How Entrepreneurs Become Skilled Cultural Operators

Research setting

There are different types of entrepreneurs and new ventures (Starr & MacMillan, 1990; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002). Frederic can best be characterized as a corporate entrepreneur. Unlike start-up entrepreneurs who are typically self-employed and create start-up ventures, corporate entrepreneurs create corporate ventures. Corporate entrepreneurs are not self-employed but continue working for a larger company. As such, they aim at entering and developing markets that are initially not served by the company. Similarly, Frederic independently developed a venture in pursuit of an opportunity but seeded by an initial investment from his employer.

Frederic had been a manager at Blue, a large international provider of business process outsourcing services, before creating and growing BluePublic as a corporate venture and as an organizational subunit of Blue. Frederic had worked for Blue for almost 15 years and had accumulated a wealth of experience in acquiring and managing outsourcing contracts from several large private sector companies. When Frederic became aware in 2005 of a business process outsourcing tender from a public sector organization, he recognized it as a potential business opportunity. The tender called for an improved delivery of a local government authority’s back-office services, such as the maintenance of information systems. Given Frederic’s extensive experience in outsourcing such activities from private sector companies, the tender sounded very doable to him. In other words, Frederic in part saw the opportunity based on a perceived similarity between private sector outsourcing and public sector outsourcing (Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010). Having convinced his superiors to grant him some initial resources as seed funding to bid for this tender and to venture into the public sector outsourcing market, Frederic had access to a certain amount of initial resources that helped his venture survive for some time in order to give it a chance to establish itself. Yet upon market entry, he had to recognize that this specific market was in fact fundamentally different from his earlier experiences. Instead of acquiring resources in culturally competent ways, he experienced drastic and costly ‘culture shocks’ which he needed to overcome in order to interact more competently with local resource-holders and make his new venture sustainable.

Since entering the public sector outsourcing market in 2005, Frederic has managed to set up BluePublic in the market by winning three out of the five contract biddings in which he participated (bids 1, 4 and 5). Only a handful of companies – mostly large incumbent firms – compete for around four to eight tenders a year in the public sector outsourcing market in this particular European country. The contracts companies bid for consist of large-scale, long-term joint public service delivery contracts between a public sector authority and a private sector organization. The contracts are substantial and involve an average contract length of 10 years, an average contract value of US$250 million and the temporal transfer of up to 1,000 public sector employees to the private sector company. Winning three such public sector outsourcing contracts over the course of our investigation thus enabled Frederic to create BluePublic as a new subunit of Blue, to become its managing director, and to acquire the revenues and human resources necessary for growing BluePublic into a serious player in this field.

To answer our research question, this empirical setting has particular relevance. Importantly, when entering the public sector outsourcing market, Frederic entered an extraordinarily complex and demanding cultural context. He faced prospective clients who aimed to expand public welfare in the geographical areas of their authorities. To acquire bidding contracts (and thus resources to develop his business), he thus had to gradually become aware of the public welfare logic of the public sector authorities and to evoke corresponding cultural frames besides any economic or commercial considerations.

Moreover, the contract bidding (i.e. resource acquisition) in this setting is culturally contingent, complex and foreign to the experiences that the entrepreneur had accumulated in the private sector. Contract bids have to address extremely detailed bidding requirements which the resource-holding public sector organizations prescribed in order to ensure that their expectations are met. Frederic’s resource acquisition attempts were typically initiated by an invitation to tender from the public sector organization and took one to three years if an outsourcing agreement was reached and a contract was subsequently signed. As bidding processes are triggered and led by public sector organizations, they have to conform to the extensive guidelines of the public sector in the country concerned. Bidding processes have to be formal, transparent and follow a public sector protocol. Adapting to this market, at first culturally foreign to him, thus required Frederic to go out of his way. As such this setting proved extremely suitable and fertile for studying how an entrepreneur had to develop his cultural skills. ²

Data collection

Our data collection spans BluePublic’s evolution (2005–2010), covering the period 2008–2010 in real time. We primarily collected data during four extended field stays ranging between 10 days and 3 weeks during 2008–2010 (see Table 1). As this study oriented increasingly on the evolution of bidding practices where the entrepreneur’s cultural skill development could be most patently observed, the data collection between our field stays gained in focus in this respect. As we became aware that Frederic’s bidding practices changed substantively between bid 1 and subsequent bids, we focused our data collection efforts during our stays 3 and 4 on unearthing how and why such a radical evolution of his bidding practices had occurred.

