Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts
Volume 2, Summer
http://artivate.org
pp. 3-13
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SITUATED CULTURAL ENTPRENEURSHIP
Johan Kolsteeg, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht
Abstract
In this essay, I investigate the relationship between local political context and
entrepreneurship in the arts, specifically entrepreneurship by cultural institutions, which I refer to
as “cultural entrepreneurship.” I look at cultural entrepreneurship as a discourse and discuss one
locus in particular, the city of Utrecht in The Netherlands. The discourse on cultural
entrepreneurship in the Dutch context is influenced by diminishing government responsibility for
financial support of the arts. Entrepreneurship is seen in that context as finding new sources of
income. Entrepreneurial values such as curiosity and experimentation are dominant in the routine
relationship between cultural organizations and their subsidizing administrations but are not
incorporated in the understanding of cultural entrepreneurship. After applying these
considerations to the observation of the culture-political practice in the city of Utrecht, I suggest
a framework that allows us to understand the discourse on the relationship between cultural
entrepreneurship and political context along two axes. One axis moves between risk acceptance
and aversion, and the other between the private and public interests.
Introduction: Definitions and Discourses
The discourse on entrepreneurship in the arts is characterized by issues concerning the
unequivocal definition of central terms and the situatedness of discourses and practices. Just as
we understand art through a combination of universal connotations with the word and local
discourses on aesthetics (Pratt, 2005: 7), the term “entrepreneurship” also has both a universal
connotation and practices defined by local culture. The motivation for individual
entrepreneurship, for instance, is likely to vary with the level of importance given in different
regional contexts to entrepreneurial values such as open-mindedness, perseverance, and risk
acceptance. Institutional conditions for entrepreneurship vary regionally (Wennekers & Thurik,
1999), as does the moral attitude towards entrepreneurial behaviour (Klamer, 2011). Further,
there is the matter of what is included in the terms cultural and creative industries and products.
Since in the UK the term cultural industry was replaced by the term creative industry and was
given the definition “those activities that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent
and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the general exploitation of
intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998), the terminology has suffered from a certain diffuseness.
For one instance, the adjective creative has been employed to describe products we generally
consider to be “cultural” (Caves, 2003; Hesmondalgh, 2002). Unesco’s recursive definition of
the cultural industries as industries that “combine the creation, production and commercialization
of contents which are intangible and cultural in nature, and are involved in the commercialization
of copyright protected goods and services” (Unesco, 2008), suffers from a recurring association
of cultural industry with Adorno’s understanding of the “culture industry”, which confines itself
“to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the
work from that of society” (Horkeimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 95).
Throsby proposes a distinction between the cultural and the creative by which creative
industries produce products “that require a reasonably significant level of creativity in their
manufacture, without necessarily satisfying other criteria that would enable them to be labeled
‘cultural’” (Throsby, 2009, p. 16). These “other criteria” refer to the symbolic, cultural value that
cultural products communicate. In the European context, this distinction would roughly equal the
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distinction between commercial creative firms and cultural organizations that depend largely on
government subsidies. Commercial creative firms are entrepreneurial by some definitions of that
term because they are financially self-sufficient. Cultural organizations in the Netherlands
originated as public institutions with the task to conserve art and secure public access to art
without claim to financial self-sufficiency. There are at least two diverse interpretations of
“entrepreneurship,” as described following. Cultural organizations are beginning to become
aware of the possibilities of being entrepreneurial within a traditional European governmentsupported model. In the process they encounter institutional limitations and underlying
suppositions. In the Dutch discourse on cultural entrepreneurship, for instance, there is an
expectation that economic circumstances will force cultural and creative organizations to
increasingly merge into hybrid organizations, but in reality such organizational syntheses hardly
ever materialize, if at all.
In order to establish a definitional point of departure, I follow Throsby’s understanding of
creative and cultural industry and connect the distinction between them to the term
entrepreneurship. So defined, creative entrepreneurship is found in for-profit firms that produce
products or services that “require a reasonably significant level of creativity in their
manufacture” (Throsby, 2009, p. 16), and cultural entrepreneurship, the focus of this essay, is
found in cultural (arts) organizations that produce products or services that communicate a
symbolic, cultural value. This phrasing tells us nothing more than where to find cultural
entrepreneurship, and doesn’t give us a substantive definition of the term. It is the position in this
essay that a dynamic definition is arrived at in artistic and culture political discourse and
practice. The essay does not aim to solve the problem of how to define cultural entrepreneurship,
but to look at the lines along which it is given substance in discourse and communicative
interaction.
What we can say is that cultural and creative entrepreneurship have to do with balancing
artistic freedom and entrepreneurial freedom (Hagoort, 2007), or in other words balancing
autonomy and heteronomy, while acknowledging a responsibility for cultural infrastructure. We
look at cultural entrepreneurship as a moral act (Klamer, 2011) in a culturally-cum-politically
situated discourse and practice. In different geographical and political contexts, cultural
entrepreneurship manifests itself in different ways, not only because art, culture and
entrepreneurship have different connotations, but also because the process of mediating between
artistic and political discourses is likely to progress differently in different contexts. Following
Hagoort’s (2007) contention that cultural entrepreneurs tend to show responsibility for the
greater picture, they are reminded of this responsibility in relationship to their direct environment
as public and political stakeholders. Given that how the process of balancing artistic and
entrepreneurial freedom materializes is a situated matter, in order to understand the practice of
entrepreneurship it is important to look at the relationship between the practice of mediating
autonomy and heteronomy on the one hand, and socio-cultural political context on the other.
A third discourse to be aware of when thinking about cultural entrepreneurship is that of
the history of local support for the arts. In The Netherlands, a country with a traditionally large
government responsibility for arts support, the term cultural entrepreneurship became
increasingly important with the gradual reduction of this government support during the period
2005–2010. Here, entrepreneurship de facto has come to be about making ends meet and
reducing dependence on government support. This reductionist position is deeply embedded in
the discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in the Netherlands.

