Entrepreneurial Cultures

This collection of essays represents different approaches to the insertion of entrepreneurial activities in cultural and historical contexts.  Brigitte Berger and Tibor Kuczi examine the cultural conditions that foster the development of market economies and the formation of entrepreneurial activities, while Robert C. Ulin focuses on the intersections of cultural production and economic legislation.
Drawing from historical and demographic research, Berger claims that the accumulation of capital was preceded by sociocultural transformations that engendered the figure of the modern entrepreneur.  In addition to the historical analysis of the emergence of Western entrepreneurial culture, she cites anthropological and sociological studies on Chinese family enterprises and the conditions of entrepreneurial activities among the Third World underclass.  Thus, the author shows that the subsistence strategies organized around the household economies of the poor may actually bring about successful entrepreneurial activities.  
In his analysis of post-socialist economic transformation in Hungary, Kuczi seeks to explain the immediate reemergence of the spirit of capitalism after 1989, or in other words, the swiftness by which the state-socialist economy, based on state-owned industries, was replaced by the dominance of the private sector.  The author believes that the answer to this riddle can be found in the specific life-paths of the entrepreneurs themselves:  before 1989, many people sought to achieve economic autonomy for themselves, established important connections and accumulated means of production that could be utilized in the economy of the private sector.   
In the last essay of the collection, Ulin examines the causes of the exceptionally high prestige of Bourdeaux wines.  He shows that wine is basically a cultural invention, as differences in quality, however naturalized or taken-for-granted, are actually results of legislative discourses and economic policies.  These discourses serve the interests of the winegrowing elites but they are reproduced by other segments of the wine industry because non-elite growers can also benefit from the symbolic capital of the wine classification system originally produced by the elites.  This symbolic capital has been further reinforced by the production of a cultural continuity between quality wines and the aristocracy and the ensuing image of noble and grand wines made it possible to raise their price as well.