Sensegiving in entrepreneurial contexts: The use of metaphors in speech and gesture to gain and sustain support for novel business ventures
基于对两位创业者的微观民族志研究，发现他们通过言语和手势中的隐喻，实时向投资者和员工传达项目的意义，从而获得并维持支持，尤其在商业化早期阶段强调能动性、控制力和项目的可预测性。
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.