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Table 1.

Overview of Data Status per Bid.

		Bid 1	Bid 2	Bid 3	Bid 4	Bid 5
		Authority 1 (A1)	Authority 2 (A2)	Authority 3 (A3)	Authority 4 (A4)	Authority 5 (A5)
Bid Overview	Duration	2004–2005	Spring 2006	Autumn–Winter 2006	2007–2008	2009–2010
	Bid outcome	Contact signed	Rejected after round 1	Rejected after round 2	Contract signed	Contract signed
Data	Interviews (total 41)	Retrospective	Retrospective	Retrospective	Retrospective	Real-time/ prospective
	Documents
	Bid documentation	Complete	Complete	Complete	Complete	Complete
	Bid memos	—	Yes	Yes	Yes	—
	Minutes	Complete	Complete	Complete	Complete	—
	Feedback documents from public sector authorities	Yes	Yes	Yes	—	—
	Other documents from public sector authorities	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Participant observation	—	—	—	—	Yes

We relied on three primary data collection methods: interviews and documents for all five bidding processes from the start of the organization, supplemented with non-participant observation for the fifth bidding process. While we relied on interviews as a principal data source, we accounted for the caveats of retrospective data in several ways (Miller, Cardinal, & Glick, 1997; Pentland, 1999). For instance, we sought to triangulate our interview-based findings wherever possible with related information in our other types of data sources. Moreover, in our interviews our informants could rely on voluntary reports rather than compulsory reports, allowing informants to not answer a question if they did not remember clearly. We also verified individual retrospective reports by using the same interview guideline and thus asking similar questions in every interview during a field stay.

Data analysis

Our data analysis combines established methodologies for longitudinal case analysis, content analysis, and abductive theory building. Consistent with abductive qualitative methods (Ketokivi & Mantere, 2010; Locke, Golden-Biddle, & Feldman, 2008), our analysis was based on repeated cycling between data, emergent theoretical ideas and the extant literature so as to uncover theoretical concepts that were useful for making sense of our data, for digging deeper in our analysis and for fleshing out a theoretical contribution. Eventually, in our analysis of the data, we came to draw on and integrate theoretical concepts from research on strategic cultural agency (e.g. Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Weber & Dacin, 2011), symbolic management and language use (e.g. Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010; Eisenberg, 1984; Sonenshein, 2006) and adaptive sensemaking (e.g. Cornelissen, 2012; Danneels, 2003; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010). In this process, we juxtaposed, cross-checked and combined our different data sources to triangulate our findings and to reduce the risk of a certain retrospective bias. In the data structure depicted in Figure 1, we have visualized how, in this process, we developed theoretical second-order categories and overarching theoretical dimensions from our empirical analysis and first-order findings (see Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2012).

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Figure 1.

Data Structure.

We started our analysis with detailed readings of our data and by engaging with data transcripts that we considered particularly revelatory. Initially, we focused on the several interviews we had conducted with Frederic which we later complemented with a thorough reading of other interviews and of the bid documents. We discovered that Frederic’s bidding skill and the way Frederic and his team were bidding had changed dramatically and, to use Frederic’s own words, ‘beyond recognition’ across the five bids. Subsequently, the purpose of our analysis and our conversations was finding a general theoretical ‘motor’ that would enable us to broadly conceptualize these developments (Garud & van de Ven, 2002; van de Ven & Poole, 1995). We eventually agreed that an adaptive sensemaking lens (e.g. Child, 1997; Clark 2004; Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Thomas, Clark, & Gioia, 1993) could provide us with the appropriate foci for digging deeper in our data analysis and for elaborating on the general claim that actors’ strategic cultural capacity is contingent on their ‘understanding’ of their targeted environment (e.g. Fligstein, 2001; Ganz, 2000; Jasper, 2006). In line with an adaptive sensemaking lens, we thus tracked how Frederic attended to and interpreted ‘discrepant cues’ from the public sector outsourcing environment together with his team and other actors, and how he enacted this evolved understanding in subsequent symbolic representations of his venture (see e.g. Danneels, 2003).

