A Narrative Study of Entrepreneurial Learning in Independently Owned Media Businesses

Abstract

This paper reports on the first stage of a two-year study exploring the learning experiences of the founders of four independently owned and growth-oriented businesses in the cultural media industry. The ventures include independent radio, marketing and design consultancy, Internet business development and cultural media retailing. The cultural media industry is a distinctive sector of growing economic importance, but the development of businesses within it and the acquisition of business and entrepreneurial skills by their founders are not well researched. Even the founders of successful businesses may not necessarily consider themselves to be entrepreneurs, as distinct from media practitioners, and the application of orthodox business and entrepreneurial theories developed in other sectors cannot be assumed to be valid in creative and media enterprises. This study adopts a social constructionist stance in seeking to develop new understanding of the emergence of learning as social practice, which may be shared through narrative accounts and interpreted as discourse. The four owners of media businesses are being followed through an in-depth longitudinal research study as they develop their business ventures and confront new challenges of managing growth and organizational change. Each is engaging in the research process by narrating and updating with the researcher an account of his or her learning experience in starting and managing the business. Their accounts form jointly authored, negotiated narratives that illustrate the development of entrepreneurial ways of working and the application of sense-making to produce ‘practical theories’ of action. The paper presents reflections on the research process after one year by selecting significant themes from the narrative accounts and relating these to theoretical and practical considerations of entrepreneurial identity and learning. To do this, it employs the literary medium of a short story in the ‘ethnographic fiction science’ genre, drawing on authentic speech material gathered during the research process. It explores the themes of identity in personal and social emergence, the negotiated enterprise, and the role of contextual learning in shaping practical theories of action.