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Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts  Volume 7, Issue 1 
http://artivate.org  pp. 1-2 
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Copyright © 2018, the author    
  
 
 

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THE WINTER 2018 ISSUE 
Linda Essig, Arizona State University 

 
I am pleased to introduce the Winter 2018 issue of Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship 

in the Arts. As I was reviewing the proofs for this issue, it was striking to realize that we are 
publishing Volume 7. As Shoshanah Goldberg-Miller, who co-authors one of the articles in this 
issue reminded me in private correspondence, there are several factors that mark the transference 
from a mere topic area into a discipline: differentiation, legitimization, and “the possibility that the 
emerging topic area may fill a need as a part of an established discipline.” The seven-year record 
of Artivate evidences the legitimization of arts entrepreneurship as a discipline. Reports by the 
Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), to cite just one example, have pointed to arts 
entrepreneurship education as filling a need within the established disciplines of the arts. 
“Differentiation,” is perhaps trickier to assess. Goldberg-Miller and her co-author Yan Xiao refer 
in their article to earlier arguments in the pages of Artivate and elsewhere about whether arts 
entrepreneurship is differentiated from arts management or from entrepreneurship more generally. 
Each of the three articles in this issue tease out subtle ways in which arts entrepreneurship, 
sometimes called in these articles “cultural entrepreneurship,” differs from entrepreneurship in 
other sectors and from arts management more generally. Further, each of these articles interrogates 
the role of cultural difference and cultural competency in arts entrepreneurship activities.  
 In “Music Entrepreneurs in a Linguistic Minority Context: Effectuation as Adaptation to 
the Paradoxes of Digital Technologies,” Joëlle Bissonnette and Sébastien Arcand explore the acute 
paradoxes imposed on music entrepreneurs by digital recording and distribution technology, made 
especially evident when those music entrepreneurs are working in a linguistic minority context. 
Goldberg-Miller and Xiao examine the launch of three cultural enterprises in Beijing, exposing 
both potential opportunities for and limitations of examining entrepreneurial behavior in non-
capitalist economies through the theoretical lenses of arts entrepreneurship and Kingdon’s multiple 
streams framework. In the third article, emerging scholar Tyler French presents a case study of a 
gallery and work space in Providence, RI that exists outside of the kind of creative placemaking 
policy initiatives discussed in our recent special issue on the topic (Volume 6, number 2). In an 
ethnographically informed analysis, he outlines the cultural circumstances that inform why some 
arts organizers chose to not participate in creative placemaking and artist entrepreneurship 
schemes. 
 Finally, Artivate’s “Book Review” segment returns with Johanna Taylor’s review of Mark 
Banks’s recent book, Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality. As Taylor points 
out in summarizing Banks’ case study of jazz musicians, people participate in the cultural 
industries not just for financial gain through fame or sales but also to contribute to the social good. 
This, it seems, is just one of the many ways arts entrepreneurship is indeed differentiated from 
entrepreneurship writ large. 
  



Essig            Editor’s Introduction 
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Artivate 7 (1)   

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