Abstract
This paper deals with local cultural capital as a motivator for entrepreneurial behavior in China. Following the Culture-Based Development paradigm (CBD), the current study approaches local cultural capital as an entity that can be temporarily segmented into living culture and cultural heritage and can be further differentiated type-wise into material cultural capital and immaterial cultural capital. The main hypothesis of this paper is that living culture and cultural heritage have different roles in the direction of effect on entrepreneurial behavior in China. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative research method is utilized and data is collected from China Statistical Yearbooks, the website of Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage as well as the third and fourth China Economic Census Yearbooks, covering the period from 2010 to 2019 and regarding all 31 provinces of mainland China. This dataset provides indicators for both material and immaterial living culture, respectively represented by the total book circulations in public libraries and performances at art venues, while historical cultural heritage is approximated by intangible cultural heritage (such as the number of folk literature, traditional music, traditional dance and so on) and historical sites. For data analysis, an OLS regression is used to assess the roles of each kind of cultural capital on regional entrepreneurship development. Findings suggest CBD is applicable for analyzing entrepreneurship behavior and the result of the application of model shows a notable impact of culture on entrepreneurship activities in China.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to understand regional entrepreneurial behavior in China from a behavioral perspective by applying the Cultural-Based Development (CBD) paradigm
Following closely the CBD definition for local cultural capital, which understands the entity as segmented into four blocks: material and immaterial living culture and material and immaterial cultural heritage, the current paper examines the impact of each type of cultural capital on local entrepreneurship behavior in all 31 Chinese provinces
From the results of this paper, CBD appears to be empirically applicable in capturing the impact of culture on entrepreneurial development in China from a local psychological milieu perspective
Summary
The aim of this paper is to understand regional entrepreneurial behavior in China from a behavioral perspective by applying the Cultural-Based Development (CBD) paradigm. It should be noted that the mechanism of how psychological factors would impact on the economic activities is still unclear, and it is often argued that it is the result of individuals with such personality traits interacting with local knowledge sources (Obschonka et al 2016) Other drivers such as the agglomeration of creative class in a locality is claimed to contribute to regional entrepreneurship development (Florida 2006), as creativity is one major fertilizer for the growth of entrepreneurship by generating new knowledge. Demonstration and peer effects are viewed as the explanation in that people are more likely to engage in entrepreneurship activities when they witness successful demonstrations from peers (Sorenson and Audia 2000; Arenius and Minniti 2005; Falck et al 2010) For regions such as Germany, entrepreneurship would thrive again even after drastic social and economic fluctuations (Fritsch and Wyrwich 2014). While these findings are very promising to understand the psychological aspects of regional entrepreneurship differences, the precise mechanisms that drive the local psychological milieu to develop into entrepreneurship psychology is still under-researched
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