Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Entrepreneurs’ struggle to rally key audiences’ support around their novel ideas, products, or projects is a central theme in entrepreneurship and innovation literature. This struggle is intrinsic to the paradoxical nature of novelty. On the one hand, creating something genuinely new requires breaking out of existing categories, often by recombining them in atypical and unexpected ways. But the outcomes of these unconventional recombinations are less likely to be meaningfully and positively recognized by relevant audiences, given the liability of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965). Many studies demonstrate that such novel combinations hold the potential for great impact, yet they also consistently find that challenging audiences’ categorical expectations commonly receives reproach rather than support. Indeed, “most of the time” novel ideas are discarded “even under the most favorable circumstances” (Augier et al., 2015, p. 1141). The challenge faced by innovators seeking to rally support for their ideas is especially acute in those situations where evaluative responses occur in the absence of any tangible product and/or before reputational information becomes available to relevant audiences. In such situations, innovators’ success or failure is largely an outcome of communicative acts—oral or written.

One example is provided by “small narratives” (Hjorth & Steyaert, 2005) that entrepreneurs may share in their conversations with clients, funders, patrons, or employers. The oral mode also includes the proverbial pitch to such audiences as media representatives, bankers, business angels, or venture capitalists (Kalvapalle et al., 2024). The written mode includes executive summaries, storylines, or narratives that appear in pitch decks and crowdfunding campaigns, as well as longer narratives, such as story plots, that may be submitted to key audiences for evaluation. These audiences include angel investors, venture capitalists, managers, and other corporate/institutional investors (Kalvapalle et al., 2024). Despite the frequency with which audiences across various domains are expected to evaluate novel offers couched into carefully crafted communication efforts, little research exists that attends to the linguistic properties of such messages and their effect on the recipients’ evaluative responses. The vast majority of the previous literature, in fact, focuses on locating the content of communication within the cultural and symbolic realms of meaning, grounding language in sensemaking processes and symbolic actions. However, while linguists recognize the fundamental symbolic nature of language, they also emphasize that language is “rule-governed behavior,” which means that it is organized into “appropriate” use according to various rules, structures, and conventions (which include grammar, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, to name a few). These principles establish limits around the meaning of words, dictate the relation of words with one another, and reveal mental representations of the speakers (Crilly et al., 2016) and even their values (Boyd et al., 2015), thereby playing a critical role in informing audience decisions (Guo et al., 2020). For instance, the sequential and temporal order in which we arrange words, concepts, and information can lead to qualitatively and quantitatively different interpretations and outcomes (Manning & Bejarano, 2017). Similarly, when innovators frame their novel offers using storytelling, they must decide what type of narratives to use (e.g., identity, opportunity, projective, or resourcefulness narratives, etc.; Fisher et al., 2021), whether to prioritize an abstract or concrete communication style (Cutolo & Ferriani, 2024; Falchetti et al., 2022), and how to intertwine various key elements of a story (e.g., characters, plot, setting, etc.) to improve the narrative’s overall coherence and persuasive power.

This sub-theme invites a deeper engagement with linguistic theory to explore how the rules (and rule-breaking) of language shape entrepreneurial and innovative efforts to secure resources and win audience support. We believe the moment is particularly ripe for richer qualitative and quantitative analyses of actual language use, answering growing calls in management scholarship to “enrich understanding of the links between words and action outcomes” (Giorgi et al., 2015). Several converging developments are making this possible. Over the past decade, natural language processing (NLP) tools have advanced dramatically, offering unprecedented precision in capturing the social and temporal nuances of meaning (Evans & Aceves, 2016). These tools now allow researchers to identify context-specific linguistic patterns and semantic associations that were previously inaccessible. At the same time, new machine learning techniques are enabling scholars to connect topics with their underlying linguistic properties in ways that go far beyond what traditional methods could achieve (e.g., Cutolo et al., 2020; Min & Park, 2019). Increasingly, these computational approaches are also being integrated into qualitative methodologies, such as narrative and discourse analysis, enriching our ability to understand language not just as text, but as social action (Curry et al., 2024). At the same time, the use of experimental methods to shed light on the audience-candidate interaction interface has helped expose the microcognitive foundations of audiences’ evaluative responses to language-based stimuli (Falchetti et al., 2022).

We want to follow the examples in adjacent fields, leveraging these new methods to contribute both theoretically and methodologically to the broader discussion about the role of language and its rules in entrepreneurship and innovation research. We encourage researchers from a diverse range of academic disciplines, including linguistics, communication, organizational sociology, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, strategy, and psychology, to submit papers that address these fundamental questions. We are open to various types of conceptual and empirical work, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods. We especially welcome work that aims to challenge received wisdom in the entrepreneurship and innovation literature, and recommend submitting papers that are already in an advanced state of development. We will place special emphasis on innovative doctoral research that demonstrates potential for making a nonconventional contribution to the field. We also look forward to manuscripts whose theoretical perspectives, methodological contributions, and empirical findings advance the scientific debate and allow for comparing practices across different empirical settings.

