Welcome to Emergent Patterns in Cultural Entrepreneurship: Navigating Tensions, Building Networks, and Cultivating Care.
This exposition is a reflective and practice-grounded inquiry into how early-career cultural entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty, build collective structures, and infuse their work with ethics of care. Drawing on a rich set of anonymized student thesis projects and presentation reflections from the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts (https://www.uniarts.se/utbildningar/fristaende-kurser/konstnarligt-och-kulturellt-entreprenorskap/), this research reveals recurring patterns across disciplines, cultures, and creative practices.
You may navigate the exposition by theme, theory, or method. Each page is self-contained but also part of a cumulative argument that unfolds across the exposition.
Suggested Path:
Begin with the Introduction to understand the framing and research question.
Move into the Theoretical Framework to explore the concepts guiding the analysis.
The Methodology section explains how the material was gathered, interpreted, and reflected upon.
The Empirical Findings are organized into three pages: Tensions, Networks, and Care.
The Discussion integrates the themes into a broader scholarly and practical context.
The Conclusion offers perspectives on what this means for the future of cultural entrepreneurship and suggests areas for further research.
This is a text-based exposition. All student work is anonymized. While no media is included, the exposition invites close reading and critical reflection.
We invite you to explore, question, and connect.
In recent years, cultural entrepreneurship has come into sharper focus as artists, designers, and cultural practitioners navigate intensifying uncertainty—economic, ecological, technological, and existential. Against this backdrop, the artist’s role is no longer confined to the studio or stage; increasingly, it stretches across networks, negotiations, and new forms of value production. As the creative landscape shifts, so too does the imperative to better understand how practitioners work both with and against entrepreneurial logics.
This inquiry does not begin from a theoretical distance but from the texture of lived practice. It draws on the empirical material generated within the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts. Across twelve anonymized thesis projects and their accompanying presentations and defenses, students explored diverse initiatives spanning dance, architecture, film, textile craft, performance, food culture, and digital platforms. Each project was rooted in the student’s context, and each sought to build or reframe relations—between creators, audiences, communities, and systems.
What emerges is a situated portrait of cultural entrepreneurship in flux. This work does not assume entrepreneurship as a predefined toolkit or neutral activity but approaches it as an adaptive, contested, and often ambiguous practice. Through their reflections and outcomes, students challenged extractive models of growth and success, leaning instead into co-creation, sustainability, relational labor, and aesthetic experimentation. They encountered frictions—between art and audience, innovation and tradition, urgency and patience—and responded in divergent yet often overlapping ways.
This study asks: How do early-career cultural entrepreneurs navigate the tensions between artistic practice and entrepreneurial imperatives, build adaptive networks, and cultivate practices of care in uncertain environments?
Our analysis does not isolate individual “best practices” or reduce creative labor to transferable models. Instead, it traces emergent patterns—through recurrence, resonance, and deviation—that offer insight into how cultural practitioners are building worlds that respond to, resist, and reshape dominant entrepreneurial narratives. These patterns are not static themes, but dynamic tensions: spaces where students hesitated, pivoted, questioned, and created otherwise.
The research is underpinned by a theoretical constellation of perspectives. We draw on effectuation theory (Sarasvathy, 2001; Read et al., 2009) to understand how action unfolds from means rather than goals. We include narrative and embodied knowledge (Frayling, 1993; Anttila et al., 2024) to affirm that knowledge in the arts is often lived and emergent. We use lenses from cultural entrepreneurship (Gehman & Soublière, 2017; Lindgren et al., 2014; Arvidsson, 2016) to frame entrepreneurship as a practice of meaning-making as much as of enterprise-building. And we bring in Gasparin et al. (2020) and White and Habib (2019) to reflect the temporal and psychological textures of these projects.
These concepts are braided through the three focal themes of the exposition: tensions, networks, and care. Rather than categories applied in advance, they surfaced organically from the student work—gesturing toward shared challenges, improvisational strategies, and nascent forms of resistance. In assembling and analyzing these voices, this exposition seeks to offer a textured account of cultural entrepreneurship as it is lived and made, not only studied and taught.
