Cultural Entrepreneurship as Public Infrastructure Enabling the Conditions for Sustainable Cultural and Artistic Practice
Abstract Cultural entrepreneurship is commonly discussed in relation to individual agency, innovation, and participation in cultural markets. While these dimensions are important, such framings tend to foreground personal initiative while underarticulating the infrastructural role that entrepreneurial practices play in sustaining cultural and artistic life. This article proposes a reframing of cultural entrepreneurship as a form of public infrastructure: a set of organisational, relational, and institutional practices that enable cultural work to exist, persist, and circulate over time. Rather than presenting an empirical study, the article advances a conceptual argument grounded in long-term engagement with artistic education, project development, and institutional contexts. It suggests that cultural entrepreneurship functions less as a pathway to individual success than as a shared enabling system that absorbs risk, maintains continuity, and mediates between artistic, economic, and institutional logics. In many settings, such practices compensate for fragile or uneven public infrastructures, particularly under conditions of precarity. By situating cultural entrepreneurship within broader discussions of cultural rights, public value, and sustainability, the article highlights implications for education, institutional design, and cultural policy. Recognising the infrastructural function of cultural entrepreneurship shifts attention from individual performance toward collective capacity-building and long-term conditions for cultural participation. The article concludes by positioning this reframing as a foundation for future research and international initiatives concerned with the sustainability of cultural and creative practice.
Cultural entrepreneurship is most often discussed through the lens of individual agency. Artists and cultural practitioners are encouraged to develop entrepreneurial skills in order to navigate markets, secure income, and sustain professional lives in increasingly precarious environments. Within this framing, entrepreneurship appears as a personal capacity: a matter of initiative, adaptability, and strategic self-management. Such perspectives have contributed important insights into how cultural work is organised and valued, particularly under conditions of uncertainty and limited institutional support.
At the same time, this dominant emphasis on individual agency tends to leave another dimension of cultural entrepreneurship insufficiently articulated: its infrastructural function. Beyond enabling individual careers or projects, entrepreneurial practices in cultural and artistic contexts often operate as shared systems of organisation, mediation, and support. They create continuity where formal institutions are absent or unstable, translate between artistic, economic, and administrative logics, and make it possible for cultural practice to persist over time. In this sense, cultural entrepreneurship does not only describe what individuals do; it describes how cultural life is collectively sustained.
This article proposes a reframing of cultural entrepreneurship as a form of public infrastructure. The argument is not that individual agency is irrelevant, nor that markets play no role in cultural production. Rather, it is that entrepreneurial practices perform an enabling function that is structurally closer to infrastructure than to individual performance. They absorb risk, maintain relations, and circulate value in ways that allow cultural work to exist, develop, and remain accessible—often in contexts where public or institutional support is partial, uneven, or contested.
The article advances a conceptual argument grounded in long-term engagement with artistic education, project development, and institutional practice. It does not present an empirical study in the conventional sense, but instead synthesises recurrent patterns observed across artistic and cultural contexts and situates them within broader discussions of infrastructure, public value, and cultural rights. By doing so, the article seeks to clarify what cultural entrepreneurship does at a systemic level, and why this function matters for education, institutions, and cultural policy.
Entrepreneurship in cultural contexts has traditionally been associated with initiative, innovation, and opportunity recognition. Within education and policy discourse, cultural entrepreneurs are frequently portrayed as adaptive individuals capable of navigating complex markets and transforming creative ideas into viable projects or organisations. This focus on agency has been both understandable and necessary, particularly in periods marked by the retreat of public funding, the projectification of cultural work, and the growing expectation that artists manage their own livelihoods. However, an exclusive focus on agency risks obscuring the broader conditions that make such agency possible in the first place. Individual entrepreneurial action does not occur in a vacuum. It relies on organisational forms, social relations, shared norms, and institutional interfaces that extend beyond the individual actor. These elements are rarely visible when they function well, yet they are essential for sustaining cultural practice over time. Research on infrastructure has long emphasised that enabling systems tend to disappear from view when they operate smoothly, becoming noticeable primarily when they break down or fail (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).
