ABSTRACT
As concepts such as enterprise culture and entrepreneurial ecosystems gain currency within the academic, policy and popular literature, researchers are increasingly confronted by questions about what makes a place ‘entrepreneurial’. Often, the root answer appears to be a local culture enabling practices such as risk taking or information sharing (e.g. Saxenian 1994; Lafuente, Yancy, and Rialp 2007) or conversely, a culture discouraging them (e.g. James 2005). The importance of these questions to regional development means that the study of entrepreneurial cultures must go beyond associating cultural outlooks with practices. We must instead examine how cultural outlooks create social contexts where particular kinds of practices make sense to entrepreneurial actors. Furthermore, we must be able to demonstrate that the culture in question is truly local by identifying the local processes that create and reproduce it. This paper introduces a dynamic model that demonstrates how the cultural outlooks created by the structure of a local field influence entrepreneurial actors while at the same time how these cultural outlooks evolve through actors’ experimentations with new types of practices. This allows a more nuanced examination of the role of culture in the development of entrepreneurial communities, regions and ecosystems without falling into the trap of seeing culture as the sole cause.
