Microsoft Word - PBR Review layout.docx Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts Volume 5, Issue 1 http://artivate.org pp. 35-36 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Artivate 5 (1) 36 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.