The Themes of Entrepreneurship Discourse: A Data Analytics Approach.

• Author: Roundy, Philip T.
• Position: Report - Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Entrepreneurship scholars are embracing the "linguistic turn" in organization studies and the social sciences (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Hjorth & Steyaert, 2004; van Werven, Bouwmeester, & Cornelissen, 2015). Language shapes perceptions, actions, and the outcomes of entrepreneurship by influencing entrepreneurs' cognitive processes (Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010; Kor, Mahoney, & Michael, 2007), resource acquisition strategies (Roundy, 2014), and stakeholders' evaluations (Martens, Jennings, & Jennings, 2007; Parhankangas & Ehrlich, 2014). Entrepreneurs' language-use manifests in the discourse constructed during the entrepreneurial process and used to describe the novel organizations, products, and initiatives that entrepreneurs create (Clarke & Cornelissen, 2014). Entrepreneurs' language also influences the processes of attention, identity construction, legitimation, and sensemaking, which, in turn, shape entrepreneurs' performance (Roundy, 2016). However, the themes of entrepreneurs' language, how they appear in discourse (i.e., the contextualized language used in talk or text; Linell, 2010), and how they change over time, are not clear.

Despite the strides made by studies of entrepreneurs' language, research has not attempted to identify the common themes in entrepreneurial discourse. Scholars generally adopt an interpretivist approach (cf. Leitch, Hill, & Harrison, 2010), which involves examining how discourse is constructed and interpreted during social interactions. The focus of this work is capturing rich representations of higher-level discourse constructs, such as narratives and stories, rather than understanding word-, phrase-, or theme-level language. Instead, research primarily emphasizes how entrepreneurs use language and the outcomes of language-use and does not devote attention to the content and structure of entrepreneurial discourse (e.g., Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001). This represents an important omission in studies of entrepreneurs' language because without a detailed understanding of the themes of entrepreneurial discourse it is difficult to identify the topics that are at the center of entrepreneurs' communications and attention.

To address these omissions in prior research, in this study we examine two related questions: what are the themes that comprise entrepreneurship discourse and how have these themes changed over time? To explore these questions, we use a partially-inductive methodology (cf. Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013), coupled with research from linguistics and entrepreneurship, to analyze the themes that are present in a corpus of entrepreneurship discourse. Specifically, we combine MapReduce programming, a Big Data methodology (cf. Asllani, 2014), with traditional statistical methods to develop a text mining algorithm that generates insights into the contextualized themes of entrepreneurship discourse. We identify the most common themes in the entrepreneurship lexicon and examine the extent to which they change over time.

Our study design and findings respond to calls for research at the intersection of data analytics and entrepreneurship (e.g., George, Haas, & Pentland, 2014). A greater understanding of the themes of entrepreneurship discourse represents a contribution to entrepreneurship scholarship and has implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers because it sheds light on the topics currently receiving the most attention in entrepreneurship practice, including technology-oriented entrepreneurship, digital entrepreneurship, marketing activities, professional investment, and new venture entrepreneurship. These themes were identified inductively, rather than making a priori assumptions about the issues that matter to entrepreneurs. This is an important distinction because it places the focus on the major themes comprising practicing entrepreneurs' discourse (i.e., practitioner discourse or discourse-in-use) rather than the themes comprising entrepreneurship scholars' discussions (i.e., academic discourse). As our findings suggest, the themes in academic and practitioner discourse are not perfectly aligned and divergences exist.