Our initial hunches suggested that two core interests drove Frederic in attending to and interpreting such surprising cues, and in symbolically enacting his evolved understanding in subsequent bids: first, he aimed at signing further contracts by appealing to the expectations of authorities and differentiating his venture from competitors. Second, when bidding, he aimed at addressing his target audience’s public sector-based aspirations in a way that would enable him to defend his scarce resources and realize his own private-sector-based aspirations (securing the financial viability and the profitability of his venture). These hunches sensitized us to the role that the entrepreneur’s ‘interests’ or ‘motives’ may have had for explaining his cultural agency (Spillman & Strand, 2013) and his adaptive sensemaking in response to the interests and values of public sector authorities as important resource-holders (Cornelissen, 2012; van de Ven, Sapienza, & Villanueva, 2007; Weber & Glynn, 2006). Cycling repeatedly through our data and the literature, we further elaborated our empirical and theoretical understanding of Frederic’s interests which we came to refer as ‘approval motive’ and ‘autonomy motive’. While gaining approval and autonomy are considered important drivers in actors’ symbolic management of exchange relationships (e.g. Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Oliver, 1991; Suchman, 1995), we specifically focused our analysis on how these impacted Frederic’s adaptive sensemaking processes which we came to refer to as ‘approval-driven sensemaking’ and ‘autonomy-driven sensemaking’.

Subsequently we focused our analysis more specifically on the enactment dimension of the entrepreneur’s adaptive sensemaking. Empirically, this dimension is connected to how BluePublic was symbolically represented in bid documents and how such ‘symbolic enactments’ evolved across bids. We thus focused our analyses on the content of the bid documents to answer these questions. We specifically analysed the content and evolution of BluePublic’s identity claims and the use of symbolic language therein. These claims included representations of Blue, BluePublic and their clients, as well as statements on how BluePublic would go about important public sector outsourcing issues, namely, ‘community regeneration’ and the conditions under which public sector employees would be ‘transferred’ to the private sector company as part of the outsourcing agreement. We uncovered that the content and style of these symbolic representations changed radically across the five bid documents. We found that, on the one hand, the representation of Blue, BluePublic and their clients became more and more based on symbolic language that aligned the venture more tightly with public sector frames while differentiating it from competitors. These symbolic representations also became increasingly embellished, amplified and emphasized (see Benford & Snow, 2000; Sonenshein, 2006). On the other hand, however, identity claims emphasizing how BluePublic would deal with the outlined public sector issues were increasingly loosened from public sector frames. The claims were also crafted in increasingly ambiguous (Eisenberg, 1984) and deemphasized or ‘subtracted’ ways (Sonenshein, 2006, p. 1160). We cross-checked this development with an analysis of our interviews and also uncovered ‘ceremonial compliance’ (Pache & Santos, 2013) as motivation behind the latter development. Iterating between our data and prior literature, we eventually labelled these two processes of symbolic adaptation ‘symbolic coupling’ and ‘symbolic decoupling’. Since notions of ‘coupling’ are used in research on adaptive sensemaking (e.g. Danneels, 2003; Scheid-Cook, 1992), symbolic management (e.g. Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Fiss & Zajac, 2006), and in cultural-institutional research (e.g. Haack, Schoeneborn, & Wickert, 2013) for conceptualizing degrees of alignment with a targeted environment, we considered them particularly generative in our case. On an overarching theoretical level, we regard these two processes as elements of an aggregate dimension which we refer to as ‘calibrating symbolic enactments’.

Subsequently, we used a variety of other data sources – evaluation and feedback documents by authorities, interview data, and internal BluePublic documentation – to uncover the patterns of attention and reflection that drove these changes in how symbolic representations of BluePublic were crafted. In line with our adaptive sensemaking lens, we focused our analysis specifically on the entrepreneur’s attention to and interpretation of ‘discrepant cues’, that is, surprising and unexpected events, feedback, or experiences that challenged and updated his extant understandings (e.g. Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). This led us to eventually develop a further overarching theoretical dimension of cultural skill development which we labelled ‘gaining cultural awareness’. A thorough analysis of our data suggests that his drive towards approval and autonomy led Frederic to increase his cultural awareness of the public sector outsourcing environment in two ways: First, together with his team, he gauged discrepant environmental cues to better understand which elements of his company are particularly resonant with public sector authorities’ interests and values. Aiming to yield a generative conceptual combination that combines notions of sensemaking (e.g. Danneels, 2010) with notions of strategic cultural agency (e.g. Weber & Dacin, 2011) and symbolic management (Zott & Huy, 2007), we conceptually referred to such processes as ‘recognizing cultural resources’. Second, following discrepant cues, Frederic also strove to better understand which public sector values conflicted with Frederic’s own private-sector-based interests and aspirations so as to ensure the profitability and financial viability of his venture. Such empirical insights were in turn referred to as ‘recognizing cultural constraints’.

