Introduction to Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Suppose a software developer named Ada has an idea for a truly revolutionary app. This innovation could change the world. But many such innovations could; few actually do. And as Ada begins to think through how to get this innovative app to the people who might use it, she realizes that innovation was perhaps the easiest part. Now comes the hard part: Ada must persuade others to see the potential that she sees in the app. And that means being willing to change or iterate the innovation because there is no transportation without transformation (Akrich, Callon, & Latour, 2002a, 2002b; cf. Rogers, 2003). She must get people to invest in her idea, to provide support ranging from hard cash to word of mouth. She must persuade others to quit their jobs and work for her for the promise of potential future gains. She must figure out how the innovation will actually make money and from whom and how to get the innovation in front of them so they can start to believe in it too. And in the process, Ada must persuade herself to become something different and perhaps alien: an entrepreneur.

What Is Entrepreneurship and Why Should We Study It?

Entrepreneurship—roughly, the process of discovering and conceptualizing problems and then solving those problems with innovative solutions—has gotten considerable attention lately in a variety of contexts. Certainly, it has been a continuing focus for firms and corporations, leading to new models such as open innovation and open-source partnerships as well as rethought opportunities such as intrapreneurship. But entrepreneurship has also been applied in private and public contexts. On the one hand, some successful entrepreneurs have encouraged students to skip college and build companies instead. On the other hand, educators have been developing new tools (e.g., Michigan State’s Eli Review), pursuing technology commercialization, and exploring new models for helping students to learn (e.g., Massive Open Online Courses). Meanwhile, long-term changes in information technologies and the economy are pushing more and more people into the entrepreneurship path—sometimes reluctantly—and some legislative reforms (e.g., the Affordable Care Act) have made it easier for new entrepreneurs to tread that path. And in the social sector, nonprofits are exploring entrepreneurial models to engage donors and solve social problems in new ways (Neff & Moss, 2011) while both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations are exploring social entrepreneurship models that provide sustainable social change (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). In each of these contexts, entrepreneurship involves identifying new opportunities, then building an organization to take advantage of them. This work is sustained rhetorically in a number of ways for entrepreneurs such as Ada.

First, Ada must take on the identity of an entrepreneur: She must begin thinking of herself as an entrepreneur. Drucker (1993) once said that “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity” (p. 28). Entrepreneurs discover and conceptualize problems, then look for opportunities to solve those problems with innovative solutions—solutions that could involve new combinations of products, services, processes, or principles (Schumpeter, 1934). Such innovations can range from household gadgets to industrial processes to social services to viral phone apps. Above all, entrepreneurs take on risks—risks that most people are unwilling to take—in hopes of rewards (Knight, 2012). Ada must decide whether she is willing to take on this identity and all it entails.

Second, Ada must sustain her entrepreneurial work through communities and cultures to which she has access. Externally, these could include Ada’s family and friends, specific cultural or ethnic groups with which she is affiliated, and entrepreneur associations to which she belongs (e.g., mentor groups, accelerators, incubators, or coworking spaces). Internally, these might include organizations that form around the entrepreneurial opportunity, such as the company that will produce and market her new app. Ada has to reach out to her communities, but she also has to build a community.

Third, Ada must persuade stakeholders: investors, distributors, partners, and even potential employees. In business, that activity often involves researching potential markets, developing a business model, articulating a value proposition, assembling an appropriate team, and putting together marketing and business plans. Ada must therefore learn a variety of genres, figure out how to make them persuasive to different potential stakeholders, and approach stakeholders often.

To be successful in achieving her vision, then, Ada must develop, extend, and hone complex arguments to interest her support community, her stakeholders, and herself in the vision—and to adapt that vision to the needs of the stakeholders. Throughout this process—from developing an idea to researching the market, from sketching out the business model to describing the value proposition, and from gathering customer feedback to pitching a product—she must perform many small arguments that form a larger coherent argument.

As I have suggested, entrepreneurship is often focused on developing business opportunities. But entrepreneurship can also take other forms. For instance, organizations sometimes engage in social entrepreneurship, which involves finding new models for sustaining themselves and engaging diversified funding streams while embarking on social change. Public universities often commercialize technologies that they have developed. Open innovation involves developing new entrepreneurial opportunities by creating partnerships between existing organizations and unaffiliated crowds. Open-source projects arguably involve entrepreneurship although the opportunities being exploited do not translate directly to profits. Finally, intrapreneurship involves taking risks and innovating within a larger organization. In all of its forms, entrepreneurship involves rhetoric. This aspect has been explored in the entrepreneurship literature, but lightly and often not by name.