The theoretical framework for this exposition was constructed through a deliberately layered process. Rather than selecting a fixed canon in advance, we allowed the literature cited by students in their thesis projects to guide the initial scaffolding. These references, gathered from twenty anonymized final reports, reflected what early-career cultural practitioners themselves reached for when navigating questions of uncertainty, collaboration, and value creation. Building on these foundations, we carefully expanded the framework—cross-referencing newer scholarship (from the past five years) and integrating seminal texts to ensure conceptual robustness, scholarly relevance, and a diversity of perspectives. This situated, pedagogically grounded method affirms the value of reflective theory-building in arts-based inquiry, where lived practice and intellectual framing evolve in tandem.
Effectuation: Navigating with What Is at Hand
Effectuation theory, originally proposed by Saras Sarasvathy (2001), serves as a foundational model for understanding how entrepreneurs operate under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than starting with fixed goals, effectual actors begin with their means—who they are, what they know, and whom they know—and allow the path to emerge through action and interaction. The theory shifts the entrepreneurial question from “What should I do to achieve a given goal?” to “Given what I have, what can I do?”
For many of the student projects examined, this approach was not a chosen methodology but a necessity. Limited funding, ambiguous audiences, and overlapping personal and professional roles required adaptive improvisation. The additional insights offered by Read et al. (2009) on effectuation in uncertain, collective environments strengthen the case for viewing cultural entrepreneurship not as solitary ambition but as co-created, negotiated in practice.
Narrative and Embodied Knowledge
Central to artistic research is the recognition that knowledge is not always abstract or propositional, but lived, situated, and performed. Drawing from Frayling’s (1993) now canonical distinction between research for, into, and through art, and extending through Wesseling (2011) and Anttila et al. (2024), the work in this course embraces the idea that creative processes generate their own epistemologies.
Student reflections often took the form of autoethnographic accounts, movement-based inquiries, and spatial storytelling. These modes produce what Springgay et al. (2008) have termed “thinking-in-movement”: a mode of knowledge production inseparable from the process of doing. This supports a move away from case-study rationality and toward a paradigm where insight arises through immersion and reflection.
Cultural Entrepreneurship: Meaning Before Market
The field of cultural entrepreneurship offers multiple entry points for understanding how creative actors engage with economic realities without reducing their practice to product development. Gehman & Soublière (2017) frame entrepreneurship as a form of world-making, where symbolic capital is as central as financial capital. Similarly, Lindgren et al. (2014) argue that cultural entrepreneurs are often concerned with narrative legitimacy, identity work, and values alignment. Arvidsson (2016) deepens this perspective by examining how temporality and symbolic value shape long-term cultural contributions.
Within the student projects, this translated into an emphasis on community relevance, aesthetic experimentation, and systemic contribution rather than profit maximization. The theoretical lens of cultural entrepreneurship thus helps us read these projects not as pre-market prototypes but as contributions to what could be called the cultural commons.
Complementary Lenses: Slow Design and Behavioral Insights
In response to the accelerated demands of creative labor, some students leaned into practices aligned with slow design—a movement that resists hyper-efficiency in favor of reflection, depth, and ethical intentionality (Grosse-Hering et al., 2013; Gasparin et al., 2020). These practices resonate with the affective and temporal rhythms observed in many of the projects, suggesting a counter-logics to the startup imaginary.
In tandem, behavioral design (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008; White & Habib, 2019) provides tools for understanding how micro-decisions in cultural contexts are shaped by framing, feedback, and perceived agency. These perspectives help explain not only how students crafted external interventions, but how they designed environments for themselves that allowed entrepreneurial identity to emerge gradually.
Together, these theoretical domains provide a vocabulary for interpreting the nuanced, plural, and often contradictory realities of emerging cultural practitioners. They support a reading of entrepreneurship not as a fixed discipline but as a field of relations—improvised, embodied, situated, and negotiated.
This research adopts a reflective, qualitative, and practice-grounded methodological approach. It is rooted in the pedagogical and empirical context of the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts, which ran from January to June 2025. Over the course of five months, students engaged in thematic workshops, peer-to-peer inquiry, and iterative project development, culminating in a final thesis and an oral presentation.
3.1 Data Sources and Scope
The primary data corpus consists of twenty anonymized final theses produced by students in the course, along with field notes and reflective summaries from their oral defenses. These works span diverse creative and cultural fields—from dance and textile craft to food culture, sound art, and digital experience design. Each project is grounded in the student’s context and addresses a real-world tension or challenge in their artistic or entrepreneurial practice.
