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Abstract

Contemporary creative work increasingly requires individuals not only to produce artistic and cultural value but also to engage with the demands of entrepreneurship. Although entrepreneurship research has generated important insights into entrepreneurial opportunities, ventures and identities, less attention has been paid to how entrepreneurial demands are experienced and negotiated in everyday work. This thesis addresses this gap by asking: How do independent artists navigate contemporary work environments?

The thesis comprises three interrelated papers examining creative entrepreneurial engagement. The first paper explores how artist entrepreneurs navigate persistent tensions between artistic and commercial demands. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 45 artist entrepreneurs, it identifies three paradoxes: artistic freedom versus commercial demands, exploration versus repetition, and artwork primacy versus branding the self. The findings show how artists engage in differentiating and integrating practices to work through these tensions, while also highlighting the risks of drift toward artistic or commercial extremes.

The second paper examines how independent artists engage in entrepreneurial activities without adopting the entrepreneurial identity. Based on 61 interviews and observational data, it demonstrates that artists routinely perform entrepreneurial work while resisting the entrepreneur label. The findings reveal a decoupling between role enactment and identity adoption, showing how work roles are selectively accepted, resisted or reframed according to their perceived compatibility with a core social identity as artists.

The third paper develops a conceptual model of entrepreneurial identity regulation in social media environments. It argues that social media platforms should be understood not merely as communication tools through which entrepreneurial identities are expressed but as socio-technical environments that actively shape entrepreneurial identity. The paper theorises how social media platform-mediated evaluation influences entrepreneurial identity over time and extends identity regulation theory by showing how identity regulation can emerge through distributed socio-technical systems, operate in the absence of identifiable regulators and become recursively self-reinforcing.

Overall, the thesis advances understanding of entrepreneurship as a situated and ongoing process shaped by paradoxes, identity negotiations and digital infrastructures. It contributes to entrepreneurship research by challenging assumptions that entrepreneurial engagement necessarily entails entrepreneurial identification, extends research on creative entrepreneurship by providing a micro - level account of how artistic and commercial tensions are navigated in practice and develops a theory of entrepreneurial identity regulation in social media platform- mediated environments. The thesis highlights how entrepreneurial action and entrepreneurial selves are continually shaped through interaction with the social, occupational and technological contexts in which contemporary work unfolds.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Bayes Business School Doctoral Theses Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management Doctoral Theses

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