Reframing cultural entrepreneurship in infrastructural terms shifts analytical attention from isolated actions to enabling arrangements. Infrastructure, in this sense, refers not only to physical or financial systems, but to the organisational, relational, and institutional configurations that support ongoing activity. Seen from this perspective, entrepreneurial practices contribute to building and maintaining the conditions under which artistic work can be initiated, continued, and shared. They create pathways for participation, establish forms of coordination, and mediate between different value regimes. Such functions align closely with broader understandings of infrastructure as collective systems that enable action without prescribing specific outcomes (Ostrom, 1990). Importantly, this reframing does not negate the role of individual agency. Instead, it situates agency within a layered system of support and constraint. Individual initiative remains central, but it is exercised within—and often in response to—existing infrastructures. Cultural entrepreneurship thus appears less as a heroic act of self-realisation and more as a situated practice that depends on, and contributes to, collective capacity. Agency and infrastructure are not opposing explanations, but mutually constitutive dimensions of how cultural work is sustained.
Understanding cultural entrepreneurship through this lens also helps clarify why entrepreneurial practices are so prevalent in cultural and artistic fields. Their persistence does not merely reflect individual ambition or market orientation, but signals the presence of infrastructural gaps or misalignments within existing support systems. Entrepreneurial action often emerges where formal institutions are absent, inflexible, or insufficiently attuned to the temporal and organisational realities of cultural practice. By shifting attention from individual trajectories toward shared arrangements, the infrastructural perspective provides a more comprehensive account of how cultural entrepreneurship operates in practice. It foregrounds the conditions that enable outcomes to emerge, persist, and remain accessible over time, without reducing entrepreneurial activity to either personal virtue or market success alone. This perspective prepares the ground for examining how entrepreneurial practices function as enabling infrastructure in more concrete terms.
This article does not seek to replace individual or artistic agency as an analytical focus, but to complement it by examining the infrastructural conditions that make agency viable over time.
Infrastructure is often understood as a background condition: something that enables activity without drawing attention to itself. Its significance becomes visible primarily when it fails. In cultural and artistic life, infrastructure functions in similar ways, though it is less easily recognised as such. It includes organisational forms, funding mechanisms, legal frameworks, educational pathways, and informal networks that make cultural participation possible (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). Infrastructural systems share several defining characteristics. They are enabling rather than expressive, collective rather than individual, and oriented toward continuity rather than immediate outcomes. Infrastructure does not prescribe content or direction; instead, it establishes the conditions under which diverse forms of practice can emerge, interact, and endure. Its value lies less in what it produces directly than in how it shapes the range of actions that can be taken over time.
Applied to cultural and artistic contexts, infrastructure supports more than production and distribution. It underpins learning, collaboration, experimentation, and the transmission of knowledge across generations and communities. Educational institutions, funding bodies, professional networks, and regulatory frameworks all function infrastructurally insofar as they make sustained participation in cultural life possible. When these systems operate effectively, they recede into the background, allowing artistic practice to unfold without constant negotiation of basic conditions. At the same time, cultural infrastructure is rarely stable or uniform. It is shaped by historical legacies, political priorities, and economic arrangements that vary across contexts. As a result, access to cultural infrastructure is unevenly distributed, and practitioners often encounter gaps, misalignments, or rigidities that limit participation or continuity. These conditions are particularly visible in project-based cultural economies, where support is fragmented and temporally constrained.
