ABSTRACT
The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu offers such a framework. This paper discusses how Bourdieuian approaches can help understand how local entrepreneurial cultures influence the practices entrepreneurs employ as they start and grow their firms. Local entrepreneurial culture refers to the collective worldviews common to a place that affects how the act of entrepreneurship is understood and experienced. Drawing on recent work on Bourdieuian perspectives on entrepreneurship (de Clerq and Voronov 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2011; Terjesen and Elam 2009; Karatas¸-O¨zkan and Chell 2010; de Clerq and Hoing 2011; Spigel 2013), this paper argues that Bourdieu’s sociology of practice is a useful way to understand the processes through which culture affects the entrepreneurship process. A Bourdieuian approach sees entrepreneurial practices as emerging from actors’ understanding of the social rules surrounding them, particularly the ‘values’ of the different forms of capitals (economic, cultural or social) they possess and which they want to acquire. This paper builds upon existing Bourdieuian approaches to entrepreneurship by placing them within a geographic context and by developing a conceptual model to explain the emergence, evolution and influence of entrepreneurial cultures within regions.