Based on these overarching theoretical dimensions and their second-order components, we elaborated a theoretical model to capture how Frederic became a more competent cultural operator. The model is depicted in Figure 2 and will be elaborated on in the paper’s ‘theory development’ section entitled ‘Toward a model of cultural competence development’.

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Figure 2.

Theoretical Model: How Entrepreneurs Develop Cultural Competences.

Trustworthiness of research methods

Throughout data collection and data analysis, we took several measures to ensure the trustworthiness of our research procedures (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). First, we carefully managed our data, including contact records, audio files of interviews and meetings, transcripts, field notes and documentary data as we collected them. Second, we undertook reviews of our emergent findings with Frederic and other key informants as well as with our academic peers. For the former, we went back to Fredric and senior managers at BluePublic to discuss our thoughts and emerging results in order both to gauge their validity and to refine our understandings of BluePublic’s evolution. For the latter, on several occasions we undertook peer reviews to gain the perspective of experienced outsiders. Peer review here included engaging researchers not involved in the case study in order to discuss emerging conceptualizations and process descriptions, to act as a sounding board and to point out critical issues throughout the data collection and analysis process. Peers included both departmental members as well as senior scholars at other universities. Finally, we asked two independent experts in qualitative research methods to evaluate and audit our analysis procedures so as to help secure the robustness of our analysis and emerging theoretical interpretations.

Toward aligning the venture more tightly with enabling public sector frames

In this section, we show how Frederic came to gradually realize that two cultural frames – a certain ‘public sector ethos’ and the concept of ‘reference-ability’ – provided opportunities for more tightly aligning his venture’s identity claims with the values and interests of public sector authorities. In these claims, he particularly highlighted specifics of Blue’s legal status and corporate values as well as the client base of Blue and BluePublic as important stakeholders (see Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Zott & Huy, 2007).

Toward shielding the venture more effectively from constraining public sector frames

In this section, we detail how Frederic came to realize that aspects of two further cultural frames – relating to public sector authorities’ interests in ‘community regeneration’ and the ‘TRANS conditions’ for the transfer of public sector employees as part of the public sector outsourcing contracts that Frederic was bidding for – constituted threats to his goal of making BluePublic profitable and viable. These realizations gradually and iteratively led Frederic toward mobilizing identity claims that distanced and shielded BluePublic better from these two frames. In this way, he sought to protect his venture’s resources and to ensure that the contracts he aimed to sign would not threaten to his aspirations.

Gaining cultural awareness

Becoming aware of one’s external environment is a key component of adaptive sensemaking (e.g. Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010) and necessary for strategic agency (Child, 1997; Zimmerman & Zeitz, 2002) and competent cultural entrepreneurship. Expanding and adapting the entrepreneur’s cultural knowledge, gaining cultural awareness is a process that led to a refinement of Frederic’s understanding of BluePublic’s cultural environment and of the implications of this environment for the venture. It enabled the entrepreneur to better discern the cultural frames and discourses that the targeted public sector authorities were relying on and to better understand how these frames could enable and constrain him and his venture in productive and unproductive ways (see Fairhurst, 2010, pp. 36–57). Frederic gained cultural awareness repeatedly as he interpreted discrepant cues from the public sector outsourcing environment that his symbolic enactments triggered.

Frederic also actively and strategically searched for such discrepant experiences in order to increase his cultural awareness and strategic capacity (see Smircich & Stubbart, 1985). For instance, after bid 2, he brought in a consultant to help him and his bidding team reflect on the second bid process, on the feedback of A2, and on how and what to write in future bids. Moreover, he used bid 3 as an ‘experiment’ in order to garner feedback and symbolic influence, and to improve on his understanding of this symbolic environment. As Frederic reflected: ‘We approached [bid 3] with a view of: we don’t expect to win, but we will learn something out of this. We did sit down at the end of that process and talked about it. We went through a conscious evolution stage around that time.’

