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The growing recognition of the importance of cultural and creative sectors as sources of creativity and innovation has put emphasis on the development of entrepreneurs within this field. Cultural entrepreneurs are often described as being driven by artistic, rather than entrepreneurial, ambitions, where value creation is based on unique expressions, requiring them to engage in continuous innovation to sustain their activities, as well as facing challenging conditions. However, more understanding is needed on the work of these entrepreneurs and how they deal with challenges. The purpose of this paper is thus to explore the work of cultural entrepreneurs by integrating the current understanding of its challenges and strategies. Through reviewing empirical articles focusing on entrepreneurs in these industries and analyzing how the activities of entrepreneurs are described, we argue that the academic conversation around these entrepreneurs revolves around broad questions: who they are, what they have and where they are. These questions constitute three domains of entrepreneurial activity. We outline the challenges and strategies of cultural entrepreneurs and discuss the dynamics in the interplay between challenges and strategies within and across these domains. In highlighting the interplay between challenges and strategies, we advance the knowledge of entrepreneurship in the cultural and creative sectors and provide avenues for further research.

The growing cultural and creative sector has been argued to be an important catalyst for revitalization and development of other industries, cities, and regions through innovative value creation based on a logic with a focus on cultural and creative values rather than on growth and scalability. We argue that in attempting to realize such positive effects, cultural and creative entrepreneurs (CC entrepreneurs) face challenges, including liabilities of smallness, newness, and uniqueness, and of creating an identity, legitimacy and understanding of their value in interaction with partners. In coping with these challenges, boundary work becomes critical, and this paper explores the boundary work of CC entrepreneurs. Based on our qualitative study we use three narratives to illustrate our analysis of how the entrepreneurs engage in boundary work. We find that CC entrepreneurs set and maintain, as well as span and cross boundaries to overcome challenges of identity and develop their distinctiveness and belonging, and to overcome liabilities through cooperating across boundaries or expanding their scope. We also show that boundary work can be a joint effort by CC entrepreneurs, facilitated by creating boundary spaces, individuals taking on boundary roles, and through using boundary objects. 

In this chapter, we empirically investigate an important question of "how does knowledge sharing and knowledge leakage impact the alliance performance in dyadic coopetitive alliance settings that involve small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs)." Taking the perspective of the focal SME to address this question, we posit that while knowledge sharing positively associates with alliance performance, inadvertent knowledge leakage is negatively related to performance. We further postulate that under the conditions of high knowledge leakage, the positive impacts of knowledge sharing on performance would be reduced. Our structural model results based on a survey of 186 SMEs in the high-tech and knowledge-intensive industries in Sweden show support for two of the hypothesized relation- ships. More specically, the results show that knowledge sharing has a positive effect on alliance performance but knowledge leakage has an insignificant direct effect on performance. However, knowledge leakage plays a negative moderating role on the relationship between knowledge sharing and performance. We contribute by demonstrating the effects of knowledge sharing and leakage in under-researched but important dyadic one-to-one coopetitive alliances involving SMEs.

Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is an urgent challenge for mankind. However, as aggregate emissions continue to rise, necessary changes in industrial practices are lagging behind. The article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how the issue of GHG reduction is channeled from policy to industry, in one of the more GHG intensive sectors, agriculture. We adopt the translation perspective to analyze and discuss how the climate issue travels between contexts. Our study explores the activities involved as advisors, functioning as translating agents within Swedish agri-policy, inform producers about the issue of GHG reduction. The study sheds new light on the effectiveness of mitigation policy in promoting practice change and illustrates how translation is an analytical framework suitable for studying this within different industries.

Contemporary agricultural practices account for a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions. Inspired by the emergent literature on institutional entrepreneurship, we seek to explore mechanisms that affect an actor’s propensity to act in ways that imply suggesting and promoting emission-reducing practice changes. As influences originating outside the organizational field are assumed to constitute such mechanisms, the paper explores their role through a case study of a project run by a public agency. Unlike extant theory, results show that the agency’s propensity to act is not necessarily enhanced by extra-field influences but that such influences also limit the scope for suggesting change that challenges existing industrial practices.

Justification of the paper

Reducing GHG emissions is a fundamental part of the transition to a sustainable society. However, necessary changes in industrial practices are lagging behind as emissions, in the aggregate, continue to rise (World Bank 2012; UNEP, 2012). This paper addresses the discrepancy between needed and actual changes in industrial practices by exploring how the issue of GHG reduction is channelled through policy to industrial producers in a sector of relative importance: Swedish agriculture. We depart from the translation model which sets out to explain how entities, e.g., issues, ideas, practices and problematizations travel within and between contexts (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008). Our application of the translation  model sheds new light on the attempt to understand inertia in climate change-related practice change and should provide researchers and decision makers, particularly within policy, with new information.    

