Abstract

"Concoctions of the Past: New Venture Use of History"

Shannon Younger, University of Arkansas (shannon@shannonyounger.com)

Scholars have considered how history— “an ongoing set of practices through which the past is used”—is a critical symbolic resource for organizations (Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, & Popp, 2018: 1667). This is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs in cultural industries with institutionalized expectations for organizational ties to the past (Hirsch, 1972). But while established organizations have firm-specific histories (Hatch & Schultz, 2017), new ventures lack such internal stocks. We pose the following research question: How do new ventures manage novelty in cultural industries?

We address this question by conducting a qualitative, theory-elaborating study of craft distilleries in Washington and Tennessee. Given the profound regulatory and cultural shifts during Prohibition and the recent growth of craft distilling in the U.S., this is a fitting setting for this study. Using archival texts and craft distillery websites, our analysis unpacks how new ventures make rhetorical constructions of history.

In our sample, new ventures used elements from repositories of history derived from ancestry (i.e., personal historical ties), annals (i.e., market-level historical accounts), place (i.e., historical geographic ties), and techniques (i.e., approaches to historically transmitted production processes). Use of these repositories was different between states—those in Washington leaned into their sense of place and those in Tennessee leaned into historical annals. We observed that variations were a result of long-standing history impacting the cultural repertoires of craft distillers today. Further, new ventures adapted elements from the historical repositories using three distinct modes—revere, renew, and renounce—to reflect how they anchor and justify their present-day practices. We contribute to work in cultural entrepreneurship (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001) by expanding understanding of how history is used beyond established organizations (Rindova, Dalpiaz, & Ravasi, 2011) and providing a framework to explain how new ventures can meet expectations for historical ties despite their own lack of organizational history.