In Frederic’s case, ‘gaining cultural awareness’ included two component processes, ‘recognizing cultural resources’ and ‘recognizing cultural constraints’. Two different motives – an ‘approval motive’ and an ‘autonomy motive’ – guided Frederic during these two adaptive sensemaking processes and shaped what feedback cues he attended to, and how he reflected on them with his team in order to update and better calibrate future symbolic enactments.

Recognizing cultural resources involved Frederic repeated realization that some aspects of his company could serve as resources for constructing identity claims that would improve on the resonance of BluePublic with targeted public sector audiences. Frequently, this sensemaking process yielded Frederic awareness of unexpected similarities between his company and the cultural frames and expectations of public sector authorities and awareness of unexpected contrasts between his company and competing private sector companies (see Etzion & Ferraro, 2010). These processes were induced as part of the acknowledgement that BluePublic had been ‘sold short’ in previous symbolic enactments. Recognizing cultural resources was an important aspect of the entrepreneur’s broader ‘approval-driven’ sensemaking. His ‘approval motive’ (see Cornelissen, 2012) was manifest in the entrepreneur’s desire to better understand how to symbolically represent BluePublic and how to craft identity claims that would align the venture more tightly with the frames of the public sector authorities while differentiating the venture from competitors. In these processes, the positive or negative feedback of the targeted public sector authorities had considerable symbolic and ‘editing’ influences on Frederic’s sensemaking (Weber & Glynn, 2006) and repeatedly helped him gain cultural awareness and recognize cultural resources for updated symbolic representations of BluePublic.

Recognizing cultural constraints in turn involved Frederic’s repeated recognition that some BluePublic’s identity claims – while aligning the venture with public sector frames and differentiating it from competitors – actually dissipated too many resources and constituted threats to the entrepreneur’s goal of securing the profitability and viability of his venture. Frequently, this sensemaking process yielded Frederic awareness of unexpected contrasts between his company and the cultural frames and expectations of public sector authorities as well as a joint realization of unexpected similarities between his company and competing private sector companies (see Etzion & Ferraro, 2010). These processes were induced as part of the entrepreneur’s realization that BluePublic had been overly compliant with according public sector values and expectations in prior symbolic enactments, as for instance in claims around how BluePublic would go about ‘community regeneration’, and that outright negation or rejection of such public sector frames was not be beneficial either (see Werner & Cornelissen, 2014). Recognizing cultural constraints was a component of the entrepreneur’s broader ‘autonomy-driven sensemaking’. Here, Frederic’s ‘autonomy motive’ (see Oliver, 1991; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), his interest in developing alternative symbolic enactments that would better protect BluePublic’s discretion, its private-sector-based aspirations, and its long-term viability, came to override and balance his approval motive when making sense of cues received from the public sector outsourcing environment. This reduced the ‘editing’ effect of public sector authorities’ feedback on Frederic (see Weber & Glynn, 2006). Remote from the audience’s view and supported his bidding team and other actors such as consultants, Frederic rather sought to question the feedback, to resist the demands conveyed and to find alternative symbolic responses that would better shield the venture from public sector frames that constrained BluePublic and conflicted with Frederic’s own private-sector-based goals and aspirations.

Calibrating symbolic enactments

As Zott and Huy (2007, p. 85) argue, skilful symbolic action requires entrepreneurs to ‘translat[e] their conceptual awareness of symbolism into actual symbolic actions’. Using a term frequently used by adaptive sensemaking scholars (e.g. Clark, 2004; Danneels, 2003), they refer to this process as ‘enactment’ (Zott & Hay, 2007, p. 85). Gaining cultural awareness enabled Frederic to ‘calibrate’ symbolic enactments, that is, to better adapt and tune the crafted BluePublic identity claims to the contingencies of the cultural context of the targeted public sector authorities. Gaining cultural awareness thus yielded Frederic cultural agency. It included ‘reflective deliberation resulting in nondeterministic responses’ (see Archer, 1988; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) and led him to more creatively combine and ‘laminate’ public sector and private-sector-based symbols in his ‘toolkit’ thereby yielding more strategic manoeuvrability and versatility (Fairhurst, 2010, pp. 36–57; Rindova, Dalpiaz, & Ravasi., 2011).

More specifically, calibrating symbolic enactments iteratively and gradually led to two types of change in the way symbolic representations of BluePublic were crafted. We refer to these processes as ‘symbolic coupling’ and ‘symbolic decoupling’. Together, these developments reflected the entrepreneur’s increasing ability to enact his cultural awareness in more skilful ways. They gradually and iteratively changed the features of the venture’s claimed identity so as to more effectively convey the venture’s legitimate distinctiveness (Navis & Glynn, 2010, 2011) while better protecting the venture’s autonomy and economy (Oliver, 1991; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Wry et al., 2013).