The written submissions integrate literature reviews, process documentation, and reflective essays. As supervisors and course designers, we also drew on presentation transcripts and informal feedback exchanges, which revealed how students grappled with ambiguity, articulated shifts in practice, and contextualized their emerging entrepreneurial identities. Identifying information was fully removed in preparing the data for analysis.
While these materials were initially reviewed in our role as educators, for the purposes of this study we reapproached them as a research corpus, seeking patterns, contradictions, and propositions rather than evaluative criteria.
3.2 Analytical Process
Our analytical method followed an iterative, thematic coding process. We began with open readings of the theses and presentation transcripts, noting metaphors, moments of hesitation or breakthrough, and recurring challenges or strategies. From this, we developed a set of initial keywords, which we clustered into provisional thematic constellations.
Through repeated coding cycles, three overarching domains surfaced: Tensions, Networks, and Care. These were not predetermined but emerged organically from the material. To support analytical rigor, we engaged in peer debriefing, compared independent annotations, and shared a subset of the data with a colleague outside the course for informal feedback.
We also constructed a reflective map of our coding process (see Appendix A), documenting how categories evolved across readings. This mapping served both to clarify our reasoning and to ensure traceability within our interpretive logic.
3.3 Positionality and Reflexivity
Our dual position as educators and researchers offers both insight and responsibility. We were embedded in the pedagogical context that generated the material, allowing us to witness the nuances of student process, struggle, and transformation. But this proximity also necessitates a high degree of reflexivity.
To navigate this, we:
Maintained full anonymization throughout analysis.
Made our dual role explicit in the article.
Avoided interpreting any single project in isolation.
Focused on emergent patterns across the body of work.
Sought informal consent from students to reference their work anonymously.
We see this insider position not as a liability, but as integral to the research posture itself. Our perspective is neither external nor neutral—it is situated, engaged, and shaped through a relational pedagogical framework. This methodological stance reflects the core of our argument: that cultural entrepreneurship is not only a subject of study, but a practice of inquiry.
3.4 Limitations
As with any situated, qualitative inquiry, this study carries certain limitations. First, the empirical material is drawn from a single cohort in a specific institutional setting, shaped by the pedagogical design and cultural context of Stockholm University of the Arts. While the range of practices represented is diverse, the findings are not intended to be statistically representative or universally generalizable.
Second, our proximity to the material—as both supervisors and analysts—may introduce interpretive bias, despite efforts at anonymization, iterative reading, and external peer input. Finally, the absence of long-term follow-up or audience evaluation means that our insights remain within the frame of reflective practice rather than measurable impact.
These limitations do not weaken the contribution but rather clarify its scope. The findings offered here are not conclusions but openings—situated insights that we hope will resonate with and invite dialogue from others engaged in the pedagogies and practices of cultural entrepreneurship.
This section presents the empirical findings drawn from the twenty anonymized thesis projects and accompanying presentation reflections submitted in the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts. Rather than seeking generalisable models or isolated case studies, our approach has been to trace emergent patterns—those which recur, deviate, or resonate across diverse forms of practice. These patterns surfaced not as pre-defined categories but as grounded, interpretive threads arising through close reading and iterative thematic analysis.
The findings are organized into three interrelated thematic strands: Tensions, Networks, and Care. Each reveals how students navigated entrepreneurial challenges not just strategically, but affectively and ethically. These themes are not mutually exclusive; instead, they overlap and intersect, offering a textured picture of how cultural entrepreneurship is being enacted and reimagined by early-career practitioners in situ.
4.1 Tensions
Across the projects reviewed, a striking commonality emerged: cultural entrepreneurship was rarely described as smooth or strategic, but rather as uncertain, improvisational, and full of contradiction. This was not simply a reflection of individual struggle or underdeveloped skills; rather, it pointed to a deeper structural and emotional ambivalence around what it means to operate entrepreneurially within the arts. This section explores the theme of tensions—moments where competing logics, values, or temporalities collided, often without resolution.
Between Artistic Intention and Entrepreneurial Demand
Several projects revealed tension between maintaining artistic integrity and adapting to external demands. Students described moments where funding applications nudged their work toward instrumental outcomes, or where collaborative partners expected metrics and outputs at odds with the project’s exploratory nature. This dynamic played out not only in language but also in form—where projects that began as open-ended inquiries were reshaped into “deliverables” for institutions or stakeholders.
