Websites as Spaces of Confluence: Narratives and the Pursuit of Legitimacy

Abstract

Narratives are important means through which entrepreneurs can present rationales for their activities and influence assessments of their company’s plausibility. The purpose of this research is to understand how can websites be engaged in the construction of entrepreneurial marketing narratives. To this end, we have followed a company operating in the fashion industry for over a year. As the initial fieldwork evolved, websites emerged as critical in the articulation of the company’s narrative. Consequently, this research was driven by the goal to develop an understanding on how websites can be employed in the construction of narratives. The results allowed developing two main contributions. First, we suggest that websites can gain a central role in the construction and dissemination of narratives, enabling to make them tangible and persistent over time. Narratives in websites can become reference points for companies, influencing internal stakeholders and feeding further accounts. Second, we identify and explore five qualities of narratives in websites that influence how these narratives can be constructed and disseminated: (1) tangibility; (2) persistence; (3) ubiquity; (4) multimodality; and (5) hyper-intertextuality.