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This paper aims to to explore power and legitimacy in the entrepreneurship education classroom by using Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological and educational theories. It highlights the pedagogic authority invested in educators and how this may be influenced by their assumptions about the nature of entrepreneurship. It questions the role of educators as disinterested experts, exploring how power and gendered legitimacy “play out” in staff–student relationships and female students’ responses to this.

A multiple-method, qualitative case study approach is taken, concentrating on a depth of focus in one UK’s higher education institution (HEI) and on the experiences, attitudes and classroom practices of staff and students in that institution. The interviews, with an educator and two students, represent a self-contained story within the more complex story of the case study.

The interviewees’ conceptualization of entrepreneurship is underpinned by acceptance of gendered norms, and both students and staff misrecognize the masculinization of entrepreneurship discourses that they encounter as natural and unquestionable. This increases our understanding of symbolic violence as a theoretical construct that can have real-world consequences.

The paper makes a number of theoretical and empirical contributions. It addresses an important gap in the literature, as educators and the impact of their attitudes and perceptions on teaching and learning are rarely subjects of inquiry. It also addresses gaps and silences in understandings of the gendered implications of HE entrepreneurship education more generally and how students respond to the institutional arbitration of wider cultural norms surrounding entrepreneurship. In doing so, it challenges assertions that Bourdieu’s theories are too abstract to have any empirical value, by bridging the gap between symbolic violence as a theory and its manifestation in teaching and learning practices.

This study aims to explore how membership (initially as a consumer) in a given field shapes individuals’ entrepreneurial journey.

The research context is cultural and creative industries and, in particular, the independent (indie) music field in which unstructured interviews were conducted with nascent and established cultural entrepreneurs.

The authors introduce and justify their theoretical framework of consumption field driven entrepreneurship (CFDE) that captures the tripartite process via which the informants make the transition from indie music consumers to entrepreneurs by developing field-specific illusio, enacting entrepreneurial habitus and acquiring legitimacy via symbolic capital accumulation within the indie music field. The authors further illustrate how these entrepreneurs adopt paradoxical logics, aesthetics and ethos of the indie music field by moving in-between its authentic and commercial discourses to orchestrate their entrepreneurial journey.

This study holds several theoretical implications for entrepreneurship-oriented research. First is highlighted the importance of non-financial resources (i.e. cultural and social capital) in individuals’ entrepreneurial journey. Second, this study illustrates the importance of consumption activities in the process of gaining entrepreneurial legitimation within a specific field. Finally, this study contributes to consumption-driven entrepreneurship research by offering a detailed description of individuals’ consumption-driven entrepreneurial journey.

This study provides some initial practical implications for entrepreneurs within the cultural and creative industries. The authors illustrate how membership in a field (initially as a consumer) might turn into a source of skills, competences and community for entrepreneurs by mobilising and converting different forms of non-material and material field-specific capital. To acquire entrepreneurial legitimation, nascent entrepreneurs should gain symbolic capital through approval, recognition and credit from members of the indie music field. Also, entrepreneurs can acquire symbolic capital and gain entrepreneurial legitimation by either “fitting in” or “standing out” from the existing logics of the field.

This study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines entrepreneurship fuelled by consumption practices and passions with our theoretical framework of CFDE which outlines the transition from indie music consumers to indie music entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the choices learners have in steering their way through the educational system in the UK.

The paper draws on data from two studies, one conducted in a state secondary school and the other in a Further Education College, both based in the north‐west of England. Both used interviews (either individual or focus‐group) to collect data, which were then analysed using a grounded approach.

In linking the two studies the authors highlight how the impact of symbolic violence and the relations between groups and classes at school continue into the “choices” the learners make during adulthood and also into the learner's working life, and that these “choices” are often a large‐scale consequence of many “micro‐choices” arising from day‐to‐day situations. The acts of symbolic violence described in the college group are not of themselves very different from those described by the school group, though the consequences for the school group cannot yet be known.

The participants in the two groups are unconnected in that they attend different institutions and are at very different stages of their education. However the authors contend that there is a connection in terms of the participants’ experience of symbolic violence.

The paper draws attention to the existence of symbolic violence in everyday school life, and highlights how these instances can have significant impact.

The aim of this paper is to provide novel insights into how the cosmopolitan mind-set can be fostered at a time of globalization by considering a group of social actors that has received scant attention in the literature on institutional change, notably migrant entrepreneurs.

This is a conceptual study that draws on Bourdieu’s theory of capital to develop a set of testable propositions as to how the economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital endowments of migrant entrepreneurs shape their agency in bringing about cosmopolitan transformation.

Together, migrant entrepreneurs endowed with higher levels of capital may act as institution reformers and promote the cosmopolitan mind-set by influencing the beliefs, incentives and behaviors of those embedded in more entrenched traditional institutions.

This conceptual framework deals with only one of the many agents that may help bring about cosmopolitan change and is particularly well suited to a Western European context.

