Political signification of the entrepreneur: Temporal analysis of constructs, agency and reification
分析英国议会四十年来辩论中“企业家”一词的政治意义变化，通过语料库方法揭示其建构、能动性和物化模式，对政治学和话语分析研究者有参考价值。
This article explores the political signification of the term entrepreneur in UK parliamentary debates over the past forty years. Following a review of the literature, a need is identified to understand the construction of the entrepreneur in political discourse. Concern here is not with the prosaic cataloguing of policies or definitions, but with exploring shifts in the discursive constructs of the entrepreneur that underlie political practice. To explore these constructions a large longitudinal dataset is systematically condensed, while maintaining sensitivity to the nuances of meaning. A corpus-based linguistics approach is undertaken. This combines the computational analysis of significant collocates, that is important words (concepts) that surround the term entrepreneur, with the richness of qualitative analysis. Patterns of reification, agency and structure are identified in the portrayed entrepreneurial constructs. The philosophical and practical implications of these patterns are discussed and proposals are made for using corpus techniques in international comparative analyses.