News and nuances of the entrepreneurial myth and metaphor: Linguistic games in entrepreneurial sense-making and sense-giving

Abstract

This article describes a social construction of entrepreneurship by exploring the constructionalist building blocks of communication, myth, and metaphor presented in a major British middle range broadsheet newspaper with no particular party political allegiance. We argue that the sense-making role of figurative language is important because of the inherent problems in defining and describing the entrepreneurial phenomena. Myth and metaphor in newspapers create an entrepreneurial appreciation that helps define our understanding of the world around us. The content analysis of articles published in this newspaper revealed images of male entrepreneurs as dynamic wolfish charmers, supernatural gurus, successful skyrockets or community saviors and corrupters. Finally, this article relates the temporal construction of myth and metaphor to the dynamics of enterprise culture. Copyright 2005 by Baylor University.