Rhetoric and Entrepreneurship: Outside the Rhetoric Literature

Outside of rhetoric and professional communication, much work has examined issues related to rhetoric and entrepreneurship although not often under that explicit heading. Here, I review three specific issues: rhetoric and identity; rhetoric, culture, and community; and rhetoric and persuasion.

Rhetoric and Identity

Although Ada must take on the identity of an entrepreneur, constructing an entrepreneurial identity can be difficult for two reasons. First, entrepreneurs like Ada fail—often. (After all, entrepreneurs take on high levels of risk as a matter of course.) So entrepreneurs must make sense of business failure when it happens. For instance, Singh, Corner, and Pavlovich (2015) investigated failure stories of 12 entrepreneurs and found that “stigmatization ultimately triggers epiphanies or deep personal insights which transform entrepreneurs’ view of failure from a very negative to a positive life experience” (p. 150). Byrne and Shepherd (2015) examined eight entrepreneurial failure narratives and found that entrepreneurs’ “negative and positive emotions act in concert to facilitate sensemaking—high negative emotions motivate, and high positive emotions inform, sensemaking efforts” (p. 377), allowing the entrepreneurs not only to make sense of the immediate failure but also to make better sense of future opportunities.

But when entrepreneurial institutions fail, those narratives may become more complicated. Zilber (2007) reported that after the dot-com crash of 2000, he collected narratives about the industry-wide failure from participants in a high-tech conference in Israel. Although these participants constructed “a shared story of the crisis that reflected and further strengthened the established institutional order,” they also told “a counter-story of indictment, blaming other groups for the crisis and calling for changes in the institutional order” (p. 1035). Failure hurts, and entrepreneurs must learn to understand that failure as being part of their success narrative if they hope to endure enough of it to succeed. That is, they must construct an entrepreneurial identity that allows them to recover from the failures associated with this high-risk activity.

Second, constructing this entrepreneurial identity can be difficult because it is not done in isolation. To take on this identity, entrepreneurs often seek out mentoring within a community of practice. This mentoring not only helps them to construct their own identity; it also provides a source of social capital, allowing them to be “admitted into a hallowed community of entrepreneurs who recognise and acknowledge each other for their risk taking, nous, wits, achievements and bruises” (Rigg & O’Dwyer, 2012, p. 324). That is, identity work allows entrepreneurs to create homophilous (birds of a feather) ties. Forming this “set of dyadic ties” allows entrepreneurs to “access the resources and knowledge needed to create and sustain a venture” (Phillips, Tracey, & Karra, 2013, p. 134). The narrative identity work also extends across organizations, such as a firm and its customers and suppliers: Downing (2005), for instance, drew on Giddings and Goffman to propose a framework “for capturing the collective positioning of identities and actions that establish ontology and precede collective learning or inertia” (p. 198).

Rhetoric, Culture, and Community

As I have suggested, entrepreneurs like Ada do not make it on their own: They are supported by many others, not only by mentors and homophilous ties but also by families, ethnic networks, and the broader communities and cultures in which these entrepreneurs operate.

Family support is most visible in family-owned businesses. For instance, in their study of German wineries, Jaskiewicz, Combs, and Rau (2015) noted that family firms are typically less entrepreneurial after the founder departs, but there are exceptions due to “entrepreneurial legacy, which we define as the family’s rhetorical reconstruction of past entrepreneurial achievements or resilience” (p. 29). These exceptions engaged in “three strategic activities—i.e., strategic education, entrepreneurial bridging, and strategic succession—that nurture transgenerational entrepreneurship” (p. 31). Similarly, in her study of 38 family-owned firms in northern Italy’s silk industry, Yanagisako (2002) examined individuals’ and families’ decisions about entrepreneurship and how family oral histories and founder stories play a prominent part in these family-owned businesses. But the author also traces how capital, labor, and technical knowledge flow through networks of consanguinity and marriage (p. 116).

