Dongjing Kang, Ran Ju
Cultural entrepreneurship, defined as the creation and management of businesses rooted in cultural heritages, strives for economic growth while preserving heritage, strengthening communities, and promoting diversity. Despite its strong relational ontology, cultural startups remain underexplored from a public relations perspective. This study examines its role through 35 consecutive in-depth interviews with cultural entrepreneurs in ethnic Tibetan regions in Southwest China. Grounded in entrepreneurial public relations scholarship and relationship management paradigm, we introduce a Sentience-Oriented Approach of relationship cultivation informed by Tibetan language and relational practices. Through this approach, Tibetan entrepreneurs cultivate relationships with various stakeholders through three key relational practices, emotional consciousness, aspiration, and compassion, which serve as foundational mechanisms for their public relations practices. This study elevates non-Western public relations scholarship by extending the current relationship management paradigm and highlights the significance of human-centered and care-driven relationship cultivation in cultural entrepreneurship. It also further aligns with recent calls for care-based public relations by emphasizing emotional consciousness and compassion as central to stakeholder relationship management.