136A. Brattström

way, the entrepreneurship industry not only produces economic value, such as in the form of new ventures. In addition, it produces cultural products (Hartmann et al., 2020) which its actors consume and reproduce. In this chapter, I seek to understand what the cultural ideals are within the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden, how they manifest themselves, and the consequences they have for actors and their activities.

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Methods

Because of the lack of prior academic research on entrepreneurship as a cultural ideal in the entrepreneurship industry, I relied on an inductive, explorative approach (Edmondson & McManus, 2007). I collected data from two different sources: (1) interviews with actors in the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden; and (2) public documents from actors in this industry, in which they explain who they are and what they do. Informants are listed in Table 1, all names are pseudonyms.

My analysis follows standard procedures in inductive theorizing from qualitative data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Miles & Huberman, 1994). I started with an open coding of interview transcripts, seeking to identify manifestations of values, norms, rules, beliefs, and taken-for-granted assumptions related to the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden. An initial central theme to emerge from this open coding was the idea of entrepreneurship as a positive, cultural ideal—albeit one that was fuzzy and difficult to define. As one informant said,

Table 1 Informants Name A. Serial entrepreneur and entrepreneurship educator

C. Entrepreneurship scholar D. Serial entrepreneur E. Innovation policy scholar F. Entrepreneurship scholar H. Entrepreneurship coach K: Founder, entrepreneur, and innovation manager

L. Entrepreneurship educator M. Entrepreneurship support actor