Some students resisted this shift. Others embraced hybrid strategies, embedding ambiguity or poetic gestures within more conventional formats. One project, for example, used food as a medium to explore cultural displacement, only to find itself rebranded by partners as a “community engagement tool.” The student responded by altering the structure of events to subtly resist this instrumental framing—serving meals in silence, removing signage, or changing venue layouts to disorient audience expectations.
Between Urgency and Depth
A second tension centered on time. Cultural work often unfolds over long durations, requiring slowness, care, and relational build-up. Yet entrepreneurial contexts tend to reward speed, responsiveness, and visibility. Students reported feeling caught between the impulse to go deeper—to reflect, revise, and listen—and the need to produce visible outcomes, attract attention, or secure funding before ideas were fully formed.
Some attempted to “stretch time” by staging iterative versions of their projects, framing them as prototypes or processes rather than products. Others leaned into temporality as a theme, making slowness or disappearance part of the work itself. In one case, a student dismantled their entire installation midway through the exhibit cycle, documenting the removal as a central gesture of refusal. These were not simply aesthetic choices but acts of resistance against the pace and expectations of cultural production under entrepreneurial pressures.
Between Internal Values and External Systems
A third pattern involved ethical friction—where students’ internal values clashed with the systems they were expected to engage. Issues of accessibility, representation, cultural appropriation, and ecological impact surfaced repeatedly, not only as topics but as lived concerns. One student working with inherited textile techniques from a diasporic lineage described a crisis moment when asked to showcase the work at a commercial design fair: “It felt like I was being asked to brand my grandmother,” they wrote in their reflection.
This kind of dissonance forced many to articulate their boundaries—to decide where adaptation becomes compromise, and where entrepreneurship becomes extraction. For some, the course became a space to rehearse refusal: to say no to platforms, funders, or collaborations that felt misaligned, even if it meant losing visibility or opportunity. These acts of principled non-participation complicate the assumption that entrepreneurship always equals expansion or exposure.
Holding Contradictions as Method
Rather than treating these tensions as problems to solve, many students chose to hold them—allowing ambiguity, discomfort, and contradiction to shape their practice. This suggests an emergent mode of cultural entrepreneurship not defined by clarity or linear progress but by holding space for uncertainty. These tensions, then, are not barriers to success, but active terrains of negotiation—sites where values are tested, ethics are enacted, and futures are prototyped in small but significant ways.
This section reveals that tension is not a failure of entrepreneurial capacity, but often a feature of working ethically within compromised systems. It suggests that a pedagogy of cultural entrepreneurship must not rush to resolve these frictions but rather help students name, navigate, and sometimes even amplify them.
4.2 Networks
If tensions revealed the inner frictions of cultural entrepreneurship, networks reveal its connective tissues—those webs of relation, support, visibility, and negotiation through which creative projects come to life. The projects analyzed in this study rarely positioned the entrepreneur as a solitary figure. Instead, entrepreneurship was understood as a relational, co-constructed process that relies not only on who you know, but on how you hold, nourish, and challenge those relationships over time.
Networks as Infrastructures of Care
Many students used their projects to activate or deepen pre-existing communities, often extending informal relationships into more intentional collaborations. This was particularly visible in projects grounded in localities—neighborhoods, diasporic communities, or marginal spaces—where the work became a means of tending to the social fabric. In one example, a student working with a small-town arts collective structured her budget to pay not only artists, but also volunteers and caregivers involved in hosting events, reframing the act of collaboration as an economy of mutual recognition.
These relational infrastructures did not always emerge from strategic planning; often they grew out of long-standing trust, shared risk, and situated commitment. Yet students also reflected critically on the limits of these networks—acknowledging power asymmetries, hidden labor, and the difficulty of sustaining participation over time. Some questioned their own role in these dynamics, asking whether their entrepreneurial efforts activated community or merely extracted symbolic capital from it.
Navigating Institutional and Informal Networks
Another recurrent theme involved navigating between formal institutions (universities, funders, municipalities) and informal collectives (peer groups, activist circles, art scenes). Students often served as intermediaries, bridging vocabularies and expectations between these worlds. One student described herself as “a translator between bureaucratic language and poetic urgency”—a role that allowed access to resources but also required emotional labor and occasional compromise.
For some, this navigation sparked creative strategies. They used formal events to smuggle in informal logics—hosting dinner parties under the guise of planning meetings, or turning public panels into platforms for community storytelling. These hybrid tactics suggest a form of cultural entrepreneurship that is not oppositional to systems, but porous—able to bend protocols without being subsumed by them.