Symbolic coupling refers to the gradual process of more tightly ‘aligning’ the symbolic representation of BluePublic with enabling public sector frames (see Benford & Snow, 2000). Frequently, this involved the mobilization of analogies to create similarities between aspects of BluePublic and public sector frames as well as mobilizing contrasts to emphasize BluePublic’s difference from competitors (see Etzion & Ferraro, 2010). Symbolic coupling was manifest in an increasing clarification, ‘embellishment’ (see Sonenshein, 2006) and ‘amplification’ (Benford & Snow, 2000) in some BluePublic identity claims, i.e. those around Blue’s foundation and corporate values as well as those emphasizing Blue’s and BluePublic’s public and private sector clients. Symbolic coupling is an enactment process that aims at mobilizing the cultural resources and seizing the cultural opportunities Frederic had become aware of following discrepant environmental feedback. As an approval motive led this adaptive sensemaking process, Frederic aimed at better emphasizing those claims that he thought would yield his venture legitimate distinctiveness (see Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Navis & Glynn, 2011) by resonating with public sector authorities in a way that differentiated BluePublic from competitors.

Symbolic decoupling in turn refers to a simultaneous process of gradually but increasingly ‘loosening’ the symbolic representation of BluePublic from target audiences’ constraining cultural frames. Symbolic decoupling was observable in an increasing ambiguity and ‘subtraction’ (see Eisenberg, 1984; Sonenshein, 2006) of other BluePublic identity claims, i.e. those responding to public sector interests in ‘community regeneration’ and the ‘TRANS conditions’ for the transfer of public sector employees. Moreover, at later bids, symbolic decoupling was also joined by ‘ceremonial compliance’, that is, by symbolically espousing values that ‘go down well’ with targeted public sector audiences while actually aiming to implement other practices in line with the entrepreneur’s own private-sector-based goals and aspirations (see Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Brown, 1994; Pache & Santos, 2013). As an autonomy motive led this adaptive sensemaking process, symbolic decoupling aimed at avoiding recognized cultural constraints by symbolically ‘shielding’ the venture from cultural frames (see Gray et al., 2015) that threatened the viability of BluePublic. While such symbolic decoupling led to forfeiting some legitimate distinctiveness vis-a-vis competitors, it nevertheless enabled Frederic to better realize his aspirations and to more effectively protect BluePublic’s resources and autonomy.

Theoretical implications

Our study stands to make the following contributions to cultural perspectives on entrepreneurship. As a first contribution, our study refines existing cultural explorations of entrepreneurs that typecast entrepreneurs as skilful cultural actors, or not (e.g. Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2011; Rao, 1994; Zott & Huy, 2007) – perhaps already at the time of entering their target market and when creating their new organizations. Rather, our study has sought to highlight the iterative, adaptive sensemaking processes that entrepreneurs – and particularly those who enter target markets that are initially foreign to their cultural experiences – may need to go through in order to develop and expand their cultural competences. Becoming a skilled cultural operator accordingly entails for an entrepreneur to gradually become aware and deepen their understanding of context-specific cultural resources, opportunities and constraints, and to translate their evolved understanding into updated and better calibrated strategic actions.

For at least two reasons, prior research might have repeatedly assumed entrepreneurs as skilful cultural actors from the outset. First, prior studies (e.g. Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010; Martens et al., 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2011; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009) may have envisioned more domain-general layers of culture compared to the more detailed, context-specific picture of culture that we present here. For instance, Santos and Eisenhardt (2009) referred to entrepreneurs as skilfully drawing on very general concepts that may be shared across domains in Western society (such as ‘store’, ‘shopping cart’, or ‘checkout’) for making their new organization (an ‘online shop’) appear comprehensible and valuable to resource-holders. What we add to this strand of inquiry is that we highlight first of all the importance of investigating how entrepreneurs come to draw on domain-specific layers of culture such as the culturally contingent frames of a specific type of resource-holding organization. In our case, these complex domain-specific frames of resource-holders (i.e. public sector authorities) were not evident or even salient from the outset and what this suggests is that entrepreneurs need to evolve their understanding before they can mobilize cultural resources, seize cultural opportunities and avoid cultural constraints as they create and grow their ventures.

