Abstract
This article aims to discuss attempts to achieve a professional career within the creative industries. The key question is: How do entrepreneurs in creative industries invent strategies to cope with the paradox between individual professionalization and dependence on social contexts and professional scenes. The paper refers to the striking moment in which the high proportion of factual micro-entrepreneurial professions emerged without direct governmental support. Since a few years, the status of entrepreneurs in the creative industries is associated by a highly ambiguous situation: the newly invented catchphrase “new entrepreneurship” alludes to individualized marketing strategies, self-promotion and social hardships on the one side, but also to skillful alternation between unemployment benefit, temporary jobs, self-employment structures and new temporary network coalitions on the other. Contributing to this discussion, I bring forward the argument that the conceptualization of the term “scene” helps to shed light on action logics by cultural entrepreneurs caught in rather paradoxical circumstances. I will demonstrate and compare the various kinds of entrepreneurial embeddedness and the respective structural paradoxes in two urban settings: Berlin and Leipzig).
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Lange, B. (2018). The Paradox Between Individual Professionalization and Dependence on Social Contexts and Professional Scenes. In: Innerhofer, E., Pechlaner, H., Borin, E. (eds) Entrepreneurship in Culture and Creative Industries. FGF Studies in Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65506-2_6
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