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Another element to take into account if we want to develop awareness of the discursive
context of cultural entrepreneurship is that the general political discourse on entrepreneurship
tends to be uncritically transferred to the cultural field as a whole. Klamer points out that in
economic science, the quantitative economic angle on entrepreneurship is easily transferred to
the cultural and creative areas. Klamer contends there is little mention of the cultural
entrepreneur in economic literature since “they come with characteristics that are hard to specify,
like creative, risk taking, and alert. How to put those in an equation?” (Klamer, 2011, p. 143).
Cultural organizations and creative for-profit firms may value creative identity and
network position higher than growth and profit (Kolsteeg, forthcoming). Yet there is
considerable attention to the economic impact of the creative sector in terms of number and size
of firms, financial growth potential, competitiveness and employment figures (Stam, De Jong, &
Marlet, 2008). Also, growth of the sector is considered vital for the Dutch economic agenda:
“The government designated the creative industry as one of the top areas with a significant added
value for Holland” (Government, 2011, p. 29). The approach to the creative sector as a whole in
this quote is another typical element of the government’s approach, which continues despite
awareness that the creative industry is strongly fragmented (Government, 2009a, p.12; see also
Kooyman, 2009).
That cultural and creative entrepreneurs are ‘different’ from other entpreneurs is also
found in research from Norway, which shows that cultural and creative entrepreneurs react
differently to entrepreneurship support policy than non-creative entrepreneurs do. Cultural
entrepreneurs “did not find the support understandable, relevant and in a language that appealed.
They also found that it was difficult to obtain support […] and they thought that IN [Innovation
Norway, a centralized state owned agency] consultants did not have the right competence and
insight in the cultural field” (Bille and De Paoli, 2012, p. 83). Bille and De Paoli show that the
Norwegian support policy is not inadequate in itself, but that it fails because intermediaries relate
to the internal discourse (“competence and insight”) of the cultural entrepreneur inadequately. In
Holland, comparable government programs are equally unsuccessful. One of these programs,
meant to improve innovation and economic growth, and improve networking skills among
creative entrepreneurs and their access to finance and connection to other societal areas, is
evaluated as having little lasting effect (Government, 2009b, p. 57), among other things, because
policy targets were sometimes insufficiently supported or shared and support programs had entry
barriers for parties outside an inner circle (Den Hertog et al., 2012).
Finally, to further bolster the importance of qualitative investigation of cultural
entrepreneurship, it is important to realize that there is no entrepreneurship (cultural or
otherwise) in a void. Cultural entrepreneurs by definition work in a social, political, economic
and artistic discourse. Understanding what motivates a cultural entrepreneur in balancing
creative identity with context is crucial to developing a relationship between ‘the cultural’ and
‘the political’ that can effectively explain entrepreneurial behavior. Doing so requires awareness
of the genealogy and context dependency of the terms and a framework in which the relationship
between cultural entrepreneurs and their socio-political contexts can be understood. This article
suggests the contours of such a framework. I use a case study of cultural entrepreneurship in The
Netherlands, not with the purpose to evaluate the quality of entrepreneurial choices made by
organizations, but to see how we can understand cultural entrepreneurship as a situated discourse
in a socio-political context, elaborating on the points made by Hagoort (2007) and Klamer
(2011) that cultural entrepreneurship is to do with balancing cultural and economic values and
also with caring for a society’s cultural infrastructure.
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Methodology and Theoretical Construct
A discourse analysis of the strategic interaction between cultural organizations and local
administration was made during my PhD research on strategy formation in subsidized cultural
organizations and for-profit creative firms in Utrecht, 2010-2012 (Kolsteeg, forthcoming). The
empirical data in this essay are extracted from this study, which used documents, observation of
practice, and interviews. The research looks at the construction of creative identity in strategic
practice. That study involves a discourse analysis (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001) along the lines of
Giddens’ structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), applied to organizational practice. Giddens
