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Fishing via Meaning Infrastructure: Entrepreneurial Search and Possibility Development in the Emergent AI & ML Field
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- Author / Creator
- Valadao Alves, Rodrigo
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This monograph broadens the scope of cultural entrepreneurship by exploring the link between entrepreneurial search activities and the level of institutionalization of fields. Cultural entrepreneurship involves manipulating cultural repertoires to gather support from relevant audiences, but this relationship between institutionalization and entrepreneurial activity has been underexplored. Additionally, the assumption that entrepreneurs and their target audiences share cultural overlap is not always true in fields with a low level of institutionalization. These aspects have limited cultural entrepreneurship's ability to explain, for example, entrepreneurial search and possibility development in nascent and disintegrating fields. To address these limitations, this dissertation proposes the metaphor of fishing as a mechanism through which entrepreneurs explore possibilities and advance or demobilize institutionalization. The concept of meaning infrastructure is also introduced, representing a network of cultural repertoires that constitute the underlying meaning system of an institutional field. Four archetypes of meaning infrastructure are theorized: ethereal, condensed, plasmatic, and crystallized. Successful fishing occurs when entrepreneurs develop ties among cultural repertoires at the meaning infrastructure level. Empirically, this dissertation examines how cultural repertoires become available for startup organizations in an emerging field (i.e., the artificial intelligence and machine learning field in Canada between 2011 and 2020) and how fishing strategies are used effectively. Four major cultural repertoires are available for startups in an emerging field, enabling four fishing strategies: visionary, steward, communitarian, and pragmatic. The pragmatic strategy focusing on a crystallized infrastructure from adjacent mature fields is the only one that increases the chance of securing initial funding. This dissertation concludes with a discussion on the overall significance of the responses to the three research questions addressed, as well as directions for future research. Theoretically and empirically, this monograph contributes to advancing the relational turn in cultural entrepreneurship, a move that is fundamental to understanding entrepreneurial activity as part of a broader macro-cultural context.
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.