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Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts  Volume 5, Issue 1 
http://artivate.org  pp. 35-36 
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Copyright © 2016, the author      
 
 

BOOK REVIEW 
Creating Cultural Capital: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Theory, Pedagogy and Practice 
Edited by Olaf Kuhlke, Annick Schramme, Rene Kooyman  
Reviewed by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, University of Texas at Austin 
 

This ambitious volume eloquently frames cultural entrepreneurship as a “critical 
paradigm” for artistic creators, scholars, students, and policymakers to ethically engage the 
communities where they work. Among the book’s important contributions are its conceptual 
framework and its exemplary models of cultural entrepreneurship efforts on the ground. 
However, at nearly 400 pages with contributions from 50 scholars worldwide, Creating Cultural 
Capital’s most significant offering is undoubtedly its precedence as a benchmark for the study of 
praxis globally. The book’s diverse cultural perspectives pay particular attention to place, distinct 
economic circumstances, and the interdisciplinary and hybrid approaches shaping artistic and 
cultural practices worldwide.  

 In their introductory remarks, editors Olaf Kuhlke, Annick Schramme, and Rene 
Kooyman define cultural entrepreneurship first and foremost as a theoretical framework to 
explain the ways that creative producers and consumers draw from and inform cultural contexts. 
They affirm the book’s goal of rooting cultural entrepreneurship in arts pedagogy and 
scholarship by outlining its diverse methodologies, emergent theorizations, and broad 
applications in pursuit of some form of stable practice, if not fully realizable sustainability. The 
editors are especially concerned with focusing on the first word in the term “creative economy,” 
and situating the creative worker so that artistry is neither subjugated nor overhyped in market-
based approaches. Arts indicator models are used variously to appraise, tout, or bolster cultural 
vitality, often across vastly different circumstances and at the expense of particular local contexts 
and challenges. In response to this, the volume’s authors are all careful to articulate the terms of 
economic circumstance in their arguments.  

Through these semantic shifts, as well as the careful attention to place and context, the 
editors align cultural entrepreneurship with “social entrepreneurship,” which found purchase in 
the academy more than a decade ago, with some accounts dating it back even further. At the 
same time, they invite cultural entrepreneurship to play a mediating role across policy concerns, 
arts management, and professional development training programs, as well as community 
engagement and arts entrepreneurship models currently responding to the same host of issues in 
academia.  

Organized in five sections, with an editors’ introduction and an extraduction by United 
Nations Policy Advisor Edna dos Santos-Duisenberg, the book offers a simple framework for 
reading cultural entrepreneurship. Respective sections touch on “A Global Perspective,” 
“Different Theoretical Approaches,” “Pedagogy,” “Cases,” and “The Practice,” with each part 
offering transnational examples. The approach implied by this methodological framework belies 
the presence of several other core streams of thought and analysis operating across categories.  

Navigating through the chapters one can locate a focus on the ideological challenges and 
opportunities made possible through entrepreneurship.  In the theory section, Manuel Montoya’s 
“Poetics as a Dynamic Concept” compellingly depicts how creativity and imagination emerge 
among creative workers who reconcile entrepreneurship values and potentials with ambitions for 
artistic creation. In “Developing a Business Model,” which appears under “Pedagogy,” Valerie 
Ballereau, Christine Sinape, Olivier Toutin and Edgar Juno-Delgado use identity theories to 
argue that cultural entrepreneurship is a necessarily hybrid approach requiring practitioners to 



Bonin-Rodriguez            Book Review: Creating Cultural Capital 
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Artivate 5 (1)   

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maintain a dialectical engagement. In their “Cases” chapter titled “Experiences with a Practice-
Oriented Minor at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts,” Dany Rookus and Tamara Jacobs analyze a 
Netherlands educational program where artists use their projected study of artists’ lives to 
construct their own entrepreneurial identities. In the “Practice” section, Isaac Bongani 
Mahlangu’s “Project Development Training as a Tool for Empowerment in Crafts” demonstrates 
how women workers in South Africa emerge into the economy through their carefully calibrated 
entrepreneurial efforts.  

 Other chapters detail the ongoing negotiation between arts managers and artistic 
practitioners who embody managerial approaches in practice. In a theory chapter about creative 
entrepreneurs operating in micro-economies titled “Adapting the Promethean Fire of Business 
for Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship,” Margaret Jane Wyszomirski and Shoshanah Goldberg-
Miller highlight the core business practices that align cultural organizations and those who 
continue to work with small, less formalized, collaborative methods. In “The Entrepreneurial 
Ant,” Kooyman and Ruben Jacobs call for a new entrepreneur-informed approach to managerial 
education. In “Pedagogy” Irene Popoli’s “From Art Manager to Social Entrepreneur” examines 
how European university initiatives have wrought a generation of skilled professionals who 
function effectively as arts makers and managers. Likewise, Bruno Verbergt and Leyla 
DeBruyne’s “Companions, Not General Managers,” challenge common organizational and 
creative practice distinctions.  

The role and valence of microeconomies touched on by Wyszomirski and Goldberg-
Miller offer another stream of concern. Jerry C Y Liu’s “Global Perspective” article “ReOrient” 
demonstrates how entrepreneurial efforts in Asian economies are often worked out across 
different forms of value—social, cultural, and economic.  Aparna Katre’s “Entrepreneurship 
Education for Social Innovation,” which appears in “Theories,” frames entrepreneurship as a 
means to address societal inequities and model social justice.  
 Considerable attention is also given to historicizing entrepreneurship in its various guises. 
Dennis Cheek’s “Global Perspective” chapter, “Legitimization Strategies Across Various Guises 
of Entrepreneurship,” performs what has become the expected critical operation of framing 
entrepreneurship for cultural practice. Drawing from a diverse body of literature, Cheek delivers 
a core “legitimizing logic” at work in all approaches.  Similarly, Marcin Poprawski’s “Cultural 
Entrepreneurship Teaching & Learning Models in Central Europe” historicizes the role of 
entrepreneurship since the fall communism. In a similar manner, Walter van Andel and 
Schramme’s theory article “Exploring Entrepreneurial Actions of Creative Entrepreneurs and its 
Consequences for Entrepreneurship Education” offers new logics for longtime practices and 
longheld assumptions.  

Undoubtedly, Creating Cultural Capital offers a handy teaching tool for arts, 
entrepreneurship, and public policy educators and practitioners working at all levels and 
locations. Its chapters are dense and compellingly argued. The research is rigorous, with each 
author exceeding the necessary burden of evidence. As demonstrated by my own reading into the 
work, the logic model framing the sections invites readers to self-determine the path of critical 
inquiry. Through case studies drawn across places as diverse as Lithuania, Brazil, the UK, the 
Netherlands, Croatia, South Africa, and Asia, this anthology offers a dynamic picture of the zeal 
and rigor with which entrepreneurship scholars are building a dynamic cultural marketplaces and 
homes worldwide.   
 

 