Networks as Learning Ecosystems
Several students framed their networks not just as support systems, but as epistemic spaces—sites of shared inquiry and experimentation. They described how knowledge was generated not through individual reflection alone, but in dialogue: through critique sessions, communal meals, collaborative prototyping, or feedback loops across iterations. These learning networks allowed for risk-taking and failure, buffered by mutual trust.
Importantly, these ecosystems were often feminized in both tone and structure—emphasizing softness, reciprocity, slowness, and permission to pause. One project described its main output not as an event or object, but as “a listening circle that didn’t collapse”—suggesting that the endurance of relational forms might itself be a radical act of entrepreneurship.
Taken together, these patterns indicate that networks in cultural entrepreneurship are not only instrumental—they are ontological. They shape not just what is possible, but what is thinkable. For many students, to build a practice was to build a network, and to build a network was to build a different world.
4.3 Care
Care emerged across the student projects not as a theme added on to the work, but as an underlying ethic that shaped both process and intention. In a time when creative labor is often precarious, extractive, or accelerated, many of these projects turned toward care—not only as a response to burnout or systemic inequity, but as a generative principle in its own right. Care, in this sense, was neither sentimental nor merely interpersonal; it was infrastructural, methodological, and political.
Care as Counter-Ethic
Several students framed care explicitly as resistance. Against dominant entrepreneurial norms of growth, scalability, or disruption, they posed slower, more situated ways of working—prioritizing local relationships, sustainable pacing, and the emotional labor of listening. One student wrote: “This project is not a launch—it’s a holding. I’m not starting something new, I’m sustaining something fragile.”
This orientation often meant de-emphasizing public visibility or material output. In one project, the main intervention was simply maintaining contact with a group of older artists displaced by institutional closure. There was no final event, no visual documentation—only regular phone calls, shared meals, and a closing letter co-written with participants. While this may appear modest within dominant evaluative frameworks, it exemplifies a mode of entrepreneurship grounded in continuity, trust, and repair.
Designing for Relational Practices
In other projects, care shaped the design of formats and interactions. Students staged participatory workshops that centered safety and consent; created soundscapes that honored grief; built spaces where no one had to perform productivity. One project involving migrant youth included a “pause protocol” whereby any participant could suspend the session at any time, no explanation required. These gestures reflect a deliberate structuring of power—placing attention not just on what happens, but on how, with whom, and under what conditions.
Many students struggled to balance these intentions with institutional constraints. Some found their careful processes truncated by deadlines or misunderstood by funders. Others used care as a covert tactic—embedding slowness, vulnerability, or refusal into proposals coded in familiar entrepreneurial language. This ambivalence—both sincere and strategic—points to care not as a stable identity, but as a continuous negotiation within systems that often resist it.
The Aesthetics of Care
Finally, care was also expressed aesthetically. Several students explored how texture, form, and rhythm might communicate care as sensibility. In one project, a textile installation was stitched entirely from reclaimed materials donated by the artist’s neighbors, with each piece tagged by name and story. In another, an immersive audio piece asked listeners to lie down, close their eyes, and breathe together in a darkened room—offering not information, but presence.
Such practices recall Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) assertion that care is not only about fixing or helping, but about “thinking-with”—allowing space for entanglement, mutual becoming, and shared precarity. In this view, care is both affective and epistemological: it informs how we feel, what we know, and how we come to know with others.
These findings suggest that care in cultural entrepreneurship is not reducible to kindness or emotional labor; it is a mode of inquiry, a condition of practice, and a horizon of possibility. For many students, to care was not a reaction—it was the work.
The patterns identified in this study—Tensions, Networks, and Care—do not sit apart as discrete phenomena. They are entangled, often surfacing together within a single project or moment of reflection. A student confronting the precarity of cultural funding might simultaneously explore collaborative models of support and reflect on the emotional labor involved in maintaining those relationships. In this way, the categories are less themes than lenses, and the findings more a field of resonance than a taxonomy.
This discussion returns to the three patterns not to summarize them, but to situate them—within broader scholarly conversations, pedagogical implications, and possible directions for cultural work. It also reflects on what it means to conduct research through reflective practice and to hold both educational and analytical responsibility for the material.
