Practice Theory in Action

Empirical Studies of Interaction in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Betsy Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351017695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

This book explores intra-team interaction in workplace settings devoted to technological breakthroughs and innovative entrepreneurship. The first set of studies to investigate these economically important institutions through the lens of talk-at-work, this book begins by discussing the ethnomethodological traditions of Conversation Analysis and institutional interaction and linking them to innovation and entrepreneurship.

The book offers rich and detailed empirical accounts of teams talking new technologies and new ventures into being. By focusing on the observable language of teams in action, the book reveals the situated practices that teams use to enact their work, including the means by which team members verbally grapple with the uncertainties inherent in doing work in uncharted domains. The book presents important findings about the conversational accomplishment of work and demonstrates the value of examining the practices of teams in action.

A valuable contribution to studies of talk-in-interaction, as well as entrepreneurship-as-practice, this book can help to bridge the gap between scholarly investigations and the practical experiences of entrepreneurs. The author closes by considering the ways that practice-based studies of entrepreneurial work can improve issues of diversity and inclusion within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This book is intended to serve as an invaluable sourcebook for scholars and students interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizations as well as those focused on applied Conversation Analysis. The book's insights are presented in a richly detailed manner while remaining accessible to readers who are new to the methodologies and activity contexts.

Part I

Interactions and the innovation workplace

Part I introduces concepts and methodologies relevant to the study of entrepreneurship as practice. It describes the ethnomethodological tradition of Conversation Analysis and the interdependent nature of practices. While it emphasizes the importance of verbal conversations between team mates in context, it also explores the socio-material aspects of interaction in innovative entrepreneurial work.

1
Framing a contemporary understanding of workplace interaction

Introduction

In 1987 Arthur Rock, a well-respected venture capitalist, asserted that he would rather invest in an A team with a B technology than the reverse (Rock, 1987). He reasoned that a top-notch innovative entrepreneurial team would be able to adapt to the market demands and produce a successful product, whereas a less capable team would fail even with a great product innovation within their grasp. Coming from a context in which failure is the norm (Shane, 2008; Timmons, 1994), Rock’s words of wisdom became a guiding practice for investors and innovators. They also helped to inspire a rich body of research that attempts to define the qualifications of an “A team”.

For decades, researchers interested in entrepreneurship have explored various aspects of high performance. Most of that research has focused on either the impersonal or the intrapersonal aspects of success. The streams of research aimed at understanding the impersonal aspects have included inquiries into external resources such as access to funding sources and geographical proximity to hubs of innovation. They also have examined the size of entrepreneurial teams in conjunction with their performance. Most recently, they have considered the role that diversity – in terms of core skills and network relations – might have on outcomes.

The streams of research organized around questions of intrapersonal traits have considered the role of psychological orientation and cognitive biases of entrepreneurs in their decisions to start and continue to work on their ventures. Topics such as confidence and attitudes toward risk and failure, for example, have been given significant attention. Many of these inquiries into intrapersonal traits have compared entrepreneurs with managers and have attempted to define an enduring characteristic that sets entrepreneurs apart.

As valuable as these efforts have been, they fail to tell us much about what entrepreneurs actually do in the course of their daily work. Many scholars recognize that all professional work is verbal work (Donnellon, 1996), and most practicing entrepreneurs will attest to having pivotal conversations in team meetings that define their products and organizations (Reis, 2011). However, the existing body of entrepreneurial research says little about the ways that entrepreneurial teams talk their innovations and ventures into existence. Few researchers have attempted to examine and describe the conversational work of these teams in action. This book reports on the means by which innovations and innovative new ventures are verbally accomplished. It aims to illuminate the means by which teams actively engage in the “interactional competencies”(Psathas, 1990) associated with being an innovator and doing innovative entrepreneurship.

Before unpacking the importance of studying the observable language used by innovative entrepreneurial teams to enact their work, it is worth pausing to define innovative entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has been associated with endeavors of many kinds including self-employment (Shane, 2008; Stevenson, 1983), small business (Gibb, 1996), and franchise operation (Azoulay & Shane, 2001). Even though the entrepreneurship term can be applied to anyone who starts a new venture of any kind (Lazear, 2004), this book draws a distinction between imitative and innovative entrepreneurial endeavors (Baumol, 1986; Cliff, Jennings, & Greenwood, 2006). Most entrepreneurs start imitative ventures (Bhide, 2000): ventures that join an established category in the marketplace. For example, an imitative entrepreneur might start a new dry cleaner or a new restaurant. This book, however, is focused on innovative entrepreneurship. Such ventures are based on significantly differentiated value propositions that often include breakthrough offerings (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2008). Consequently, the development of a viable and differentiated product or service (Christensen, 1997) is central to and effectively synonymous with the creation of these new business entities. Facebook and Tesla are contemporary examples of innovative entrepreneurial ventures that might be recognized by most readers.

