TY - JOUR

T1 - Performing, learning and entrepreneuring

T2 - playing it by ear

AU - Anderson, Alistair R.

AU - Air, Carol

PY - 2022/8/1

Y1 - 2022/8/1

N2 - We examine how musicians become entrepreneurs, illustrating how this dramatic shift from the aesthetic to the commercial offered a useful platform for understanding entrepreneurship. Analysing our data of 20 life story narratives, we found chronological patterns of socialised learning through and by experience and began to recognise how experience was acquired and deployed. Employing an entrepreneurship as practice theoretical framework, we saw an unexpected dimension, that our respondents not only used experience for “knowing” but that they performed that knowledge. Remarkably, performing was not simply enacting, but was a learning experience. This led us to propose a constructive circuit of learning by doing. The concept of performing provides an explanation that bridges conceptual gaps between experience and learning, strengthening our knowledge of entrepreneurship as socially situated by demonstrating that it is also socially learned. Although novel, it builds on and connects to much of what we already know.

AB - We examine how musicians become entrepreneurs, illustrating how this dramatic shift from the aesthetic to the commercial offered a useful platform for understanding entrepreneurship. Analysing our data of 20 life story narratives, we found chronological patterns of socialised learning through and by experience and began to recognise how experience was acquired and deployed. Employing an entrepreneurship as practice theoretical framework, we saw an unexpected dimension, that our respondents not only used experience for “knowing” but that they performed that knowledge. Remarkably, performing was not simply enacting, but was a learning experience. This led us to propose a constructive circuit of learning by doing. The concept of performing provides an explanation that bridges conceptual gaps between experience and learning, strengthening our knowledge of entrepreneurship as socially situated by demonstrating that it is also socially learned. Although novel, it builds on and connects to much of what we already know.

KW - entrepreneurial learning

KW - entrepreneurship as performing

KW - experiential learning

KW - becoming an entrepreneur

U2 - 10.1177/14657503221105045

DO - 10.1177/14657503221105045

M3 - Journal article

VL - 23

SP - 163

EP - 175

JO - The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

JF - The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

SN - 1465-7503

IS - 3

ER -