Purpose

The purpose of the paper is to explore how translation of the issue of GHG reduction affects the meaning of industrial practice. Following Zilber (2002; 2006; cf. Hardy and Maguire, 2009) we consider the shared meanings that underpin practice to be of pivotal importance to explain practice change. Thus we suggest that how or if this issue will spur practice change depends on how translation affects such meanings.

Theoretical framework

The translation model Somewhat simplified, translation assumes that a) entities change as they travel within and between contexts, b) the activities of translating agents are central for this and c) the process never starts nor stops but over time results in taken-for-granted simplifications (Jensen, Sandstrom, & Helin, 2009). Thus it is not mainly the advantages of a particular entity or the power and prestige of some original source (e.g. IPCC) that explain spread but rather the efforts of a multitude of translating agents that: “may act in many different ways, letting the token drop, or modifying it, or deflecting it, or betraying it, or adding to it, or appropriating it” (Latour, 1986: 267).

In applying this model to (agricultural) practice and practice change, we follow Hardy & Maguire (2009; cf. Zilber, 2002; 2006) who stresses the pivotal role of the shared meanings that underpin practice. Seen from this perspective, an emerging issue such as reduction of GHG emissions, could introduce radical change in practices through accompanying problematizations, e.g., claims, arguments, stories, that challenge the legitimacy of the practices prevailing in an industry (Maguire & Hardy, 2009).

Results and conclusions

Our results stem from two case studies exploring how the issue of GHG reduction is channeled through Swedish agro-policy. Our cases show how translation results in new meanings for GHG reduction as well as current agro-policy and practice. However, changes occur mainly at the level of discourse rather than at the level of practice. The argument of “biological complexities”, rendering agricultural emissions special and more difficult to reduce, takes on a status as a taken-for-granted truth that precludes substantial emission cuts and radical practice changes. Framing GHG reduction as concerning efficiency in agricultural practices reconciles possible opposing interests and protects the legitimacy of existing practice. Subsequently, arguments for radical practice changes are weakened.  

Implications for Just Transitions

The results shed light on some of the reasoning that explains inertia in transitions to a sustainable production in advanced nations. It is troublesome if advanced nations, e.g., Sweden, by reducing a complex issue to a matter of efficiency of production, refrain from assuming responsibility and making required radical changes. Further, results illustrate the limitations of the eco-modernist principles that currently guide policy making, especially in addressing global issues e.g., climate change. Such principles effectively preclude discussions of equity and fairness in terms of how much emission a sector and its producers have capacity for. 

The main purpose of this paper is to explore organizations’ perception of opportunities as a consequence of an infrastructure investment. More specifically, the study investigates the effects of organizations’ perception of institutional thickness, innovativeness, and local embeddedness on perception of opportunities. The study reports on investments made in a new railway in a Swedish peripheral region. The sample included organizations from different economic sectors located in seven selected municipalities. The data was analyzed by using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that activities supporting institutional thickness have a positive effect on perception of opportunities. In addition, organizations characterized by high levels of innovativeness and local embeddedness are more likely to perceive positively opportunities arising from an infrastructure investment.

Investors spend money and resources trying to reduce the environmental, social and governance risks in companies they own. If unattended, these risks may cause reputational damage not only to the portfolio firm but also to its owner. In this article, we study five Swedish national pension funds and the influence strategies used in shareholder engagement. Knowledge about influence strategies is important because successful shareholder engagements can lead to more sustainable corporate behaviour and a lower risk to the investor. In addition to the traditional power and legitimacy dependencies that have been reported as influential in deciding stakeholder salience, our findings reveal five additional factors useful for determining influence strategies in shareholder engagement. We provide a conceptual model showing how these factors interlink with choices of influence strategies, offering a practical use of this study. Stakeholder theory has been used as our theoretical frame of reference, based on existing influence strategy literature using a stakeholder–firm perspective.

This article illustrates how opportunities for regional renewal in a peripheral region may be reduced by rigid threat responses undertaken by established firms operating within traditional regional industry. In an inductive case study of new biorefinery industry initiatives in a region where traditional pulp-and-paper and forestry industry was in decline, we used primary and secondary data to outline how a set of new industry players who created innovative ways of using existing regional infrastructures and resources sparked rigid threat responses among established firms from the struggling traditional industry. Established industry firms framed new industry initiatives as threats, and responded by (1) reducing new industry actors' possibilities for new business development, (2) engaging in entrenched resistance, (3) creating collaborative illusions and (4) undermining the fundamentals of the new industry. Consequently, this study contributes to existing literature by proposing the potential of applying the threat-rigidity thesis on a regional level. This is achieved by illustrating that conflicting behaviours between new and established regional industry actors constrain opportunities for regional renewal in a peripheral region. As such, relevant directions for future research and policy implications are outlined.