5.1 Navigating Contradictions: Toward Situated Agency
The recurrence of friction in the student projects—between ideals and resources, urgency and capacity, art and audience—echoes a wider body of literature on entrepreneurial tension (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006; Du Gay, 2010). Rather than resolving these contradictions, many students chose to inhabit them, working with ambiguity as a generative space. This reflects an approach aligned with Sarasvathy’s (2001) notion of effectuation, where entrepreneurs do not control for outcomes but adapt through iterative action.
Several projects foregrounded contradiction as material. One student’s food-based project wrestled with ecological sustainability and cultural identity, refusing to simplify either into marketing language. Another mapped the invisibilized labor behind public performances, not to critique production per se, but to provoke new formats of acknowledgment.
Such tensions also reframe agency—not as the ability to overcome constraint, but as the capacity to navigate and reconfigure it. This echoes McRobbie’s (2016) and Lindgren & Packendorff’s (2021) view of cultural agency as distributed, negotiated, and affectively charged. Students worked not from mastery, but from situated knowing.
5.2 Rethinking Sustainability: Networks as Relational Ecologies
While network-building appeared often as a strategy for resilience, the projects reveal it to be more than infrastructure. Networks were framed as relational ecologies—interconnected systems of meaning, support, and reciprocal shaping. Sustainability in this framing is not a fixed state but an ongoing, relational achievement: composed of trust, time, knowledge, and care. This aligns with current thinking in entrepreneurial ecosystems (Neumeyer & Santos, 2018), feminist economics (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and new materialist approaches to relational agency and distributed networks (Coole & Frost, 2010).
Students did not only describe networks; they cultivated them as a method. One student reflected, “We weren’t just collaborators—we were holding each other up. The project wouldn’t exist without that support structure.” Another noted how “shared rhythm and mutual pause” replaced traditional planning structures in a cross-continental collective. This speaks to what Berlant (2011) calls “slow attachments”: structures that hold not through efficiency but through attuned, iterative connection.
This deepens our understanding of networks as more-than-functional. They become sites of aesthetic influence, moral decision-making, and temporal alignment. The network, then, is not merely a backdrop for entrepreneurship but its medium and material. It reveals how entrepreneurial practice is shaped not only by market forces, but by social contracts, artistic lineage, and moral orientation.
5.3 Reclaiming Care as Cultural Practice
Of the three patterns, care was the least expected and the most powerful. Care emerged not only as content—as in projects exploring caregiving, memory, or grief—but as method, as mode of relation, and as epistemology. Students reported organizing rehearsals around participants’ energy, designing rituals to honor failure, or holding space for doubt in feedback loops.
One wrote: “I had to accept that listening was more important than producing. That slowing down wasn’t a failure—it was fidelity.” Another described their artistic process as “care-in-motion”—a choreographic ethic that shaped both form and intention.
This reframes cultural entrepreneurship away from metrics and toward attunement. It aligns with Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) argument that care is a “matter of concern,” a relational practice that foregrounds maintenance, vulnerability, and repair. It also resonates with Springgay & Truman’s (2018) proposition of “attunement” as a research disposition: to be affected, to be open, to allow dissonance to linger.
In the projects, care often complicated productivity. Students chose to pause projects rather than overextend collaborators, or accepted diminished public visibility in favor of deeper personal meaning. These are not failures of entrepreneurship, but reminders of its plurality. They point toward what Ahmed (2014) calls “feminist survival tools”—ways of working that protect both self and structure.
This emergent ethic of care does not negate ambition. Rather, it redefines success as sustainability with integrity, growth with reciprocity, and innovation with responsibility.
5.4 Pedagogical Implications
What does this mean for how we teach and learn cultural entrepreneurship?
First, it affirms the value of reflective, situated inquiry over formulaic models. The students’ capacity to generate insight was not despite uncertainty, but through it. This suggests that entrepreneurial pedagogy must make space for not-knowing, for working-through, and for reframing as valid outcomes.
Second, it calls for attention to the conditions under which entrepreneurship is taught. The scaffolding of the course—its emphasis on process, feedback, peer learning, and transdisciplinarity—was not neutral. It shaped the inquiries and afforded moments of departure. This resonates with emerging work on entrepreneurial education as design (Neck & Greene, 2011; Lackéus, 2021), where learning is less about content delivery and more about context curation.
Third, it invites us to consider ethics as foundational, not auxiliary. If care is a method, then pedagogy must embody it—in time allocation, in feedback, in what forms of knowledge are recognized and valued.
Finally, it reminds us that cultural entrepreneurship is not merely a response to crisis or opportunity, but a way of being in relation: with others, with tradition, with change. Our role as educators is not to prescribe this, but to host its emergence.
