Cultural Entrepreneurship: Between-Organization Cultural Isomorphism and Within-Organization Culture Shaping

Cultural entrepreneurship is a process that focuses on entrepreneurial resources, identifies and legitimates new startups, and improves organizational performance. Although scholars of this subject have viewed entrepreneurs as cultural agents, for example, who either strike a balance between cultural resources and constraints or decouple their ventures from cultural constraints while coupling them with cultural resources, they have overlooked another possible behavior that cultural agents might display. In the present study, the authors attempt to uncover another facet of cultural entrepreneurship and conduct a case study focusing on a new entrepreneurial organization (subcontractor) that became a parts supplier for an automaker (user company). Our findings show that the subcontractor’s entrepreneurs shaped its culture by drawing on the external cultural constraints coded by the user company’s culture (between-organization cultural isomorphism), and they also used internal cultural resources to foster an entrepreneurial culture and to stimulate exploratory innovations (within-organization culture shaping).