Modelling cultural entrepreneurial regimes in Central and Eastern Europe: a symbolic data analysis approach

This chapter models ‘entrepreneurial regimes’ for cultural entrepreneurship using symbolic data. From the Amadeus database the authors select a sample of firms active in the cultural and creative sectors in Europe to verify to what extent entrepreneurial activities in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries differ from the other old European countries. Analysing several entrepreneurial (firm-level), institutional and macroeconomic distributional variables, and symbolic data clustering algorithms, they transform the dataset into a set of symbolic variables. They extract four main temporally robust clusters and provide their interpretations. Cultural and creative entrepreneurship in CEE countries perform differently compared to other European countries and those countries can be separated into two clusters, based largely on the level of development. Furthermore, Estonia and Slovenia emerge as clear outliers being closer to Western European countries. The authors conclude by reflecting on the findings for future research in the area.