contends that “social structure is constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the
very medium of this constitution” (p. 128, emphasis in original). Institutional context, the
“universe of objects”, is “constituted or produced by the active doings of subjects” (Giddens,
1993, p. 168). Actors are seen as knowledgeable individuals, and this knowledgeability is partly
explicated and partly hidden in practice itself. People produce society in a situated structural
context. Analysis must clarify what aspects in human action display structural properties, where
the boundary lies between intentional reflective actions and ‘occurences.’ Structure is considered
to show a duality in the recurrent influence of structure on action, and of action on structure: this
process of structuration is observable in the “interplay of meanings, norms and power” (Giddens,
1984) in daily routine. The analytical question is how in daily human interaction communication,
power and sanction are instantiations of, and at the same time instantiate themselves, macro level
structures.
National Context
Let’s take a short look at the history of the discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in The
Netherlands. In the 1950s a cultural policy was installed in which a large responsibility for
funding the arts was given to the national government. Based on the philosophy that the
government may be the financer of art but should not be the judge of its quality, over time an
elaborate system was developed in which cultural organizations apply for government funding
for periods of four years. Every four years, organizations write strategic plans, which are
assessed by independent committees on whose advice the government decides on funding. This
routine is dominated by arguments concerning the organizations’ creative identities and artistic
development.
In 1999 the Secretary for the Arts introduced a new element into the culture politics,
pertaining to the cultural institutions’ responsibility to involve new audience groups. This was
intended to result in democratization of participation in the arts and a measurable increase in
ticket sales. At the end of the first decade of the current century, government support became
connected to the question of whether or not an organization shows efforts to increase selfgenerated income (i.e. earned revenue). What started as a (social democratic) ideal of
democratization of the arts changed over a decade into the position that an increase in selfgenerated income for cultural institutions is a goal in itself to be reached by what is called an
entrepreneurial attitude.
Until the recent economic crisis, Dutch cultural policy was generally seen as supportive
towards all administrative levels (Utrecht, 2011) but the economic crisis forced the
administration to make radical choices: “All three administrative levels [national, provincial,
municipal] will have to make sharp choices in the coming time.” This led to decentralization of
national responsibilities to lower administrative levels, and it led to a smaller “cultural
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infrastructure” (Government, 2011, p. 4). The government announced it would reduce its support
in the arts to “those developments that don’t automatically come about in the market”
(Government, 2011, p. 4). The political rhetoric referred to a necessary radical change in cultural
policy because of a changing society, historically developed excessive government dependence,
too little entrepreneurship, and “giving culture back to the people,” leading to a reduction of the
government budget for culture by twenty-five percent. Because of the four-year system, the first
instance to effectuate the new situation was January 1, 2013. Entrepreneurship is invoked as a
solution for the retreating government involvement. As of 2013, a set level of self-generated
income is a condition to be admitted to the system of government arts subsidies: “A norm of
17.5% self generated income is conditional to be allowed into the basic cultural infrastructure for
2013-2016” (Government, 2011, p. 11). In The Netherlands, there is hardly any private
patronage for the arts.
In this context the involved players, cultural institutions and subsidizers, share an
understanding of cultural entrepreneurship as synonymous with finding solutions to the problem
of decreasing government support. Cultural institutions respond to this in their strategic
documents for government support in the period 2013-2016. I will not discuss individual
documents but continue to follow the discourse by looking at an audit that was performed in
2012 for the Ministry of Culture. This audit contributes to the discussion on the level of
entrepreneurship displayed in the strategic documents. The audit looks at quantitative (financial)
criteria for good entrepreneurship such as cash position and solvency, as well as positioning,
