ABSTRACT

University of Edinburgh Business School, 29 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9JS, Scotland, UK (Received 22 October 2012; accepted 4 November 2013)

Culture has emerged as an important concept within the entrepreneurship literature to help explain differences in the nature of the entrepreneurship process observed between regions, industries and socio-cultural groups. Despite voluminous research on the topic, theories about how culture affects the entrepreneurship process remain underdeveloped. Without a framework to connect culture with everyday entrepreneurial practices and strategies, it is difficult to critically compare the role of culture between multiple contexts. Such a framework is necessary when examining the influence of local cultures on entrepreneurship, given the diverse ways they can influence economic activities. This paper introduces a Bourdieuian perspective on entrepreneurial culture that can be used to explain how particular entrepreneurial cultures emerge within regions, influence the local entrepreneurship process and evolve in the face of internal and external developments. Building on existing work on Bourdieu and entrepreneurship, this paper argues that entrepreneurship research must carefully consider how the concept of culture is used if it is to be a useful factor in explaining the heterogeneous geography of entrepreneurship we observe in the modern economy. Keywords: entrepreneurship; culture; geography; regional development; Bourdieu

1. Introduction Culture is critical to the study of entrepreneurship. Far from being a solitary economic activity, entrepreneurship is a social endeavour embedded in multiple cultural and economic contexts. This is particularly true of the geography of entrepreneurship, where researchers have long agreed that variations in the nature of entrepreneurship between regions or nations are the result of complex interactions between economic and social institutions, histories and cultures (Audretsch et al. 2011). Although culture is generally accepted as a useful concept within entrepreneurship research, it remains under-theorized. It is difficult to understand the processes through which culture affects the entrepreneurship process (the course of the entrepreneurship phenomenon from idea generation, firm formation, growth, to final exit) without a suitable theoretical framework. This results in either overly generalized views of culture based on simplistic proxies or descriptive case studies of particular cultures that provide few generalizable findings. As a result, it is difficult for researchers to identify the salient attributes of a culture which affect entrepreneurship as well as to describe how this influence occurs. There is a need for a

University of Edinburgh Business School Scotland, UK