In naming these patterns, we do not seek closure. Rather, we offer them as openings—maps in progress, shaped by encounter and ready to be redrawn in future iterations of research and teaching.
This exposition has traced emergent patterns in cultural entrepreneurship through the lived practices of twenty early-career cultural practitioners. Set within the context of the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts, the research has drawn on anonymized thesis projects and defense reflections to explore how students navigated tensions, built networks, and cultivated care in their work.
Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a fixed set of tools or outcomes, the study approached it as a process of situated sense-making: dynamic, contested, and deeply entangled with artistic identities and social relations. The findings reaffirm that entrepreneurship in cultural contexts often unfolds through improvisation, collective effort, and slow attunement—not linear planning or market logics.
Across the themes of tension, networks, and care, the students demonstrated a willingness to linger in uncertainty, to build relational infrastructures without promise of return, and to frame value in terms of contribution rather than extraction. This points toward a mode of entrepreneurship that is not a departure from artistic values, but a deepening of them—offering new ways to inhabit and shape the world through practice.
While the study is grounded in a specific educational context, its insights travel. They contribute to broader conversations around cultural sustainability, alternative economies, and the ethics of creative labor. They also offer an invitation to educators, policymakers, and practitioners to take seriously the forms of knowledge generated within artistic learning environments—not only as pedagogical outcomes, but as cultural research in their own right.
Further Research
Several directions emerge for future inquiry:
Longitudinal studies could follow these practitioners beyond the course to understand how their approaches evolve over time and in different institutional or geographic settings.
Comparative studies across similar programs internationally could surface shared challenges and divergent strategies in nurturing cultural entrepreneurship.
Focused investigations on care, slowness, and improvisation as entrepreneurial methods could further enrich our understanding of what constitutes viable creative practice today.
Collaborative authorship models between students and educators may yield deeper insights and challenge traditional separations between pedagogy and research.
Finally, this work signals a broader shift. As entrepreneurial education increasingly finds its way into the arts, there is a growing need for frameworks that do not simply transpose business logics onto creative practices—but that listen, stretch, and transform in response to the practices themselves.
Looking ahead, the course continues to evolve, welcoming new cohorts of practitioners each year. As the body of student work grows, so too does the potential for longitudinal or comparative inquiry—contrasting emerging patterns across cohorts, disciplines, and time. This unfolding archive offers a unique opportunity: to not only revisit initial insights but to iteratively deepen, challenge, and expand our understanding of cultural entrepreneurship as a practice of learning, making, and relating.
Anttila, E., Vasiljev, E., & Åberg, S. (2024). Artistic research in motion. Routledge.
Arvidsson, A. (2016). Value in the cultural economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke University Press.
Frayling, C. (1993). Research in art and design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), 1–5.
Gasparin, M., Green, W., Lilley, S., Quinn, M., & Saren, M. (2020). Careful innovation: Conceptualizing slow innovation and the socio-ethical dimension of innovation. Journal of Business Ethics, 161(4), 833–855. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3990-9
Gehman, J., & Soublière, J-F. (2017). Cultural entrepreneurship: From making culture to cultural making. Innovation: Organization & Management, 19(1), 61–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2016.1268521
Grosse-Hering, B., Mason, J., Aliakseyeu, D., Bakker, C. A., & Desmet, P. M. A. (2013). Slow design for meaningful interactions. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3431–3440). https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466472
Lindgren, M., Packendorff, J., & Sergi, V. (2014). Thrilled by the discourse, suffering through the experience: Emotions in entrepreneurial identity work. In R. Jeanes & T. Huzzard (Eds.), Critical management research: Reflections from the field (pp. 47–66). Routledge.
Read, S., Dew, N., Sarasvathy, S. D., Song, M., & Wiltbank, R. (2009). Marketing under uncertainty: The logic of an effectual approach. Journal of Marketing, 73(3), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.73.3.1
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2001). Causation and effectuation: Toward a theoretical shift from economic inevitability to entrepreneurial contingency. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378020
Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2008). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text. In S. Springgay, R. L. Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. xix–xxxiii). Sense Publishers.
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
Wesseling, J. (2011). See it again, say it again: The artist as researcher. Valiz.
White, M. P., & Habib, R. (2019). Nudge me gently: Behavioral design and cultural participation. Cultural Trends, 28(4), 311–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2019.1681232