cooperation, marketing, governance and vision. The audited institutions were seen to be
generally strong in explaining their position in a creative network, but poor in financial
robustness and awareness of risks and opportunities. The audit concludes that many
organizations do not convincingly ground their business models in creative strategy (In 't Veld,
Gerdes, & Gooskens, 2012).
The importance given in the audit to the connection between the organizations’ artistic
strategies and their business models is a new element in this survey of the discourse on cultural
entrepreneurship. The poor foundation for the entrepreneurial figures (figures that would project
the necessary increase of self generated income over 2013–2016) in substantive strategic policy
leads the auditors to suggest that organizations relate to entrepreneurship only discursively (In 't
Veld et al., 2012). The audit is based on strategic documents of nationally supported
organizations, but the conclusions can also be applied to cultural organizations in a local context.
The auditors conclude that a relationship between artistic identity and entrepreneurship is
missing. This omission can be explained by looking at discourse surrounding the routinized
quadrennial subsidy exercise. Cultural organizations, in their strategic documents, identify
opportunities for artistic growth and innovation based on the need to further develop their artistic
signature and work with a larger and more diverse ensemble. In its feedback to one such subsidy
request, the local Arts Council accepts the growth ambition: “The ambition to scale up […] is
sufficiently motivated from earlier successes” (Utrecht, 2008). Despite the general importance
given to critical examination of the budgetary proposals of the applying organizations, in
individual evaluations the local arts council considers financial aspects to be logically
consequential to artistic growth ambitions. In fact, if organizations are critically reviewed at all,
it is for lacking an articulated artistic vision.
The traditional focus in the quadrennial subsidy exercise is on the organizations’ own
artistic developments, and organizations make sense of the term entrepreneurship as synonymous
with financial planning consequential to this artistic strategy. Organizations do not feel invited to
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see their artistic identity as a starting point for entrepreneurial thought, nor do they see
entrepreneurship as a way to identify and realize opportunities outside their direct artistic realm.
Entrepreneurship is a “paper value” (In 't Veld et al., 2012) devoid of entrepreneurial values such
as open-mindedness, perseverance, and risk acceptance, the very values that creative
organizations familiarly refer to in the quadrennial subsidy application.
As sketched in this national context, cultural entrepreneurship is used as a synonym for
finding new sources of income as a response to the decreasing government support as a result of
the economic crisis. Entrepreneurship as it appears in strategic documents of cultural
organizations comes out as restricted to politically acceptable (and accepted) predictions of selfgenerated income. The theme of cultural entrepreneurship does not fundamentally affect the
artistic growth discourse that dominates the quadrennial subsidy applications.
Local Context: Utrecht
On a local level the contours of a different interpretation of cultural entrepreneurship are
drawn. This is illustrated in the case of the Dutch city of Utrecht. Here, the local administration
invites cultural organizations to connect to a larger societal agenda. The local administration
connects cultural policy to underlying socio-political goals. In Utrecht, cultural policy is closely
connected to positioning the city internationally as a “city of knowledge and culture” and to
improving its image as a good location for businesses. The city has lined up several large-scale
cultural events, into the next decade. It connects to European policy in its ambition to look at
culture as a tool to improve social cohesion in the city. The city specifically mentions the
challenge to connect artistic autonomy to social inclusion and the policy to get the city
structurally on a higher financial and economic and competitive level (Utrecht, 2011).
The city acknowledges that it needs support from cultural institutions to reach its longterm goals: “Long term ambitions are expressed in the themes for Utrecht 2018 [the ambition to
become cultural capital of Europe in 2018, JK], and co-determine our choice to support
organizations. These organizations will be the bearing forces of 2018” (Utrecht, 2011). Cultural
organizations are invited to propose artistically provocative projects to substantiate the image of
the city and help it reach its long-term goals. New connections among players in the cultural
field, educational field, and the corporate world are expected to be beneficial for