It is difficult to capture the naturally occurring interactions of innovative entrepreneurial teams at work. Often teams working at the forefront of technological innovation have intellectual property concerns for their emerging products. They also may work in private or otherwise protected settings – from the proverbial home garage to the accelerators on university property. For these and other reasons it is not easy for researchers to be in the right place at the right time with the right permissions to record the authentic conversations of teams in action.

Perhaps because recordings of teams in action are difficult to obtain, researchers interested in the roles of language in the innovation process have tended to study presentations rather than intra-team conversations. Pitches are the name for the presentations given by founders to prospective investors. Sometimes given in private or sometimes given as part of a public showcase, pitches are a standard part of the innovative entrepreneurial journey. However, they are quite distinct from naturally occurring intra-team conversations.

Pitches are constructed, at least in part, from prepared and rehearsed points and tend to be monologues more than dialogues. Presentations also are given to inform or influence a listener rather than invite collaboration. By studying pitches, researchers can illuminate the communicative skill of persuasion that may be beneficial for teams in this one particular context. However, the staged language of pitches can tell us little about the ways that teams verbally accomplish the shared act of innovating. Only by studying the routine intra-team interactions of innovative entrepreneurial teams being innovative entrepreneurial teams can we uncover the full set of “interactional competencies … requisite to participation” (Psathas, 1990, p. 21) in the professions of innovation and innovative entrepreneurship.

Despite the challenges of recording the naturally occurring interactions of innovation teams in action, such recordings are essential to studying the verbal accomplishment of teamwork. The recordings permit researchers to return to the data to examine it directly and repeatedly in the processes of open coding, transcription, and analysis. Field notes and researcher recollections can miss or distort important details from the authentic interactions. The same can be said for invented exchanges or experimentally provoked verbalizations (Heritage, 1984). Consequently, only recorded authentic conversations can serve as the foundation for meaningful inquiries into the language used by teams in action at work.

A look at methodological traditions

Studies of workplace interaction have their roots in the traditions of ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Springing from Garfinkel’s work in the 1960s, ethnomethodology describes the ordinary means by which people co-create and recognize their social settings, acts, and activities. Ethnomethodology treats these settings, acts, and activities as emergent achievements that result from the deliberate and situated contributions of participants.

Verbal conversations are one form of interaction that enables people to co-create and recognize social settings, acts, and activities. In fact, conversations are a vital form, and Conversation Analysis (CA) has emerged within ethnomethodology to attend to them in great detail. Associated closely with the work of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in the 1970s, CA probes the organizing properties of naturally occurring conversation. Early themes of CA research included the ways that conversational features – such as openings and closings, repairs, and turn-taking – were recognized and achieved by participants. The work asserted that ordinary conversation operated according to social rules – not just proficiency with grammar or vocabulary – that are understood and reinforced by the participants’ situated interactional choices. By attending to the observable features of language, researchers can uncover the conversational moves and situated processes of reasoning by which people accomplish collaborative action. In other words, the interactional means by which people understand each other, achieve shared awareness, and accomplish social tasks can be revealed.

Increasingly scholars are analyzing interactional phenomenon in specific activity settings. Research has examined conversations such as medical interviews or police interrogations, for example (Antaki, 2011; Psathas, 1990). As research moves into these applied realms, it can reinforce our understanding of basic interactional phenomena. It also can discover additional ways that these phenomena are accomplished, or it can reveal entirely new characteristics of interactions associated with a particular activity setting. Interactional phenomena that are recognized as part of a specific activity setting can be framed as competencies that constitute adequate participation in that setting. This means that training could be developed to enable new or struggling participants in these settings to improve their ability to contribute productively (Psathas, 1990).

