In this edited volume, Christopher Rea proposes cultural entrepreneurship as a new approach to studying mobility and pluralism, which captures and theorizes cultural producers’ innovative ways of engaging multiple artistic fields that cross geographical, political, and ethnic boundaries. It centers agency on individuals and collectives as holistic entities and explores their “pluralistic approaches to cultural production” (p. 4). It thus remedies profession-based categories in the study of cultural agency that not only exclude institutions but also compartmentalize the individual's behaviors along professional lines. Each of the book's chapters provides an empirical study of cultural entrepreneurship in complex societal environments. To this end, the contributors to The Business of Culture skillfully exploit textual, visual, oral, and aural aspects of primary sources.

Part one introduces the concept of cultural personalities as a type of entrepreneur. The contributions by Grace Fong and Eugenia Lean explore two such personalities: Lü Bicheng (1883–1943) and Chen Diexian (1879–1940), respectively. Both Lü and Chen used their own literary talents to build a personal brand to attract consumers to their various enterprises. Unlike Lü’s silence on her economic success, Chen ardently linked his literary persona with his pharmaceutical brand. What accounts for the difference requires further study.

In his contribution, Michael Hill examines the correspondence school's entrepreneurial approach to language learning in the 1910s and 1920s. The mobility of cultural agency, here, is less about individuals straddling the realms of literature, commerce, and linguistics. Rather, it manifests in the interactive dynamics between writers and readers. Catering to middlebrow urban readers’ desire for a national and cosmopolitan cultural life, correspondence schools provided an entrepreneurial approach to self-fashioning. Through integrating language learning with modern life, student-readers practiced and branded themselves as modern self-improvers contributing to a larger cause.

Part two examines a second type of cultural entrepreneurs—tycoons, such as Tiger Balm King Aw Boon Haw (1882–1954) and post-1949 Hong Kong media magnates Law Bun (1923–2012) and Jin Yong (b. 1924). All exerted substantial influence over the cultural landscape in China and Southeast Asia. Sin Yee Theng and Nicolai Volland's study challenges the dichotomous view that separates Aw's commercial ventures from his philanthropy. Instead, they argue that these two aspects were mutually reinforcing. The complexity of Aw's motives and his transregional industrial, philanthropic, and journalistic enterprises, they argue, “illustrate the multi-dimensional and polycentric nature of cultural production” (p. 126). This nature is reflected as transmedia production and promotion in Law and Jin's enterprises examined by San-Shing Yung and Christopher Rea.

Part three discusses collectives functioning as cultural entrepreneurs. Unlike tycoons pursuing primarily economic interests, cultural groups oftentimes sought nonmonetary rewards, such as “social productivity,” to use the words of Robert Culp. Investigating local journals published in Guangdong by cultural and civil groups, Culp describes social productivity as the cultivation and reproduction of “social persons, organizations, and communities” (p. 182). Local journals worked to produce local communities by defining and representing them, mobilizing material aids to sustain them, and facilitating internal communication among their members both materially and discursively.

Collectives also engaged in a type of cultural production that could not be accomplished by individuals. This is seen, for example, in early Singapore cinema, as discussed by Chuan Ai Lin. In early Singapore cinema, collective enterprises were established between local entrepreneurs, who possessed the capital and a cultural understanding of the local market, and cinema industry experts from outside. This collaboration was essential for success in a region fragmented along ethnic, linguistic, and cultural lines.

Collective enterprises were also formed to navigate regime changes. The Shanghai Book Trade Association, as explored in a contribution by Volland, is one such example. Like Culp's local journal publishers, this professional association aimed to support its members, that is, the market-driven entrepreneurial model of publishing. To this end, the association had to bridge the bureaucratic and commercial worlds. Already weakened by internal frictions, the association was gradually “sidelined” (p. 236) when the Chinese Communist Party redefined culture as a service to class interests and began to manage it through bureaucracy after 1949.

In the epilogue, Christopher Reed and Volland apply the concept of cultural entrepreneurism to study the agency of “cultural workers” in Maoist China. Some artists, they argue, were entrepreneurial in dealing with cultural bureaucracy to pursue “symbolic capital” (p. 263)—i.e., recognition and honor. They also describe the behaviors of new Chinese cultural entrepreneurs born in the reform era, especially in their approaches to coping with the strong presence of the party-state in cultural production.

These essays together explore the dual nature of cultural entrepreneurship. As a historical phenomenon, its presence is contingent on complex technical and social conditions. As an analytical category, it identifies cultural activities resembling the archetype in early twentieth-century China and Southeast Asia. However, the question is to what extent we can stretch this concept.