It is within such contexts that entrepreneurial practices frequently emerge as adaptive responses. When existing infrastructures fail to accommodate the organisational rhythms, temporalities, or value orientations of cultural practice, practitioners develop alternative arrangements to sustain their work. These arrangements may be informal, temporary, or hybrid, yet they often perform infrastructural functions by enabling coordination, access, and continuity where formal systems fall short. Understanding infrastructure in cultural and artistic life therefore requires attention not only to established institutions, but also to the practices that arise around and between them. Infrastructure is not solely something that is provided from above; it is also enacted, maintained, and repaired through ongoing collective activity. From this perspective, entrepreneurial practices can be understood as part of the lived infrastructure of cultural ecosystems, shaping how cultural life is organised in practice. This understanding prepares the ground for examining cultural entrepreneurship not simply as individual initiative, but as a set of practices that actively participate in building, supplementing, and sustaining cultural infrastructure. The following sections develop this argument by exploring the limits of individualised entrepreneurial framings and articulating how entrepreneurial practices function as enabling infrastructure in cultural and artistic life.
The emphasis on individual entrepreneurial agency has played an important role in shaping contemporary understandings of cultural work. It has helped articulate how artists and cultural practitioners navigate uncertainty, mobilise resources, and exercise strategic judgement under conditions of limited institutional stability. Within education and policy discourse, this focus has supported the development of skills related to project management, communication, and professional sustainability, particularly in contexts where cultural labour is increasingly project-based. At the same time, individualised entrepreneurial framings have clear limitations when applied as the primary lens for understanding how cultural and artistic practice is sustained. By centring attention on personal capacities, adaptability, and outcomes, such framings tend to obscure the collective, relational, and systemic dimensions of cultural work. They risk attributing success or failure to individual performance while leaving the broader enabling or constraining conditions insufficiently examined. One consequence of this focus is that structural fragility can become normalised. Precarity is framed as an individual challenge to be managed rather than as a systemic condition shaped by funding structures, institutional design, and policy priorities. Artists are encouraged to become more resilient, entrepreneurial, or innovative, while the infrastructures that shape access to resources, time, and recognition remain largely unchanged. Research on creative labour has repeatedly shown how such conditions produce uncertainty that cannot be resolved through individual effort alone (Menger, 2014).
Individualised framings also struggle to account for the temporal dynamics of cultural practice. Artistic work often unfolds over extended periods, characterised by cycles of development, interruption, and return. Entrepreneurial narratives oriented toward growth, scalability, or short-term success sit uneasily with these temporalities. They privilege moments of visibility and achievement while overlooking the ongoing maintenance work required to sustain practice between projects, audiences, or funding cycles. Cultural-economic research has highlighted how value in artistic work is frequently realised over time rather than at the point of production or exchange (Throsby, 2001). Furthermore, the language of individual entrepreneurship can obscure the relational labour that underpins cultural production. Collaboration, peer support, informal mentorship, and collective organising are often treated as secondary or instrumental, rather than as constitutive elements of cultural ecosystems. When entrepreneurial success is framed primarily as individual accomplishment, the shared infrastructures that make such accomplishments possible recede into the background. This obscures how cultural work depends on networks of trust, reciprocity, and shared commitment that extend beyond formal organisational boundaries.
These limitations do not imply that individual agency is unimportant. Rather, they suggest that agency alone provides an incomplete account of how cultural entrepreneurship operates in practice. Without an accompanying analysis of infrastructural conditions, individualised framings risk reinforcing narrow understandings of responsibility and value. They can inadvertently legitimise systems in which the burden of sustainability rests disproportionately on those with the least capacity to absorb risk. Recognising the limits of individualised entrepreneurial framings opens space for an alternative perspective: one that understands cultural entrepreneurship as a collective, enabling practice embedded within broader infrastructures of support, coordination, and value circulation. This shift does not replace agency with structure, but situates agency within the conditions that shape its possibilities and limits. The following section develops this perspective by examining how entrepreneurial practices function as enabling infrastructure in cultural and artistic life.
