Cultural Entrepreneurship and the Spirit of Japanese Capitalism

While cultural entrepreneurship research has highlighted how entrepreneurs craft stories to legitimize their ventures, we know much less about how entrepreneurs gain legitimacy for a novel organizational form. Drawing upon a detailed, historical examination of Japanese family mottos from the Edo period (1603–1868), we show how stories embedded in family mottos enabled legitimation by symbolically leveraging two core socio-cultural institutions of Edo Japan (religion and family), advancing our understanding of how broader cultural resources can be leveraged to legitimate a new organizational form. We discuss implications for scholarship on family business and cultural entrepreneurship.