CONCEPT
Cultural Entrepreneurs
Mokyr's term — drawing on the work of Richard McKenzie and his own historical research — for the specific individuals and movements who reshape cultural frameworks to make institutional innovations thinkable before policy can follow.
Cultural entrepreneurs are the agents of cultural change in Mokyr's framework. They are specific individuals — Francis Bacon, the French philosophes, the founders of the Royal Society, the authors of the Encyclopédie — whose intellectual work reshapes the cultural frameworks within which later institutional innovation becomes possible. Mokyr's argument in A Culture of Growth is that institutional change does not proceed directly from material conditions; it proceeds through cultural change, and cultural change has specific agents whose contributions can be identified, studied, and, crucially, emulated.
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The concept is important because it specifies who builds the institutions that redistribute technological gains. In the historical record, Mokyr argues, the eight-hour day was not produced by the 'working class' in the abstract. It was produced by specific cultural entrepreneurs — Robert Owen, the Fabian Society, social gospel preachers, labor journalists — who articulated the moral framework within which limiting the workday could be