Understanding cultural entrepreneurship as infrastructure requires a rebalancing of analytical focus: from isolated or short-term outcomes toward the conditions that make cultural practice possible, repeatable, and sustainable over time; from individual trajectories toward shared arrangements; and from visibility toward the often-invisible work of maintenance. This is not a move away from outcomes, but an effort to understand how outcomes are shaped, supported, and made durable through underlying systems of organisation, relation, and value mediation. When examined through this lens, cultural entrepreneurship appears less as a set of personal competencies and more as a distributed system of practices that enable cultural life to function. Rather than asking only what entrepreneurial actors achieve, the infrastructural perspective asks what entrepreneurial practices make possible, for whom, and under what conditions. It draws attention to the ways in which cultural entrepreneurship supports continuity, accessibility, and resilience across time, particularly in contexts marked by uncertainty and uneven institutional support (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). Entrepreneurial practices in cultural contexts often operate at the intersection of multiple logics. They mediate between artistic intentions, economic constraints, institutional requirements, and social relations. This mediating work is rarely captured by conventional metrics of success, yet it is central to the functioning of cultural ecosystems. It absorbs friction between incompatible demands, translates values across domains, and creates workable arrangements where none formally exist. Such mediation aligns with cultural-economic research emphasising the plurality of value regimes in cultural production and the limits of market-based valuation alone (Throsby, 2001; Klamer, 2017; Menger, 2014).
Three interrelated dimensions help clarify how cultural entrepreneurship functions as enabling infrastructure: organisational scaffolding, relational maintenance, and value circulation.
Cultural entrepreneurship frequently manifests through the creation of provisional organisational forms. These may include project-based entities, collectives, cooperatives, hybrid legal structures, or informal associations that emerge in response to specific needs. Such forms are often temporary, adaptive, and purpose-driven rather than designed for long-term stability or growth. Their primary function is not to scale, but to make artistic and cultural activity possible under given conditions. From an infrastructural perspective, this flexibility is not a weakness but a defining quality: it allows cultural practice to remain responsive without requiring permanent institutionalisation. This organisational scaffolding provides frameworks within which cultural practice can be developed, funded, and shared. It enables access to resources, creates legitimacy in institutional settings, and establishes interfaces with public bodies, funders, and audiences. Importantly, these structures often persist only as long as they are needed, dissolving or transforming as contexts change. In this sense, entrepreneurial organisation supports outcomes by shaping the conditions under which they can be produced and sustained over time (Ostrom, 1990).
A second infrastructural dimension of cultural entrepreneurship lies in relational work. Cultural ecosystems depend on networks of trust, reciprocity, and mutual recognition that develop gradually and are sustained through repeated interaction. Entrepreneurial practices often support these networks by facilitating collaboration, coordinating shared efforts, and maintaining connections across projects and contexts. This work is continuous and largely invisible, yet it is essential for enabling participation and collective resilience (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Relational maintenance includes practices such as peer support, informal mentorship, collective problem-solving, and the negotiation of shared norms. These practices distribute risk and knowledge across communities, reducing individual vulnerability and enabling longer-term engagement in cultural work. When understood as infrastructure, relational labour appears not as supplementary social activity, but as a core mechanism through which cultural systems remain coherent and functional.
A third dimension concerns the circulation of value. Cultural entrepreneurship does not only mobilise financial resources; it also enables the movement of symbolic, social, and temporal value. Recognition, legitimacy, access, and time are critical currencies in cultural life, and entrepreneurial practices often function to secure, translate, and redistribute them. They create contexts in which artistic work gains visibility, credibility, or institutional recognition, while also protecting spaces for experimentation and non-instrumental practice (Throsby, 2001; Klamer, 2017). Entrepreneurial arrangements can also mediate between different value regimes, translating artistic quality into forms that are legible to funders or institutions without fully subordinating practice to market logic. In this sense, cultural entrepreneurship supports outcomes while simultaneously shaping the conditions under which those outcomes can emerge, persist, and remain accessible. Such mediation reflects the structural uncertainty of creative labour and the need for arrangements that stabilise practice without fixing it in rigid organisational forms (Menger, 2014).