experimentation, talent development, and innovation. After culture and knowledge became the
city’s brand, the administration appealed to the entrepreneurship of the cultural sector to help
substantiate this brand. “The cultural organizations and initiatives we need for the development
of the city, on the one hand have to be able to inspire the city, and on the other must be of such
high quality that they contribute to the international profiling of the city. Cultural
entrepreneurship must run through their veins” (Utrecht, 2011, p. 12). Without providing an
exact definition of the cultural entrepreneur, the city understands the term as a “partner” in a
wider political perspective.
The administration’s position that organizations become partners on the basis of their
contribution to a local long term political strategy is an addition to the routine policy to subsidize
cultural organizations on the basis of the artistic quality of strategic plans and it is a new element
in this survey of cultural entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurship that is appealed to on this local
level is based on a broader definition than in the national discourse. The importance given to
creative diversity and experimentation in relation to a higher goal indicates that the city
understands cultural entrepreneurship to be driven by an organization’s artistic identity. The
administration’s proposition is to give substance to the term cultural entrepreneurship through
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realizing projects in partnership for the good of the city’s general political strategy. Partnership is
introduced in the strategic discourse but it is left to the organizations to give it substance. The administration’s role is to “encourage a very diverse group of partners and stakeholders to work
together in creating our common European future” (Utrecht, 2012, p. 106).
It is not the aim of this essay to evaluate the artistic success of the partnerships that have
developed, but to see how they influence the discourse on entrepreneurship. Two elements are of
importance. First, the interpretation of entrepreneurship as a connection between organizations’
autonomous artistic identities and societal goals leads to the strategy for organizations to connect
to higher goals in turn leads organizations to initiate ‘partnerships’ with the city (and with other
cultural organizations) in a way that ‘fits’ the organization. Such partnerships may be modest, as
is one museum’s when it says it is fair that its enthusiasm towards the city is in line with the
city’s contribution to the its subsistence (Kolsteeg, forthcoming), or more elaborate. In the
preparations for the Cultural Capital of Europe bid, new creative partnerships were forged,
leading to programs like ‘Former West,’ an “artistic reflection on a new world order”, by the
Center for Contemporary Art plus international partners: “Over a ten-year period (2008-2018),
[this program] will seek answers and develop possible scenarios for our global future, […]
involving universities and arts academies, and […] arts institutions from Europe and beyond”
(Utrecht, 2012: 183). The program ‘Hacking Habitat’ proposed by a group of educational and
artistic partners, ascertains a tendency among artists to “form alliances with colleagues and with
other stakeholders such as local residents in order to ‘reclaim the public domain and design their
own human habitat’” (Utrecht, 2012, p. 170).
Second, we should address the implication in the term ‘partnership’ that in order for the
city to be a credible partner, it, in turn, should show a risk-accepting, ‘we’re in this together,’
attitude. Doing so is a struggle for the local administration. Formal administrative procedures
(and their bearers) are not easily tolerant of a risk accepting interpretation of cultural
entrepreneurship. Early in 2013, the city of Utrecht organized a conference on cultural
entrepreneurship at which it asked, “Entrepreneurship often involves taking risks, artistically and
financially. In return for subsidies, the administration requires that public money is spent
responsibly and is accounted for adequately. How can the city of Utrecht find a balance between
freedom and control?” (Utrecht, 2013). Paradoxically, the answer to this question is to adopt the
criteria developed in the above mentioned audit, along with setting up a structure that facilitates
early identification of possible financial risks (Utrecht, 2013). Along with the invitation to the
sector to partner in the city’s underlying strategy, the need for the local administration to execute
its responsibility as a controlling government is a political and bounded reality.
In the case of Utrecht, a condition for establishing an entrepreneurial attitude that fits the
context is that cultural organizations understand and share a sense of urgency about local
underlying political targets, in this case targets such as the European Cultural Capital ambition,
