SEJ Special Issues

Innovators’ struggle for recognition is a central theme in the literature on entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation. One way by which innovators can overcome the liability of newness of their nascent projects is through the use of rhetorical devices (e.g., Aldrich & Fiol, 1994; Czarniawska, 1998). A growing body of scholarship now adopts a framing approach (Goffman, 1974) to study entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation, where framing refers to “the use of rhetorical devices in communication to mobilize support and minimize resistance to a change” (Cornelissen & Werner, 2014: 185). Framing matters for entrepreneurs (Snihur et al., 2022), corporate entrepreneurs (Putra, Pandza, & Khanagha, 2023), and innovators more broadly (Hargadon & Douglas, 2001) to construct meaning around novel endeavors and win over skeptical audiences. Several studies in entrepreneurship, for instance, underscore the importance of framing choices in contextualizing innovation efforts (Garud et al., 2014), shaping the perceived risk of novel entrepreneurial ideas, or motivating capital commitment by relevant stakeholders (Martens et al., 2007). Likewise, organizational scholars have suggested that the frames individuals use, as well as the terms and categories they borrow from dominant discourses are critical to gain access to audiences’ symbolic and/or material resources (Lounsbury & Glynn, 2001; Zott & Huy, 2007; Navis & Glynn, 2011; Granqvist et al., 2013).  

More recently, some scholars have started to establish a link between the enabling role of language in framing innovation and audience-based evaluative mechanisms (Falchetti et al., 2022). For instance, one important pillar of this link lies in language expectancy theory, which holds that individuals develop normative expectations concerning appropriate communication styles in given situations, and argues that such expectations affect individuals’ attitudes toward message effectiveness (e.g., Burgoon et al., 2002). When those expectations are matched, the persuasiveness of the message increases. Expected patterns of language use have been shown by cognitive studies to exist and operate along multiple communication features including language intensity, complexity, and emotional tone (Averbeck & Miller, 2014; Craig & Blankenship, 2011). Along these lines, past research has linked the frequency with which we use certain word categories with how we are perceived by others, thereby resulting in tangible performance outcomes such as job performance or attainment (Berry et al., 1997). Entrepreneurship scholarship has shown audiences to be sensitive to the entrepreneurial orientation of the rhetoric used in the shareholders’ letters (Wang et al., 2021), or the linguistic styles adopted by entrepreneurs to communicate their ideas on crowdfunding platforms (Parhankangas & Renko, 2017; Gafni et al., 2019) and digital marketplaces (Cutolo et al., 2020), while related strategy scholarship has demonstrated that subtle changes in the linguistic framing of idea pitches may decisively affect key audiences’ disposition to support those ideas (Huang et al., 2021; Falchetti et al., 2022; Contigiani and Young-Hyman, 2022).