Performing, learning and entrepreneuring; playing it by ear

We examine how musicians become entrepreneurs, illustrating how this dramatic shift from the aesthetic to the commercial offered a useful platform for understanding entrepreneurship. Analysing our data of 20 life story narratives, we found chronological patterns of socialised learning through and by experience and began to recognise how experience was acquired and deployed. Employing an entrepreneurship as practice theoretical framework, we saw an unexpected dimension, that our respondents not only used experience for “knowing” but that they performed that knowledge. Remarkably, performing was not simply enacting, but was a learning experience. This led us to propose a constructive circuit of learning by doing. The concept of performing provides an explanation that bridges conceptual gaps between experience and learning, strengthening our knowledge of entrepreneurship as socially situated by demonstrating that it is also socially learned. Although novel, it builds on and connects to much of what we already know.