135public (e.g., Ejermo, 2016; Karlson et al., 2021; Sandström et al., 2018) reports. These studies provide important functional insights into the different private, public, and academic actors that participate in the entrepreneurship industry; what elements of the entrepreneurship industry are more or less efficient; as well as insightful policy recommendations for how to improve the functioning of the industry. In comparison, the present study is less functionalistic. My aim is not to suggest how we can increase the output of the entrepreneurship industry, but rather to understand its cultural underpinnings, in the hope of also understanding why entrepreneurial activities are increasing.

2.2

Cultural Ideals

As the entrepreneurship industry grows in size and significance (Hunt & Kiefer, 2017), it also undergoes a process of institutionalization (Brandl & Bullinger, 2009; Hwang & Powell, 2005). Processes of institutionalization do not only encompass the establishment of standards, professions, and formal rules (Hwang & Powell, 2005; Powell & DiMaggio, 2012). They also encompass cultural ideals, or implicit, takenfor-granted assumptions about what is desirable and appropriate (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Cultural ideals are important if we acknowledge that entrepreneurship actors are social beings (Granovetter, 1985). They interact with others, collaborate with others, and spend their time in social communities within the entrepreneurship industry. In this way, entrepreneurship actors become “suspended in a web of values, norms, rules, beliefs, and taken-for-granted assumptions, that are at least partially of their own making” (Barley & Tolbert, 1997, p. 93). By adhering