Taken together, these dimensions illustrate how cultural entrepreneurship operates as infrastructure rather than merely as individual strategy. It creates enabling conditions that allow cultural and artistic practice to persist, evolve, and remain accessible despite uncertainty, fragmentation, and uneven support. While individual agency remains essential to initiating and sustaining entrepreneurial activity, its effects are amplified and made more durable through shared infrastructural arrangements. Recognising cultural entrepreneurship as enabling infrastructure also clarifies its public significance. Even when entrepreneurial initiatives are privately initiated or informally organised, their effects extend beyond individual benefit. They contribute to collective cultural conditions by supporting participation, maintaining diversity of practice, and enabling the circulation of cultural value over time. In this way, cultural entrepreneurship complements public institutions while also revealing the limits of relying on individual initiative alone to compensate for systemic fragility.
The infrastructural dimensions outlined above are not abstract constructions imposed on cultural practice; they resonate closely with recurrent patterns observed across artistic education, project development, and professional cultural work. Over time, sustained engagement with artistic and cultural contexts reveals that entrepreneurial practices are rarely oriented toward singular outcomes or linear trajectories. Instead, they emerge as adaptive responses to structural conditions characterised by uncertainty, fragmentation, and uneven access to support.
One recurring pattern concerns the role of entrepreneurship as a means of stabilising continuity rather than maximising growth. Across artistic projects and career paths, entrepreneurial effort is often directed toward securing time, maintaining working rhythms, and preserving the possibility of return. Rather than pursuing expansion or scalability, practitioners prioritise arrangements that allow practice to continue across interruptions, funding gaps, or changing institutional environments. This orientation aligns with research on creative labour that highlights endurance and risk management as central features of artistic work under uncertainty (Menger, 2014).
A second pattern relates to the bundling of practices required to sustain cultural work. Artistic activity is rarely supported by a single organisational form or income stream. Instead, practitioners assemble constellations of projects, roles, and affiliations that together form a workable infrastructure. Entrepreneurial practices enable this bundling by coordinating schedules, aligning resources, and negotiating boundaries between different forms of engagement. What appears from the outside as fragmentation often functions internally as a carefully balanced system designed to distribute risk and preserve autonomy, a dynamic also observed in cultural-economic analyses of mixed value regimes (Throsby, 2001).
Relational work emerges as a third, consistently observed pattern. Cultural entrepreneurship frequently involves maintaining networks of collaboration and mutual support that extend beyond formal organisational structures. These networks provide access to information, opportunities, and shared problem-solving, and they often compensate for the absence of stable institutional anchoring. Entrepreneurial practices sustain these relations through repeated interaction, informal coordination, and the cultivation of trust. From the perspective of artistic research, such relational labour is increasingly recognised as constitutive of practice rather than ancillary to it (Borgdorff, 2012; Coessens et al., 2015).
A further pattern concerns the management of value across domains. Cultural practitioners regularly navigate tensions between artistic integrity, economic necessity, and institutional legibility. Entrepreneurial arrangements often function as mediating devices that translate between these domains without fully collapsing one into another. These practices do not eliminate tension, but they make it manageable over time, allowing practice to persist without being reduced to a single evaluative logic (Klamer, 2017).
These observations are consistent with earlier practice-based research into artistic entrepreneurship conducted within higher arts education contexts, which highlighted the centrality of continuity, relational work, and hybrid organisational arrangements in sustaining artistic practice over time (Windeløv-Lidzélius, 2024). Referenced here as contextual grounding rather than empirical proof, this work reinforces the view that entrepreneurial practices function as enabling systems rather than isolated acts.
Taken together, these practice-based patterns support the argument that cultural entrepreneurship is best understood as infrastructure. Its significance lies not primarily in what it produces at any given moment, but in how it shapes the conditions under which cultural practice can endure, adapt, and remain accessible. Recognising this function helps clarify why entrepreneurial activity is so prevalent in cultural contexts, and why its burdens and benefits cannot be assessed solely at the level of individual performance.