We structure the remainder of the paper as follows. First, we provide an overview of prior studies at the intersection of entrepreneurship, language, and discourse. We devote extended attention to the substantive omissions in this research that our study aims to address. We then describe the study's research design, methods, and our findings. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications, limitations, and future directions of our research on entrepreneurship discourse.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The linguistic (or "discursive") turn in the social sciences (e.g., Harre, 2008) emphasizes the power of language to shape how reality is perceived, interpreted, and described. Social scientists' growing interest in language is motivated, in part, by the linguistic paradigm in philosophy, which laid the foundations for studying the influence of language on human cognition (Wittgenstein, 1922; cf. Lycan, 2012). Disciplines as disparate as law and criminal justice (e.g., Maynard, 1988), medicine (e.g., Greenhalgh, 1999), public health (e.g., Greene & Brinn, 2003), and agriculture (e.g., Morgan, Cole, Struttmann, & Piercy, 2002) find that language-use is not "just talk" but can influence decision making, the persuasiveness of communication, the transfer of knowledge, and how people and organizations are evaluated (e.g., Breunig& Roberts, 2017). Forexample, scholars studying environmental policy decisions find that the language used to frame policies influences decision making, persuasion, and evaluation (cf. Feindt & Oels, 2005). Rydin (1999), for instance, examines the language of sustainability-focused environmental policies and, quoting Edelman (1988, p. 103), argues that environmental policy is influenced by "language games that construct alternative realities, grammars that transform the perceptible into non-obvious meanings, and language as a form of action that generates radiating chains of connotations while undermining its own assumptions and assertions." The language contained in types of discourse, such as narratives, is so influential it has been argued that "all of our knowledge is contained in stories and the mechanisms to construct and retrieve them" (Schank & Abelson, 1995, p. 1). Because of the role of language in the construction and transmission of human culture, scholars even argue that a more accurate name for the human race is homo narrans, that is, "narrative humans" (Niles, 1999).

The growing attention to linguistic issues in other social science disciplines spurred organizational researchers to consider the role of language in business contexts. Language can manifest in organizations in any form that discourse can take (Chatman, 1980), including direct inter-personal interactions or written texts. Studies examine the role of language in micro-phenomena, such as employee identity construction and sensemaking, and macro-oriented phenomena, such as organizational change and legitimation (cf. Vaara, Sonenshein, & Boje, 2016). In exploring these phenomena, studies analyze the language used in texts such as annual reports (e.g., Subramanian, Insley, & Blackwell, 1993), shareholder letters (Jameson, 2000), earnings press releases (e.g., Henry, 2008), and corporate websites (Pollach, 2003).

The power of language in entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the creation and pursuit of innovative opportunities to produce value for society (cf. Gartner, 1990; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Scholars focus on entrepreneur- and venture-level characteristics, such as alertness to new opportunities and bricolage activities (Roundy, Harrison, Khavul, Perez-Nordtvedt, & 2017; Zollo, Rialti, Ciappei, & Boccardi, 2018) and, recently, on the system-level forces that support and promote regional entrepreneurial activities (Golejewska, 2018; Nicotra, Romano, Del Giudice, & Schillaci, 2018). Across these levels of analysis, scholars are devoting growing attention to how entrepreneurs construct, convey, and interpret their actions through language because of its central role in the entrepreneurship process (e.g., Clarke & Cornelissen, 2014; Roundy, 2016). These studies find that entrepreneurs' language-use can impact identifying and constructing opportunities (Gartner, Carter, & Hills, 2003), developing business models (London, Pogue, & Spinuzzi, 2015), persuading stakeholders to provide support (Spinuzzi, 2017), developing pitches, and pursuing investment (Parhankangas & Renko, 2017; Spinuzzi et al., 2015).

However, most entrepreneurship research examining discourse does not examine the specific words and themes that constitute the language of entrepreneurs. For example, Nicholson and Anderson (2005) analyze the role of discourse in sensemaking and sensegiving about entrepreneurship. They examine how the language about entrepreneurship contained in myths and metaphors presented in a British newspaper influences the image of entrepreneurship portrayed to readers. Similarly, Steyaert (2007, p. 463) argues that the social construction of entrepreneurship is conceptualized through "a myriad of linguistic forms and processes," including discourse (Perren & Jennings, 2005), dramatization (Downing, 2005), metaphors (Dodd, 2002), and storytelling (Pitt, 1998). Roundy (2014) examines how the narratives constructed by social entrepreneurs influences their ability to secure professional investment. Although these studies increase understanding about how entrepreneurs use language to construct discourse and communicate, they do not examine specific word- or theme-level patterns. These studies also do not base their findings on a large corpus of text; instead, they focus on the discourse of small samples of entrepreneurs and ventures, rather than examining a broad sample of discourse across sectors.

A study by Parkinson and Howorth (2008) is an...