A second reason to assume entrepreneurs as cultural strategic operators at the time of venture creation and market entry might be that scholars have studied new ventures and resource-holders in domains of low cultural complexity and/or low cultural discrepancy to the focal entrepreneur’s experiences (see Molinsky, 2007). Yet, we believe that the higher the complexity of the cultural domain and the higher its discrepancy to the cultural background of the entrepreneur, the lower the likelihood that entrepreneurs show cultural awareness and the more difficult it may be to engage from the outset as a skilful cultural operator in this domain. Hence, if cultural complexity and cultural discrepancy act as acute initial barriers – as in our case – entrepreneurs may start out as culturally naive, or with very little knowledge, and may have to gain the requisite cultural awareness and skills in order to appropriately and strategically act and interact with others.

Moreover, by expanding the cultural entrepreneurship perspective with insights on how actors symbolically manage their resource dependencies and constraints (e.g. Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Oliver, 1991; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Wry et al., 2013), our study complements extant research on what entrepreneurs’ cultural competences may entail. Our study shows and theorizes that skilful and strategic cultural action may not only include entrepreneurs’ ‘ability to induce cooperation’ and approval in targeted audiences (Fligstein, 2001) by mobilizing cultural strategies and identity claims that are aimed at achieving legitimate distinctiveness (see Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Navis & Glynn, 2011; Zott & Huy, 2007). Rather, successful cultural entrepreneurs may need to cultivate not only their ‘approval motive’ (Cornelissen, 2012) but also their ‘autonomy motive’ (Oliver, 1991; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) when making sense of their environment and developing cultural strategies (see Jasper, 2006). Consequently, effective cultural entrepreneurship may also require entrepreneurs to construct cultural ‘defence mechanisms’ in order to protect a venture’s autonomy, resources and long-term viability when aiming to acquire further resources from targeted resource-holders (see Hallen, Katila, & Rosenberger, 2014). Entrepreneurs accordingly need to develop and mobilize identity claims that ‘shield’ the venture from cultural frames or logics that turn out to be constraints and threats to organizational viability rather than cultural resources or opportunities (see Gray et al., 2015). In this regard, our study has emphasized and theorized how an entrepreneur’s evolved cultural awareness enabled him to improve not only on his venture’s symbolic coupling and legitimate distinctiveness but also on its symbolic decoupling and autonomy. Developing both cultural competences appears necessary for entrepreneurs to overcome the potential vulnerabilities of their ventures’ ‘adolescence’ (see Bruederl & Schuessler, 1990) get their way, realize their goals and make their projects successful and sustainable (see Jasper, 2006).

Additionally, our study also offers implications for research on entrepreneurs’ symbolic actions and symbolic management. First, we refine extant scholarship on the symbolic management activities of entrepreneurs (e.g. Granqvist et al., 2013; Zott & Huy, 2007) and, by extension, leaders (e.g. Fiss & Zajac, 2006; Westphal & Zajac, 2001) by highlighting the adaptive sensemaking processes that underlie the use of skilful symbolic actions and influence activities. As such, we have theorized that the development of skilful symbolic actions depends on whether and how an actor benefits from discrepant environmental cues for updating, tuning and recalibrating symbolic enactments. Making sense of discrepant feedback that their symbolic actions trigger can enable strategic actors to become more ‘reflexive’, that is, more aware of resources, opportunities and constraints (Zott & Huy, 2007, p. 83), and to translate their evolved knowledge into more customized and skilful symbolic enactments (Zott & Huy, 2007, p. 83).

Second, our study complements prior research on entrepreneurs’ symbolic management activities (e.g. Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Zott & Huy, 2007) by emphasizing the critical role of ‘decoupling’ as entrepreneurs create, locate and grow new organizations in their external cultural environments (see Pache & Santos, 2013). As such, we have shown how an entrepreneur symbolically endorsed the cultural frames prescribed by their target audiences while actually aiming to pursue actions promoted by other frames that were more aligned with his own goals and expectations. Our study theorizes how an entrepreneur gradually became aware of the need to better decouple his venture from constraining audience demands and expectations so as to make sure that his private-sector-based goals of making the venture profitable and sustainable could be realized. According to our theorizing, decoupling – and coupling– thus constitute not only longitudinal symbolic processes and outcomes (e.g. Haack et al., 2013; Tilcsik, 2010) but also key symbolic competences that entrepreneurs may need to develop and master.