Situating cultural entrepreneurship within a framework of public infrastructure invites a reconsideration of its normative significance. If entrepreneurial practices enable the conditions under which cultural and artistic life can exist, persist, and circulate, then their relevance extends beyond individual careers or market participation. They become implicated in broader questions of cultural rights, public value, and societal responsibility for sustaining cultural ecosystems.
Cultural rights are articulated not only as freedoms of expression, but as rights to access, participate in, and contribute to cultural life. These rights presuppose material, organisational, and relational conditions that make participation possible in practice. International cultural policy frameworks recognise that cultural participation depends on enabling environments, not solely on individual capacity or talent (UNESCO, 2005). From this perspective, cultural entrepreneurship can be understood as one of the mechanisms through which cultural rights are enacted, particularly in contexts where public infrastructure is partial, uneven, or under strain.
Entrepreneurial practices often function as interfaces between individual cultural expression and collective cultural conditions. They translate artistic intentions into organisational forms that are legible within institutional and policy environments, while also negotiating access to resources, spaces, and audiences. In doing so, they support participation not only for those who initiate entrepreneurial activity, but for wider communities of practitioners and publics who benefit from the cultural activity that becomes possible as a result.
This infrastructural role complicates conventional distinctions between public and private value. Cultural entrepreneurship is frequently framed as a private endeavour driven by individual initiative and responsibility. However, when examined in terms of its effects on access, continuity, and diversity of cultural practice, its outcomes take on a distinctly public character. Entrepreneurial arrangements that stabilise working conditions, maintain networks, or enable long-term practice contribute to cultural ecosystems in ways that exceed individual benefit, aligning with broader understandings of public cultural value (UNESCO, 2022). Understanding cultural entrepreneurship as public infrastructure also highlights the limits of relying on individual initiative to compensate for systemic fragility. When entrepreneurial practices are required to substitute for absent or weakened public support, the burden of sustaining cultural life shifts disproportionately onto practitioners themselves. Such dynamics raise questions about equity, accessibility, and the distribution of responsibility for cultural sustainability, concerns that are central to contemporary debates on culture and development. At the same time, recognising the infrastructural contributions of cultural entrepreneurship offers a constructive basis for policy and institutional engagement. Rather than treating entrepreneurial activity solely as a marker of individual adaptability or innovation, it can be approached as a signal of underlying infrastructural needs. Where entrepreneurial practices proliferate, they often indicate gaps in existing support systems or misalignments between cultural policy objectives and lived practice.
Framing cultural entrepreneurship in this way aligns it with broader discussions of public value in culture. Public value does not reside exclusively in measurable outputs or economic indicators, but in the capacity of cultural systems to sustain participation, pluralism, and continuity over time. Entrepreneurial practices contribute to this capacity by enabling cultural work to take place across changing conditions, mediating between different value regimes, and sustaining forms of practice that might otherwise disappear.
Reframing cultural entrepreneurship as enabling infrastructure has direct implications for how it is approached in education, institutional practice, and cultural policy. If entrepreneurial practices function primarily to create and sustain the conditions for cultural life, then support systems must move beyond an exclusive focus on individual performance and short-term outcomes. Instead, attention should be directed toward how collective capacity is built, maintained, and distributed over time.
In educational contexts, this perspective suggests a shift in how cultural entrepreneurship is taught and assessed. Rather than framing entrepreneurship primarily as a set of personal competencies aimed at market success, education can emphasise infrastructural literacy. This includes understanding organisational forms, relational dynamics, and value mediation as integral to artistic practice. Artistic research literature has increasingly emphasised the importance of such contextual and relational dimensions in shaping knowledge production and practice (Borgdorff, 2012; Coessens et al., 2015).