Ethnic networks have also played a part in sustaining entrepreneurship, especially ethnic groups that constitute a minority in the space in which the entrepreneur operates. For instance, Iyer and Shapiro (1999) interviewed 17 entrepreneurs from ethnic minorities, who reported that they tend not to seek help from public or private institutions, instead using “surrogate modes of venture capital generation” (p. 97) such as informal credit networks. Menzies et al. (2000) found that such ethnic networks tend to use ethnic social capital extensively. Specifically, according to their literature review, ethnic entrepreneurs tend to use coethnic employees, markets, suppliers, and sources of finance. But other ethnic-minority entrepreneurs might not have access to such networks. For instance, Min (1990) interviewed 557 Korean immigrants in the Los Angeles area, discovering that they depend on white suppliers (and face some discrimination by those suppliers); simultaneously, these entrepreneurs’ businesses are sometimes avoided by customers belonging to other ethnic minorities.

Broader communities and cultures also interact with entrepreneurs on several levels. For instance, in their study of the king crab industry, Alvarez, Young, and Woolley (2015) traced how one entrepreneur “create[d] new industry standards and government regulations in order to support the for-profit king crab opportunity” (p. 96). In a perhaps more benevolent example, McKeever, Jack, and Anderson (2014) examined how entrepreneurs in two “depleted” North Irish communities identified with, and engaged with, those communities in order to help and rebuild them. This theme of “becoming” anchors Bjerregaard and Jonasson’s (2014) study of a South Korean credit card company in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis, a crisis that induced contradictions between Korean and U.S. logics.

Rhetoric and Persuasion

Finally, entrepreneurs like Ada must persuade others—lots of others. The entrepreneurship literature has a surprising number of articles that apply the tools of rhetoric to understand persuasion and legitimacy. But these articles often use rhetoric in a much more restricted sense than our field does.

In an influential article in management studies, Alvesson (1993) argued that “a crucial dimension of a knowledge-intensive organization concerns the struggle with…ambiguity, which leads to efforts to refine various rhetorical strategies” (p. 97). Elsewhere, Alvesson (2001) argued that due to this ambiguity,

the demands on the agents involved in terms of providing convincing accounts of what they do, and what sort of people they are, become central. This means that rhetorical skills and rhetorical acts become highly significant for the constitution of the company, its workers, activities and external relations.… Rhetoric, then, is not just external to the core of knowledge-intensive [work], but is in a way its core. Rhetoric does not simply mean persuasive talk being in some kind of opposition to “reality” or “truth,” but refers to elements of argument and persuasion which may, or may not, be backed up by “facts.”…Organizations and jobs that score high on ambiguity—such as the ones we are addressing here—cannot be managed without skills in, and attention to, rhetoric. (p. 871)

Alvesson cited no rhetoric scholars in either article. But in its broad outlines, his description does seem to accord with what we in the field mean by rhetoric.

Others, particularly in economics, similarly describe rhetoric in broad terms. For instance, Klamer (2011) drew on his frequent collaborator Dierdre McCloskey’s work to argue that cultural entrepreneurs develop their own characters through narrative-while Cosgel (1996) drew on Klamer and McCloskey’s earlier work—as well as that of literary theorist Northrop Frye—to examine entrepreneurs’ use of metaphors and stories: “Choices of metaphors and stories matter. Adopting a rhetorical approach and using the tools of literary theory, I have shown the ways choices of metaphors and stories matter for the role of the entrepreneur in economics” (p. 72).

Studying entrepreneurship specifically, Green and Li (2011) used Alvesson’s (1993) article as their point of departure. Green and Li characterized rhetoric in terms of classical rhetoric (Aristotle and Cicero) and new rhetoric (Burke and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca). Their gloss revolves around agency: “Classical rhetoric focuses on how we use words” while “new rhetoric focuses more on how words use us” (p. 1671). Drawing on Burke, they combined the two in order to better understand institutional logics. This work also builds on Green’s (2004) earlier work using rhetorical theory to reconceptualize the diffusion of managerial practices. These articles present rhetoric in a relatively expansive way although they tend to focus on words and sequence.

But much work in entrepreneurship takes rhetoric to be much narrower. For instance, in a series of influential articles, Suddaby and various colleagues relegated rhetoric to microlevel discourse. Suddaby and Viale (2011) argued that “discourse operates at a macro-social level and, while it reflects extant power positions within society, discourse is not particularly associated with the agency or intentionality of individual actors” whereas “rhetoric…operates at much lower levels of analysis [emphasis added], such as the organizational field, and is much more intentional or agentic” (p. 434). Suddaby and Greenwood (2005) likened rhetorical analysis to discourse analysis: “Rhetorical analysis shares [discourse analysis’s] interest in the role of language in structuring social action but is distinguished by a very specific focus on suasion and influence. In this context, rhetoric forms a sub-set of discourse analysis” that is focused on “explicitly political or interest-laden discourse” (pp. 39–40). In this context, Suddaby, Foster, Quinn Trank, and Trank (2010) explored “rhetorical history” as a story that management tells in a firm, one that reflects the deliberate, “manipulated” (p. 157) remembering and forgetting of organizational memory.

