Gaining and sustaining support for novel ventures is a vital yet difficult entrepreneurial process. Previous research on this topic has generally focused on the social competence and social capital of those creating new ventures, and their ability to align their ventures, with collective norms of novel ventures as sensible, acceptable and legitimate. We suggest that sensegiving – the ability to communicate a meaningful course for a venture – to investors and employees may also play a direct role in achieving support for a venture. Based upon a micro-ethnographic study of two individuals who were in the process of creating new ventures, we demonstrate how they give sense, to others in real time that involve not just their speech but also their gestures. Overall, we find evidence that in the early stages of the commercialization of a venture, metaphors in both speech and gesture are consistently used to emphasize agency and control and the predictability and taken-for-grantedness of a novel venture.
The metaphorical components of two cognitive models of
moral/political systems, presented in Lakoff (1996 [2002]), were tested
empirically, using a set of televised debates between two candidates for US
president as data. Few verbal metaphoric expressions were found in the data
which directly reflected the conceptual metaphors proposed in the models.
However, a large number of mostly non-metaphoric expressions were found which
constitute entailments of the models. This suggests a form of reasoning
according to the logic of the proposed metaphors. The speakers’ metaphoric
gestures in one of the debates were then coded and analyzed. Quantitative
analysis produced results similar to the linguistic analysis, but qualitative
analysis highlighted significant differences between the models, both in terms of
their composition and how they can be expressed. The study raises methodological
issues for metaphor research, and theoretical questions about the ways of
identifying and labeling conceptual metaphors and about the status of cognitive
and cultural models.
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