Potential research questions include:

• What are the “linguistic rules” subsuming entrepreneurs’ and innovators’ communication attempts?

• What effect do these rules have on their efforts to marshal resources and win audience members’ favor?

• How does the use of symbolic language (i.e., metaphors, analogies) in entrepreneurial communication influence investor perceptions of venture legitimacy across different cultural contexts?

• How do entrepreneurs/innovators linguistically construct and evolve their venture narratives over different stages of venture development?

• How can we leverage algorithmic technologies to address the overindexing of extant entrepreneurship/innovation research on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, and instead draw on how underrepresented populations around the world are communicating for legitimacy?

• What linguistic strategies do entrepreneurs use to construct a pitch that is coherent without compromising complexity?

• How do linguistic mismatches between an entrepreneur’s communication style and audience expectations contribute to evaluation biases or misjudgments? Can such mismatches be systematically predicted, and if so, how might they be strategically navigated?

• How do entrepreneurs use strategic ambiguity or vagueness in language to balance flexibility and specificity in uncertain or resource-constrained environments? Under what conditions is ambiguity effective, and when does it backfire?

• To what extent does “code-switching” or linguistic adaptation (e.g., switching between technical jargon and lay terms) help entrepreneurs tailor their message across multiple audiences (e.g., investors vs. customers vs. regulators)?

• How does the structure and sequencing of information in entrepreneurial narratives affect audience attention, emotional engagement, and memory retention? Are certain narrative arcs more effective for communicating novelty?

• How do multilingual entrepreneurs navigate meaning translation and potential loss or gain of nuance when pitching in nonnative languages?

• How does linguistic fluency intersect with perceived legitimacy and trustworthiness?

• Augier, M., March, J. G., & Marshall, A. W. (2015). Perspective—The flaring of intellectual outliers: An organizational interpretation of the generation of novelty in the RAND Corporation. Organization Science, 26(4), 1140–1161.
• Boyd, R., Wilson, S., Pennebaker, J., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Mihalcea, R. (2015). Values in words: Using language to evaluate and understand personal values. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 9(1), 31–40.
• Crilly, D., Hansen, M., & Zollo, M. (2016). The grammar of decoupling: A cognitive-linguistic perspective on firms’ sustainability claims and stakeholders’ interpretation. Academy of Management Journal, 59(2), 705–729.
• Curry, N., Baker, P., & Brookes, G. (2024). Generative AI for corpus approaches to discourse studies: A critical evaluation of ChatGPT. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 4(1), 100082.
• Cutolo, D., Ferriani, S., & Cattani, G. (2020). Tell me your story and I will tell your sales: A topic model analysis of narrative style and firm performance on Etsy. In G. Cattani, S. Ferriani, F. Godart, & S. V. Sgourev (Eds.), Aesthetics and style in strategy (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 42, pp. 119–138). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-332220200000042005
• Cutolo, D., & Ferriani, S. (2024). Now it makes more sense: How narratives can help atypical actors increase market appeal. Journal of Management, 50(5), 1599–1642.
• Evans, J. A., & Aceves, P. (2016). Machine translation: Mining text for social theory. Annual Review of Sociology, 42, 21–50.
• Falchetti, D., Cattani, G., & Ferriani, S. (2022). Start with “Why,” but only if you have to: The strategic framing of novel ideas across different audiences. Strategic Management Journal, 43(1), 130–159.
• Fisher, G., Neubert, E., & Burnell, D. (2021). Resourcefulness narratives: Transforming actions into stories to mobilize support. Journal of Business Venturing, 36(4), 106122.
• Giorgi, S., Lockwood, C., & Glynn, M. A. (2015). The many faces of culture: Making sense of 30 years of research on culture in organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 9(1), 1–54.
• Guo, W., Sengul, M., & Yu, T. (2020). Rivals’ negative earnings surprises, language signals, and firms’ competitive actions. Academy of Management Journal, 63(3), 637–659.
• Kalvapalle, S. G., Phillips, N., & Cornelissen, J. (2024). Entrepreneurial pitching: A critical review and integrative framework. Academy of Management Annals, 18(2), 550–599.
• Manning, S., & Bejarano, T. A. (2017). Convincing the crowd: Entrepreneurial storytelling in crowdfunding campaigns. Strategic Organization, 15(2), 194–219.
• Min, S., & Park, J. (2019). Modeling narrative structure and dynamics with networks, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. PLOS ONE, 14(12), e0226025.
• Hjorth, D., & Steyaert, C. (Eds.). (2004). Narrative and discursive approaches in entrepreneurship: A second movements in entrepreneurship book. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781845421472
• Stinchcombe, A. (1965). Organization-creating organizations. Trans-action, 2(2), 34–35.