This conceptual paper provides a number of testable propositions that can be central to an empirical investigation into how the levels of capital possessed by migrant entrepreneurs affect their engagement in cosmopolitan change.

The findings help identify those individuals who are more likely to endorse the cosmopolitan movement. This implication may be of particular interest to policymakers concerned with conceiving ways of counteracting some of the negative effects caused by globalization, as they need to identify and understand the social agents who can take on the role of catalyzers of public reforms.

The novelty of this paper lies in the development of a set of propositions that shows how divergent change toward a cosmopolitan vision might be engendered by spatially dispersed actors endowed with varying degrees of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital.

Biodynamics is a specific form of organic production with spiritual underpinnings. This chapter explores it as a form of rural entrepreneurship using the capitals framework of Bourdieu as a conceptual tool.

The chapter draws upon 11 qualitative case studies of New Zealand firms engaged in biodynamic growing methods. Data collected via in-depth narratively oriented interviews inform the chapter, along with other relevant secondary material.

The chapter suggests that the spiritual underpinning of the biodynamic approach imbues the experience with a form of spiritual capital that is not captured within traditional interpretations of capital. We conceive of this as a form of alternative capital and offer a conceptualisation as an attempt to capture that difference.

This is a niche, small scale, exploratory study limited to one geographic context (New Zealand) at one particular point in time.

This chapter offers a modest expansion to previous conceptualisations of capital in the rural context.

Social entrepreneurship education (SEE) is gaining increasing attention globally. This paper aims to focus on how SEE may be better understood and reconfigured from a Bourdieusian capital perspective with an emphasis on the process of mobilising and transforming social entrepreneurs’ cultural, social, economic and symbolic resources.

Drawing on qualitative research with a sample of social entrepreneurship educators and mentors, the authors generate insights into the significance of challenging assumptions and establishing values and principles and hence that of developing a range of capitals (using the Bourdieusian notion of capital) for SEE.

The findings highlight the significance of developing a range of capitals and their transformative power for SEE. In this way, learners can develop dispositions for certain forms of capitals over others and transform them to each other in becoming reflexive social agents.

The authors respond to the calls for critical thinking in entrepreneurship education and contribute to the field by developing a reflexive approach to SEE. The authors also make recommendations to educators, who are tasked with implementing such an approach in pursuit of raising the next generations of social entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the field of visual arts marketing in the development of wider branding theory and practice. Drawing on examples from visual artists and the art mechanism that connects them, the paper reveals how artists and art professionals foster various types of capital (social, cultural, symbolic) as a way of developing a brand name, ensuring longevity in the field, and gaining financial value on the market.

As a conceptual paper, the authors draw on a range of published works as well as examples from the world of visual arts in order to provide fresh theoretical insight into how branding in the arts may be applied to other industries.

The key findings are the importance of the consideration of the development and nurturing of social and cultural capital in developing brand identity. Additionally, visual art brands are required to be innovative and dynamic, and lessons learned regarding these processes have relevance for mainstream brands. The paper also found that creativity is often collective and that looking to methods for developing work in the visual arts can be utilised by brand managers more broadly in the age of social media and user generated content.

This paper follows on the developing body of work, which indicates what mainstream business can learn from looking at the visual arts. The paper highlights the collective nature of creativity in building the art brand as well as the importance of non-economic measures of value in the realm of branding.

Kostova, Roth and Dacin called in 2008 for the advancement of a theoretical conception of the multinational corporation (MNC) that takes into account both power relationships among actors and the structure of its internal institutional field. While micro-political scholars of MNCs have started to answer the former part of the call regarding power, the second part has not been thoroughly addressed yet. Furthermore, the agentic aspects typical of power games and the structural aspects characterizing institutional fields have not been fully combined in a multi-level perspective of MNCs so far. Leaning on Bourdieu, we suggest an answer to the pending call. We theorize the MNC as a playing field of power emerging around the issue of finding a meta-rate of conversion of the actors’ capitals constituted in national fields. We conceive such issue field in a dynamic state due to the constant entry and exit of new players (e.g. through mergers, acquisitions or divestitures). This results in the need to continuously test the validity of exchange rates. The role of the metainstitutional field level of the MNC as a global category is also discussed.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

The paper aims to show how resource‐based views of the firm inadequately address the strategic importance of acquiring and using symbolic capital within the wider discursive institutional environment.

A single case using publicly available data on the strategic activities of the oil and gas firm BP was constructed.

Combining case data with a review of literature on firm capabilities and organization studies, the paper identifies a previously unacknowledged foundational strategic capability: securing a licence to act. It finds BP strategists understanding this capability as the realization of credibility and authority arising from the conscious and skilled articulation of firm commitments and activities.

Generalising from the case, the paper argues for the importance to firm performance of an understanding of how capabilities evolve in relation to the use of symbolic capital within inherently complex institutional environments. This leads beyond a purely economic view of institutional settings to cover market‐based political and social interests.