Cultural Incubation - Managing Business and Culture: De-coupling and translating conflicting norms in a cultural incubation process

Sammanfattning: The norms of business and culture are different, but cultural policy is changing and the government wants to combine the two; business needs culture and culture needs business. One initiative is to develop cultural businesses through cultural incubation; however, there is a lack of research and theories about this method. Therefore, in this study, I investigate the cultural incubation process at the cultural incubator Transit. By conducting both quantitative and qualitative research about Transit, and further interviewing with experts in the field of cultural business, I find that a cultural incubator needs to manage the conflicting norms of business and culture in order to support cultural businesses effectively. I employ institutional theory to investigate the different norms and thereby I am able to identify conflicts between the norms. I discover that the cultural incubator should use de-coupling and translation strategies in order to manage the norms of business and culture. Since there are no theories about cultural incubation, I further make a theoretical contribution to the management of the cultural incubation process.