Creative entrepreneurship as a socially embedded form of work: a sociological ecology for the platform society

Creative entrepreneurship increasingly combines creative production with entrepreneurial, communicative, and platform-mediated work. Existing scholarship has generated important insights into opportunity recognition, innovation, value creation, and creative labor, but these perspectives often examine entrepreneurial activity, social relations, cultural recognition, and platform governance as analytically separate processes. This Perspective develops the Sociological Ecology of Creative Entrepreneurship (SECE), a conceptual framework that positions creative entrepreneurship as socially embedded work within platform society. Drawing on economic sociology, sociology of work, labor process theory, digital sociology, and platform studies, SECE integrates five analytically distinct but relationally connected dimensions: identity construction, relational capital, platform governance, cultural legitimacy, and institutional embeddedness. The framework is presented as a relational and multilevel heuristic rather than a tested causal model. It proposes that creative entrepreneurial practice emerges through interactions among workers, audiences, collaborators, platforms, cultural fields, and institutions. The Perspective further considers how these relations are shaped by power, inequality, and human-AI interaction and identifies directions for empirical research into platform-mediated creative work, occupational sustainability, and changing forms of employment.