Similarly, Ruebottom (2013) identified rhetoric as having “microstructures” of language such as “vocabulary sets and rhetorical devices,” which “are building blocks of rhetorical strategy” (p. 101). And Van Werven, Bouwmeester, and Cornelissen (2015) located “the power of arguments” in a typology that “provides a base for future research on the micro-discursive processes through which entrepreneurs claim, and in turn achieve, legitimate distinctiveness for their ventures” (p. 616). Such characterizations of rhetoric are far narrower than those we use in the rhetoric and professional communication literature—and, I think, far less productive for understanding the rhetorical work of entrepreneurs such as Ada.

Rhetoric and Entrepreneurship: Inside the Rhetoric Literature

Inside the literature of rhetoric and professional communication, we see the same themes being explored. In this literature, scholars provide us with a better idea of how rhetoric illuminates the journey that Ada and other entrepreneurs take. These scholars have applied a more expansive understanding of rhetoric—but they have also spent much less time on the topic of entrepreneurship. This gap has begun to be filled—see the recent special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (Spinuzzi, 2016)—but much more needs to be done.

Rhetoric and Identity

Professional communication scholars have explored how entrepreneurs such as Ada form their entrepreneurial identity. For instance, scholars have studied entrepreneurs who work within the field of professional communication. One frequently cited article is by Spartz and Weber (2015), who surveyed 101 entrepreneurs in Wisconsin and North Alabama about the writing they did as entrepreneurs and their attitudes and audiences. Another article with a similar set of participants is by Lauren and Pigg (2016), who gathered entrepreneurs’ employment narratives to understand how these entrepreneurs networked to build their reputations.

Williams (2010) has also examined the entrepreneurial identity, concluding that “entrepreneurs must learn the roles they need to play” (p. 15). In a later article, Williams, Ammetller, Rodriguez-Ardura, and Li (2016) collected narratives from individual entrepreneurs in the United States, Spain, and China, using these narratives to examine how entrepreneurs navigate culturally situated tensions by telling stories.

In their case study, Lucas, Kerrick, Haugen, and Crider (2016) concluded that the student entrepreneurs they studied and their audiences frequently disagreed about whether the students showed passion. Since passion seems to be an important criterion for investors, entrepreneurs must be able to demonstrate, not just feel, passion about their work; it must be a key part of their identity.

Rhetoric, Culture, and Community

Other professional communication scholars have investigated entrepreneurship in terms of culture and community. Perhaps the most well known of these studies is Doheny-Farina’s (1986, 1992) 8-month ethnography studying writing at a software start-up. In that study, Doheny-Farina concluded that writing and the company’s organizational structure reciprocally influenced each other. O’Connor (2002) similarly spent 10 months in her own ethnography of a high-tech start-up; she argued that this company was founded and governed through six basic narrative types (founding, visionary, marketing, strategy, historical, and conventional) in three main categories (personal, generic, and situational).

More recently, Fraiberg (2013) conducted a case study of an Israeli start-up company. That case study linked “local multilingual and multimodal literacy practices to wider institutional, cultural, and global contexts” (p. 10). Along similar lines, in a series of case studies, Spinuzzi (2015) examined how entrepreneurs in nonemployer firms linked themselves to other firms through shared workspaces and subcontracting.

Most recently, Van Hout and Van Praet (2016) presented a teaching case in which students experience how nonnative English-speaking entrepreneurs use English in their public displays (e.g., billboards, shop windows, and posters). Using linguistic landscaping, Van Hout and Van Praet reported that students became sensitized to linguistic innovations and ethnocultural stereotyping.

