Cultural entrepreneurship: Stories, legitimacy, and the acquisition of resources

We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that med iates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent cap ital acquisition and wealth creation. We propose a framework that focuses o n how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture iden tity that serves as a touchstone upon which legitimacy may be conferred by investors, competitors, and consumers,, opening up access to new capital an d market opportunities. Stories help create competitive advantage for entre preneurs through focal content shaped by two key forms of entrepreneurial c apital: firm-specific resource capital and industry-level institutional cap ital. We illustrate our ideas with anecdotal entrepreneurial stories that r ange from contemporary high-technology accounts to the evolution of the mut ual fund industry. Propositions are offered to guide future empirical resea rch based on our framework. Theoretically, we aim to extend recent efforts to synthesize strategic find institutional perspectives by incorporating in sights from contemporary approaches to culture and organizational identity. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.