Hype: Marker and Maker of Entrepreneurial Culture

Research has studied entrepreneurial storytelling as a strategy for generating hype and establishing legitimacy for new ventures. However, it has not examined what the valorization of hype reveals about how the norms of entrepreneurial culture were constructed and justified. Through a conceptual history of hype and its evolving meanings over the last century, we theorize three norms that the concept of hype valorizes: rule-breaking, fetishizing imagined futures, and constructing the agentic entrepreneurial self. Our analysis contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism by complementing the toolkit view of culture and highlighting how hype shapes entrepreneurial culture and ideology.