social cohesion, and/or city marketing. At the same time, it is important that the local
administration understands how organizations strategically balance artistic and contextual
elements, and how they feel about the importance of their creative identity. Intermediaries need
“the right competence and insight in the cultural field” (Bille and De Paoli, 2012, p. 83) to
introduce cultural entrepreneurship as a discourse on creative positioning in relation to a political
discourse.
In summary, we see that in the Dutch context, where support for the arts is (still) largely a
government matter, the discourse on cultural entrepreneurship shows a limited financial
interpretation of the term, separated from the artistic identity of organizations. On the local level
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of the city of Utrecht, cultural entrepreneurship is themetized as using artistic creativity for
realizing underlying socio- and culture political goals, limited by the administrations formal
controlling responsibility. Cultural institutions in Utrecht accommodate the partnership discourse
within a strategic discourse of artistic innovation and positioning in a cultural network. One
theatre organization, for instance, states, “An appealing international city of culture does not only
present, but takes risks and makes a contribution to international developments. For this, an
initiating producing role is needed. We want to play this role as an international production
house” (interview, quoted in Kolsteeg, forthcoming).
Framework
In this essay, I have described the discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in the
Netherlands and in the city of Utrecht. It is not the purpose of this essay to evaluate the success
of cultural entrepreneurship in the described context, but to identify along which lines it is given
meaning. I have discussed the different usages of the term cultural entrepreneurship. I have
described the pressure from the national administration on cultural organizations to understand
entrepreneurial behavior as the strategy to reduce subsidy-dependence. I have referred to a semiindependent audit that establishes entrepreneurship is a ‘paper value’ if the projected finances
(self generated income) are not supported by strategic artistic choices. I have discussed the
practice in the city of Utrecht, where the local administration calls on the cultural field to
contribute to the city’s long-term cultural-political ambitions. Cultural organizations relate to this
invitation in a pragmatic way.
I propose now to look at cultural entrepreneurship in these observed cases along the lines
of two discursive tensions deducted from the observations and considerations made thus far.
There is the ‘risk-tension’, between understanding entrepreneurship as a safe and risk-averting
way to secure a financial future and entrepreneurship as the risk-taking practice of realizing new
artistic opportunities. The second tension is the perspective tension, between private or
organizational interests (artistic development) and responsibility for societal infrastructure, an
elaboration of Hagoort’s (2007) observation on the entrepreneur’s responsibility to care for
cultural infrastructure. These tensions are expressed in Figure 1. They are to be understood as
dynamics that occur in discourse, and I suggest the discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in this
particular context is influenced by the way interlocutors make sense of these tensions.
If we illustrate this framework with the cases discussed here, we see that the local
administration attempts to provoke cultural entrepreneurship by involving cultural institutions in
considerations concerning the top right quadrant of Figure 1, while routine interactions on
subsidy-requests traditionally are dominated by considerations found in the lower right quadrant.
With awareness of (local) socio-political goals, cultural institutions can decide if and how they
will develop artistic activities that connect to these targets. If they do connect to these goals
pragmatically from within their own creative perspective they find themselves in the upper left
quadrant, whereas the city invites them to develop innovation and artistic entrepreneurship and
move to the ‘risky’ upper right quadrant. The lower left hand quadrant represents cultural
entrepreneurship as a ‘paper value’, the most limited interpretation of the term.
If cultural organizations would move to the upper right quadrant in the case of Utrecht,
this would create a situation in which the artistic diversity that the administration claims to need
would give substance to its policy. Both the local political interest and the organizations’ artistic
interest would be met. The next step in using this model would be to identify what is needed to
reach the upper right hand quadrant. It requires organizations to risk their routine position in a
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Care for Societal
Infrastructure