Other scholars have written in compelling detail about the process of using CA to conduct research. Consequently, this book will not focus on how to do CA. However, some specific research that has influenced the work presented in the coming chapters warrants acknowledgement. Scholars have described the means by which participants collaboratively achieve recognizable acts of competence in complex matters such as making a surgical incision (Heritage, 1984), executing a calculation (Anderson, Hughes, & Sharrock, 1989), positioning an underwater probe (Goodwin, 1995), or flying an airplane (Nevile, 2004). These works probe the situated meaning and sequential ordering of utterances used by participants to achieve these complex acts. The works micro-analyze interactions to describe the means by which people enact professional practices.

These influential works also focus on interactions of co-workers engaged in shared tasks and common goals. By examining the interactions of peers at work rather than institutional representatives with clients, they showcase what might be considered “backstage” interactions (Goffman, 1956, 1974). As such, they provide an important foundation upon which the research described in this book relies. They draw from the traditions of CA and ethnomethodology to reveal how people interactionally produce and recognize competent work (Heritage, 1984; Nevile, 2004).

These works, along with others which highlight members of the same team, represent an important departure from the majority of workplace interaction studies. More typical are studies of interactions between professional and non-professional individuals such as interactions between doctors and patients, teachers and students, or lawyers and witnesses. These “frontstage” (Goffman, 1956, 1974) workplace interactions tend to be united by several features: asymmetry of power, transactional episodes, binary outcomes, and known solutions. For example, in doctor/patient interactions, doctors routinely have more medical knowledge and authority than patients. Interactions during an office visit are bounded by a limited time window during which the participants expect to reach a clear diagnosis and definitive outcome. The outcomes tend to have binary elements: the doctor will or will not prescribe antibiotics, for example. And the array of potential treatments exists in advance of the appointment and belongs to a fixed set of possibilities.

The structural features of “frontstage” work are less likely to be present in the interactions of co-workers who are focused on shared workplace goals, including the goals of an early-stage venture. Rather than negotiating asymmetries of power, entrepreneurial team mates might be more likely to grapple with asymmetries of functional knowledge. For example, one team mate might have technical expertise while the other might have marketing expertise. Similarly, innovative entrepreneurial teams may be less likely to have boundaries on the meetings, outcomes, or solutions than “frontstage” workers. Entrepreneurial teams converse over a series of sessions, not within a single 15-minute session as medical appointments do. Moreover the potential outcomes of entrepreneurial interactions are many, sometimes bordering initially on the infinite. Team members interact to define both the problem and the solution simultaneously. What the team members create often is bounded mainly by their abilities and by the market’s willingness to validate their emerging product.

Directional trends

While research continues along the traditional veins of interest, scholars increasingly are considering new topic areas and techniques. As workplaces become more technologically rich, researchers are investigating the impact of technology on communication. Researchers also are exploring the quantitative expression of conversational patterns.

For years, studies into workplace interaction have considered the transmission of knowledge and skills, the achievement of collaboration in the face of conflicting interests, and the challenges of interaction with and through technologies (Arminen, 2005). While telephone interaction proves an exception – CA researchers have investigated the nature of telephone interaction for decades (Hopper, 1992; Hutchby, 2001) – many of these studies have assumed that the participants are co-located and interacting face-to-face. Increasingly, studies have had to address mediated and distributed talk-in-interaction as workplaces have become more technologically complex.

Today’s workplace includes a wealth of technologically enabled interaction. The rapid uptake of mobile phones, for example, has enabled researchers to probe additional aspects of distributed voice-only interaction (Hutchby & Barnett, 2005). Simultaneously, popular internet-based technologies that provide videoconferencing have enabled researchers to consider the role of live video in mediated and distributed interaction (Licoppe & Morel, 2012; Mondada, 2007).

Recent decades also have seen the emergence of round-the-clock broadcast talk, another form of workplace interaction that is technologically dependent. Broadcast talk is produced for public consumption yet retains some unscripted features of naturally occurring conversation (Hutchby, 2006). Talk radio and cable television news, for example, have remote and distributed audiences, but the conversational participants who are engaged in a kind of workplace conversation may be co-located or not. Studies of broadcast talk have illuminated the order and logic of these workplace interactions. Formal exchanges of prepared questions from a host that are answered by a guest, and relatively unscripted ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Interactions and the innovation workplace
• Part II Verbally accomplishing innovative entrepreneurial work
• Part III Uncovering myths and misperceptions
• Part IV Looking through other lenses
• Part V Advancing theory and practice
• Afterword on the democratization of innovation
• Appendix: Transcription conventions
• Index