In academic circles, there’s been a lot of talk about how entrepreneurs talk.
The management department’s Rob Mitchell and his collaborators have been researching how successful entrepreneurs communicate for a number of years, focusing on dialogue between startups and potential stakeholders and how successful business pitches rely on literary storytelling techniques. Now, Mitchell and his coauthors find opportunity to connect their theories to other conversations in the burgeoning study of entrepreneurial communication. In “Ordinary Language and Dialogue in Entrepreneurship,” they find affinity between their own work and recently published research into actualization theory by Stratos Ramoglou and Jeffrey McMullen. They propose that by incorporating their theory of dialogue into Ramoglou and McMullen’s model, entrepreneurs will have a better roadmap for pitching their ideas to stakeholders.
“We build on their paper to say, ‘Wait a second, we need to get the interactive aspects of language included, too,’” Mitchell said. “It’s an opportunity for us to do more with the interactive aspects of our prior research on the role of language in enrolling stakeholders.”
“Ordinary Language and Dialogue in Entrepreneurship”
J. Robert Mitchell, Trevor Israelsen1, Ronald Mitchell2, Wei Hua3
Academy of Management Review
1 University of Victoria
2 Texas Tech University
3 Texas Tech University
What we talk about when we talk about opportunity
The research upon which Mitchell builds explores how entrepreneurs frame opportunity when developing startups. Ramoglou and McMullen’s “What is an Opportunity: From Theoretical Mystification to Everyday Understanding,” posits that entrepreneurs can use everyday language to better frame the concept of opportunity, and in doing so, create a framework in which entrepreneurs identify a change in the world they wish to enact, the steps needed to achieve that change and the conditions in which that change can occur.
The original work focuses highly on the language used when describing opportunity and the importance for entrepreneurs to use concrete and understandable framing when discussing potential plans. Mitchell draws on his previous research into the importance of dialogue to augment their concept of actualization theory.
Where their work focuses on language, Mitchell and his coauthors stress the importance of interaction through dialogue and call for an explicit theory to craft a framework for how ordinary-language dialogue between entrepreneurs and stakeholders such as investors, supply chain partners and others occurs.
“We say that entrepreneurial work exists as something bigger than the interests of the entrepreneur alone,” Mitchell said. “We need to theorize and talk about interaction, including the kind of interaction between entrepreneurs and stakeholders.”
Second-person opportunities and engagement
As part of that drive for interaction with stakeholders, Mitchell and his coauthors suggest incorporating their theory of second-person opportunity to drive engagement. This framework leverages literary points of view as a tool to explain opportunity: Opportunities for an entrepreneur themselves to make a change in the world are first-person (“opportunities for me”), while identified potential changes for others in the marketplace to take are third-person opportunities (“opportunities for someone”).
Second-person opportunities – presented to potential stakeholders as “an opportunity for you”– promote dialogue and connect entrepreneurs with the investors, supporters and brand advocates. By the very nature of language, this dialogue is interactive – entrepreneurs shore up support by acknowledging stakeholder needs and stakeholders provide course corrections to entrepreneurial visions. It’s this level of give-and-take that Mitchell and his coauthors believe needs to be incorporated into Ramoglou and McMullen’s everyday language theory.
By engaging stakeholders through dialogue, Mitchell and his coauthors argue, entrepreneurs will be more effective in creating the changes entrepreneurs hope to enact through the ordinary language they use to engage with others.
“What we’re really talking about is this ordinary language that we overcomplicate at times,” Mitchell said. “Words matter as they enable actions. The language that we use to interact with others really enables this actualization to happen.”
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