Societal

Public interest:

perspective

cultural network. In return, organizations need the local administration to review traditional
structures and procedures that originated to control institutions in a subsidy situation but now
hinder the development of the entrepreneurship it advocates. Governments should become
partners, co-entrepreneurs, and allow an innovation of the relationship between ad-ministration
and cultural institutions to grow.

Risk acceptance

Risk
acceptance

Risk aversion

Organizational /
private interest
perspective

Organizational
sustainability;

Organizational

Risk
aversion

Development and
innovation;

Creative positioning

Figure 1. Tensions surrounding interactions in cultural entrepreneurship
Conclusion
In this essay, I have looked at cultural entrepreneurship as a societal and discursive
practice in a national and local political context. I have discussed entrepreneurial practice in one
case, the Dutch city of Utrecht, and I have sketched its culture-political context. The dominant
interpretation of the term cultural entrepreneurship in the national context is limited to finding a
safe financial strategy in times of diminishing government support. There is no connection to the
creative core of the organization or to entrepreneurial values such as risk taking and
experimentation. In the local context of the city of Utrecht, the understanding of
entrepreneurship is wider. Cultural organizations are invited to connect profiling artistic projects
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to underlying municipal political ambitions. This invitation is at odds with underlying discourses
such as tenacious institutional routines, the administration’s controlling responsibility, and the
historical tendency to look at strategy of cultural organizations as limited to autonomous growth
and development. I suggest to understand this process along the line of two tensions that
influence the position taken up by the different interlocutors in the discourse on cultural
entrepreneurship: risk and perspective.
Further research on this subject is needed. First, the question is whether the risk and
perspective tension lines are helpful to understand cultural entrepreneurship as a situated
discourse in other regional contexts, or whether the ‘tension-model’ in itself (with other tensions
than the two identified here) can be used as a tool to understand entrepreneurship in other
contexts. Also, research into the working of cultural entrepreneurship needs to take into account
regional and historical contextuality in order to find a translation into relevant strategic tools for
cultural organizations. The model implies the transition process a cultural organization goes
through towards being entrepreneurial. Attention is needed for the elements that influence the
changeability of cultural organizations and to the question of to what extent creative
organizations can connect strategically to challenges in other contexts while guarding (or
capitalizing on) their artistic core. Finally, more research is needed on how these perspectives
hold up in the practice of individual artists.
.
List of References
Bille, T. and D. de Paoli (2012). Approaches to stimulate and support the cultural entrepreneur:
The case of Denmark and Norway. In: Hagoort, Thomassen and Kooyman (ed.): Pioneering
Minds Worldwide. Delft: Eburon Publishers.
Caves, R. E. (2003). Contracts between art and commerce. Journal of Economic Perspectives,
17(2) 73–84.
DCMS (1998). Creative Industries Mapping Document. Department of Culture, Media and
Sports, UK.
Government, 2009a. Waarde van creatie (The value of creation). Brief Cultuur en Economie
2009. Ministeries of Culture and Economic Affairs.
Government, 2009b. Verkenning Creatieve Industrie (Understanding creative industry).
Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Senternovem.
Government (2011). Meer dan Kwaliteit (More than Quality). Policy report, Netherlands
Ministery of Cultural Affairs.
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maken en de vrijheid van ondernemen. HKU/UU, speech, 6 June 2007.
Hertog, Den, et al. (2012). Evaluatie van de programmatische aanpak. Ministery of Economic
Affairs. Dialogic.
Hesmondalgh (2007). The Cultural Industries. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.
Horkheimer, M. and Th. Adorno (2002): Dialectic of Enlightment. Stanford University Press.
In 't Veld, J., Gerdes, E., & Gooskens, B. (2012). Meta-analyse ondernemerschap ('Metaanalysis entrepreneurship'). Ministery for Culture.
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156.
Kolsteeg, J. (forthcoming). Construction of identit in Cultural and Creative Organisations,
Utrecht 2010-2012.
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Kolsteeg
Situated Cultural Entrepreneurship
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Kooyman, R. (2009). Entrepreneurial dimensions of cultural and creative industries. Literature
review. Utrecht: HKU.
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Business Economics, 13(1), 27–56.
NOTE: need consistent publication info on the 3 “Government” 4 “Utrecht” entries. If these are
government reports or whitepapers, please format as in the following example and send
in a separate word file:
National Institute of Mental Health. (1990). Clinical training in serious mental illness (DHHS
Publication No. ADM 90-1679). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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