Rhetoric and Persuasion

The persuasive aspects of entrepreneurship provide perhaps the most obvious link to rhetoric. Not surprisingly, much of the entrepreneurship work in rhetoric and professional communication centers on the most nakedly persuasive genre: the pitch. Galbraith, McKinney, DeNoble, and Ehrlich (2014), for instance, examined how pitch form, passion, and preparedness affect grant funding; they concluded that when decision makers rated these persuasive elements highly, they also tended to rate other noncommunication factors more highly (e.g., technology merit, management ability, and commercial potential). In studies of an entrepreneurship training program, Spinuzzi and colleagues (Jakobs, Spinuzzi, Digmayer, & Pogue, 2015; London, Pogue, & Spinuzzi, 2015; Spinuzzi, Jakobs, & Pogue, 2016; Spinuzzi et al., 2014; Spinuzzi, Nelson, et al., 2015; Spinuzzi et al., 2016; Spinuzzi, Pogue, et al., 2015) examined pitch development, specifically how entrepreneurs revised (or failed to revise) their pitches based on written and oral feedback. More recently, Belinsky and Gogan (2016) described a yearlong autoethnography on pitching. They applied a frame analysis to illuminate how pitchers acquire and apply frames for pitches. Crowdfunding is a variation of pitching, but with more distributed investors who invest much smaller amounts. In Vealey and Gerding’s (2016) recent teaching case, they explored how to incorporate crowdfunding into the professional communication classroom while emphasizing its social, civic, and ethical dimensions.

Persuasion, however, happens within entrepreneurial teams as well as when those teams pitch to external stakeholders. For instance, heuristics such as the Business Model Canvas (BMC; see Blank & Dorf, 2012; Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) help entrepreneurs to think through their choices and persuade their teams about the efficacy of those choices. In a case study, Hixson and Paretti (2014) examined how student teams used the BMC to mediate their work and learning.

So we in rhetoric and professional communication have begun to contribute to an understanding of how entrepreneurs such as Ada work. But much more remains to be done. This special issue is another step in that direction.

What This Special Issue Will Cover

The three articles in this special issue should build the theoretical and methodological foundation for better understanding the rhetoric of entrepreneurship.

In terms of identity, Fraiberg (2013) continues his previous work in “Startup Nation: Studying Transnational Entrepreneurial Practices in Israel’s Start-Up Ecosystem.” Returning to the Israeli start-up ecosystem, Fraiberg applies the construct of mobility systems to understand how entrepreneurs in Israel’s extraordinary start-up community weave themselves into dense transnational networks. The construction of entrepreneurial identity turns out to be vital in this account. By examining how “actors, texts, objects, policies, cultural practices, narratives, and institutions” interacted to construct these networks, Fraiberg concludes that studies of such innovation systems must “account for these densely intertwined streams of chained activity,” streams that are “dynamic, changing, and densely knotted with other such systems in and across near and distant spaces.”

In terms of community, Natasha N. Jones gathers and analyzes the narratives of successful black entrepreneurs. In “Rhetorical Narratives of Black Entrepreneurs: The Business of Race, Agency, and Cultural Empowerment,” she explores how “black business owners rhetorically position themselves for success, sustainability, and empowerment” by “harness[ing] rhetorical agency in ways that engage with sociocultural and political challenges to work within and resist dominant ideologies.” Drawing on narrative inquiry, Jones identifies narratives of economic, community, legacy, and social justice empowerment that these rhetors used as they effected social change through their work.

Finally, in terms of persuasion, Jeffrey M. Gerding and Kyle P. Vealey rhetorically analyze a case of crowdfunding in “When Is a Solution Not a Solution? Wicked Problems, Hybrid Solutions, and the Rhetoric of Civic Entrepreneurship.” This case examines +POOL, “a civic entrepreneurial venture involving the collaboration of architects, designers, engineers, artists, and researchers” that approaches the pollution of New York City’s East River as a wicked problem. As the authors put it, “the developers of +POOL undoubtedly face a deeply rhetorical dilemma: How do you persuade or motivate people to be financially and socially invested in a problem that, by definition, cannot be solved?” Through a detailed rhetorical analysis, Gerding and Vealey analyze “how civic entrepreneurs work rhetorically to grapple with and solve wicked problems” through hybrid solutions that “reflect the complexity, fluidity, and wickedness of the problems they hope to solve.”

These three articles provide sophisticated, rhetorically based views of how entrepreneurs use rhetoric in their emergent, risky, dynamic work. It is my hope that these articles can give us a sophisticated understanding of the rhetorical work that underpins the success of our notional Ada as she begins her start-up: how she takes on the entrepreneurial identity, how she draws on a community of supporters to succeed, and how she persuades (and is persuaded by) others.

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