For cultural institutions, recognising the infrastructural role of entrepreneurship invites reflection on how institutional frameworks interact with entrepreneurial practices. Institutions frequently rely on entrepreneurial activity to deliver programmes, manage projects, or extend reach, while simultaneously treating such activity as external or supplementary. An infrastructural perspective highlights the need for institutions to engage more explicitly with the conditions that entrepreneurial practices support, including continuity, coordination, and maintenance work that often falls outside formal recognition structures. Policy implications follow a similar logic. Cultural policies that prioritise innovation, growth, or individual entrepreneurship risk overlooking the systemic conditions that make cultural participation sustainable. An infrastructural approach shifts policy attention toward ecosystem-level considerations, such as access to shared resources, long-term support mechanisms, and the alignment of cultural, educational, and social policy objectives. International policy analysis has underscored the importance of such ecosystem-oriented approaches for maximising the social and cultural impact of creative sectors (OECD, 2018; European Commission, 2022).
This perspective also has implications for how impact is understood and evaluated. If the primary contribution of cultural entrepreneurship lies in enabling continuity, accessibility, and diversity, then assessment frameworks must account for these dimensions. Metrics oriented exclusively toward outputs, revenues, or short-term visibility capture only a partial picture of cultural value. Evaluative approaches that attend to durability, participation, and the maintenance of cultural ecosystems are better suited to recognising infrastructural contributions.
Across education, institutions, and policy, a common thread emerges: the need to redistribute responsibility for cultural sustainability. When entrepreneurship is treated solely as an individual obligation, the risks and costs of sustaining cultural life are borne unevenly. Recognising entrepreneurial practices as infrastructure reframes them as shared societal concerns, calling for coordinated support across sectors. This does not diminish the importance of individual initiative, but situates it within a broader commitment to maintaining the conditions under which cultural and artistic practice can flourish.
Conclusion: From Entrepreneurial Performance to Collective Capacity
This article has proposed a reframing of cultural entrepreneurship from an individualised practice oriented toward performance and outcomes to an infrastructural function that enables cultural and artistic life to persist over time. By shifting analytical attention toward the conditions that make practice possible, repeatable, and accessible, the article has sought to clarify what entrepreneurial practices do within cultural ecosystems, beyond what they appear to achieve at the level of individual projects or careers.
Understanding cultural entrepreneurship as enabling infrastructure highlights its collective and public significance. Entrepreneurial practices organise continuity, maintain relations, and mediate between artistic, economic, and institutional logics in ways that are essential to sustaining cultural participation. These functions often remain invisible precisely because they operate in the background, absorbing risk and coordinating activity without producing easily measurable outputs. Yet without such work, much cultural and artistic practice would struggle to endure.
This perspective does not diminish the importance of individual agency, creativity, or initiative. Rather, it situates agency within a broader system of shared arrangements that shape how cultural work is supported and sustained. By doing so, it opens space for more nuanced understandings of responsibility, value, and impact in cultural entrepreneurship. It also challenges evaluative frameworks that place disproportionate emphasis on individual success while overlooking the infrastructural conditions that make such success possible. Recognising cultural entrepreneurship as infrastructure carries implications that extend across education, institutions, and policy. It invites a shift from celebrating entrepreneurial performance toward strengthening collective capacity, from short-term outputs toward long-term sustainability, and from individual adaptation toward shared responsibility for cultural life. Such a shift is particularly relevant in contexts marked by precarity, uneven support, and growing expectations that cultural practitioners compensate for systemic fragility through personal effort alone.
As cultural and creative sectors continue to evolve under changing social, economic, and technological conditions, the need to understand how cultural life is sustained becomes increasingly urgent. Approaching cultural entrepreneurship as enabling infrastructure offers a way of connecting practice-based realities to normative commitments around cultural rights and public value. At the same time, future research may further examine how individual agency, identity, and artistic decision-making interact with these infrastructural conditions across different cultural and institutional contexts, helping to clarify how artistic practice is both shaped by and actively shapes the systems that support it over time.
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