ESMT European School of Management and Technology, Germany
How do entrepreneurs engage in discourses to garner broader audience support in public interactional spaces? While prior research highlights the benefit of discourse alignment, simply aligning with the perspectives of discursive partners is insufficient for mobilizing passive audiences observing the discourse. I propose that entrepreneurs benefit from discourse broadening, which involves the addition of new perspectives in their responses that broaden the scope of the discourse. Using a computational linguistics model to analyze discourses on an online platform featuring entrepreneurial innovations, this study finds an inverted U-shaped relationship between discourse broadening and support from passive observers. This relationship is moderated by the similarity between the interpretative lenses of discursive partners and passive observers, which influences the trade-off between the benefits and costs of discourse broadening.