Limitations and future research

While the entrepreneur, his venture and the market context he entered were sampled and selected for theoretical reasons, any such choices have limitations and thus hold opportunities for future research.

First of all, we suggest that an entrepreneur’s development of cultural competences co-varies with their prior cultural experiences and their motivation to adapt and expand their existing cultural awareness and skills (see Masgoret & Ward, 2006). We specifically selected an entrepreneur whose locally appropriate cultural competences were at best limited when he created his new venture. Future research could accordingly compare our findings with a sample of entrepreneurs who had some experience with the cultural contexts they entered in order to trace how their cultural competences evolved further in this setting. Relatedly, although the cultural experiences of the entrepreneur we had selected were distant from his target setting, his technical knowledge of business process outsourcing requirements and solutions were highly developed. This situation similarly opens up questions for future research to explore. What happens when technical and cultural competencies are not equally developed in entrepreneurs? When does the skill in the one potentially offset the limitations in the other? Moreover, in our study, the entrepreneur apparently was well motivated to adapt his cultural competences and develop a locally appropriate cultural repertoire. As such, future research should further extend our findings by sampling entrepreneurs who perhaps have a lower motivation to gain approval and adapt their cultural skills in order to nuance our findings further and to detail how varying levels of entrepreneurial motivation lead to different processes and patterns in the development of cultural skills.

Second, we selected for our study a specific corporate venture and a corporate entrepreneur. This selection criterion obviously begs the question of how our findings would have differed had we sampled a different type of entrepreneurial venture (i.e. a start-up) and other types of entrepreneurs instead. Start-up entrepreneurs and corporate entrepreneurs may possess differential skill-sets and different cultural ‘resource-bags’ when it comes to strategically influencing their audiences and legitimizing their ventures (e.g. Starr & MacMillan, 1990). As such, future research may need to investigate whether the patterns of developing and adapting cultural competences may differ among corporate entrepreneurs and start-up entrepreneurs. Moreover, at least initially, our corporate entrepreneur had access to corporate resources (i.e. he could convince his supervisors to donate initial resources for his bidding endeavour and he was allowed to assemble a small bidding team from among some of his colleagues). In turn, as a start-up entrepreneur, he would have had to assemble these resources from other types of investors or he would have had to enter the first bidding process without bidding support. As such, our corporate entrepreneur likely availed of a larger pool of initial resources at the time of market entry. This begs the question of whether entrepreneurs who are equipped with very different initial economic or social resource endowments can adapt and expand their cultural competences in similar ways. Perhaps, as Bourdieu (1986) would have suggested, entrepreneurs with larger economic and social endowments can quickly convert such resources into cultural capital, thus speeding up the process of cultural competence expansion and market growth. Or, perhaps, future research might observe the opposite effect, namely, that larger endowments of financial and social capital constrain entrepreneurs’ expansion of their cultural competences. As there may be theoretical resources to support several lines of argument, larger-scale empirical research may be needed to study how different types of entrepreneurial capitals interact as entrepreneurs aim to enter markets and grow their ventures.

Third, we selected a case of an entrepreneurial entry into an established market environment where the major cultural frames and expectations were relatively institutionalized and stable. As recent research has mainly focused on the strategic cultural actions of entrepreneurs in emerging settings, it would be worthwhile for future research to investigate whether and how entrepreneurs develop locally appropriate cultural competencies in industries or markets during expanded periods from the settings’ nascence throughout their growth periods. As we know, during these periods, industry and market settings are characterized by rapid and repeated changes in populating organizations, consumer tastes and regulatory frameworks. We also know that in nascent settings, skilful entrepreneurs draw on the registers of neighbouring and more developed cultural settings (e.g. Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009) and try to ‘hedge their bets’ by drawing on cultural resources from diverse contexts until a dominant, locally appropriate register of frames emerges (e.g. Granqvist et al., 2013). What we do not know, however, is how entrepreneurs evolve their cultural actions in such settings and whether and how the processes of cultural skill development differ from the model that we have elaborated from our investigation of an entrepreneurial process in an established, major and complex cultural setting. Future research may usefully explore a greater variety of entrepreneurial contexts to further advance a research agenda on the cultural skills of entrepreneurs and their effectiveness in various settings.