Press.
• Munir, K., Ansari, S., & Brown, D. (2021). From Patañjali to the “gospel of sweat”: Yoga’s remarkable transformation from a sacred movement into a thriving global market. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(3), 854–899. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839221993475
• Navis, C., & Glynn, M. A. (2010). How new market categories emerge: Temporal dynamics of legitimacy, identity, and entrepreneurship in satellite radio, 1990–2005. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(3), 439–471.
• Reinecke, J., & Ansari, S. (2021). Microfoundations of framing: The interactional production of collective action frames in the Occupy movement. Academy of Management Journal, 64(2), 378–408. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1063
• Rhee, E. Y., Lo, J. Y., & Durand, R. (2025). Meating expectations: Category legitimation and transmutation. Organization Science, 36(5), 1980–2007. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17957
• Santos, F. M., & Eisenhardt, K. M. (2009). Constructing markets and shaping boundaries: Entrepreneurial power in nascent fields. Academy of Management Journal, 52(4), 643–671.
• Soublière, J.-F., & Lockwood, C. (2022). Achieving cultural resonance: Four strategies toward rallying support for entrepreneurial endeavors. Strategic Management Journal, 43(8), 1499–1527. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3373
• Taeuscher, K., Zhao, E. Y., & Lounsbury, M. (2022). Categories and narratives as sources of distinctiveness: Cultural entrepreneurship within and across categories. Strategic Management Journal, 43(10), 2101–2134. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3391
• Weber, K., Heinze, K. L., & DeSoucey, M. (2008). Forage for thought: Mobilizing codes in the movement for grass-fed meat and dairy products. Administrative Science Quarterly, 53(3), 529–567.
• Younger, S., Preedom, J., & Navis, C. (2025). Legitimately distinct entrepreneurial stories in evolving market categories. Journal of Business Venturing, 40(1), 106436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2024.106436