Ethics in Business Communication

Samira Allani and Silvia Molina

Websites for Women Entrepreneurs: A Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis

Abstract: This chapter examines thirty women entrepreneur websites from both a multimodal and a rhetorical perspective, offering new ways of analyzing their content and effective communicative strategies. The questions addressed in this study deal with how collective women entrepreneur identities – claims surrounding women entrepreneur organizations and market opportunities that define who they are and what they do – are constructed in these websites by means of different modes. We focus on how the interplay of different modes (visual, textual, typographic, etc.) can be handled analytically and how interpersonal and ideational realizations are rhetorically construed. The final purpose of this chapter is not only to understand the semiotic construction of these websites, but to know how their meaning-making practices attempt to change the perception and ethical appeal of women entrepreneurs at large.

Keywords: women entrepreneurs, multimodal rhetorical analysis, website discourse.

Introduction

This study presents a critical overview of the rhetorical construction of entrepreneurship in women entrepreneurs’ websites. Research on women entrepreneurship has pointed to the looming challenges women face compared to men in their entrepreneurial experience. The European Commission describes the entrepreneurial potential of women as under-exploited, as women represent only 30 per cent of start-up entrepreneurs in Europe (European Commission, 2019). Even though the gender gap is perceived to be closing in recent years (Brush et. al., 2017), there is certainly much to fix in a social context that is based on hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Fortunately, the growing number of organizations supporting and promoting entrepreneurship has increased the chance for women to overcome the hurdles and achieve their goals. Whether created by government organisms or private institutions, the entrepreneurial organization has become vital for start-ups that seek guidance and mentorship and aspire, through networking, to seize funding opportunities and strengthen their business endeavors.

With the rapid evolution of the new media, the entrepreneurial organizations’ websites have become the main tool for networking activities and a virtual space for entrepreneurs to exchange valuable information on opportunities and ←69 | 70→strategies in the most expeditious ways. Through the website, a platform created to communicate the organization’s goals and enhance its reach, participants shape their identities using a variety of discursive modes. The present study seeks to examine how entrepreneurial organizations catering for women rhetorically construct entrepreneurship in their websites, and, more particularly, how the different semiotic resources interact to create meaning and shape identities in the most visible part of the organizations’ home pages.

Entrepreneurship is a slippery concept, viewed as a socially dependent phenomenon (Achtenhagen & Welter, 2011), and there is no consensus as to what “entrepreneurship” actually is. Generally speaking, it is valued positively and involves turning a new idea into a successful innovation using skills, vision, creativity, persistence and exposure to risk (Shane and Venkatram, 2000). Successful entrepreneurship is all about seizing opportunities and introducing innovations. Innovation entails “creative destruction”, a concept coined by Schumpeter (1942) ←70 | 71→to refer to the process of generating innovative products or services that destroy those previously established in the market. The identification of opportunities does not necessarily mean that the entrepreneur generates change, but that she or he is able to exploit the opportunities that the change provides and to take substantial risks (Knight, 2005). For this, the entrepreneur needs to possess several key qualities such as technical knowledge and training, a dynamic and creative spirit oriented towards the continuous search for business opportunity, and solid networking skills to connect with resourceful people and gain financing (Koellinger, 2008). Surely, a relevant question here is whether the outlooks on entrepreneurial qualities are valid for women, or whether there are added variables to the practices of female entrepreneurship.

Most research studies on the discursive representations of women entrepreneurs in various social settings point to the problems with the recognition and construction of the female entrepreneurial character (Ahl, 2002; Bruni, Gherardi & Poggio, 2004; Marlow, Hicks & Treanor, 2019). Even though the gender gap between entrepreneurs around the world continues to narrow, as affirmed by the Global Report GEM 2018/19 (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor), women are still perceived as occupying a secondary position and successful female entrepreneurs are considered an exception (Ahl, 2002, p. 144). Marlow & McAdam (2013) point to the bias in the entrepreneurial research discourse on women entrepreneurs’ performance and the extended association of femininity with deficit. Whether in the field of business or in academia, the discursive construction of women´s entrepreneurship has been so far rather negative.

Women entrepreneur associations are now challenging these simplistic views and bringing attention to what they think entrepreneurship for women is or should be. Most of these initiatives are promoted by institutions such as the European Commission through its Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan or the Global Entrepreneurs Monitor. The Proliferation of associations promoting women entrepreneurships fosters discourses of legitimatization, and attempts to change and challenge the construction of concepts such as business organization and administration or leadership (Calás & Smircich, 1996, p. 245). In order to encourage start-ups, women entrepreneur associations may enact certain scripts for women entrepreneurs, presenting success stories and role models women in business may look up to.

The information conveyed in the entrepreneur websites is based on a variety of semiotic systems such as images, sometimes combined with sound (videos). The ubiquity and deployment of these different modes (Tseronis & Forceville, 2017, p. 1) is essential, in this particular case to convey ideas, opinions and information on what it means to be a woman entrepreneur. The discursive ←71 | 72→practices of this genre, entrepreneurial discourse online, include epistemological assumptions and values which see men and women as different. This binary thinking is reflected on some websites in our study. The female entrepreneur tends to be defined as something other than the male, the standard to be measured against. Hence, departing from a multimodal understanding of woman entrepreneur discourse, this paper examines how the female entrepreneur identities are enacted in female entrepreneur websites. Pioneering studies and tools for the multimodal analysis of websites have been introduced by Adami (2015), Djonov (2007), Baldry & Thibault (2006) and Pauwels (2012), among others. Organizations’ websites reflect ways of thinking about their owners that construct them as such. These websites structure what discourse producers hold as true and what they act upon.

The Social Semiotic Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Rhetoric

Multimodality has attracted many scholars interested in communication and semiosis, and there is now a substantial body of scholarly work focusing on the multimodal dimensions of discourse as a social practice (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Jewitt, et al., 2016; Norris & Maier, 2014). Multimodal discourse analysis, with its various approaches, draws on Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) with a social semiotics emphasis. Multimodal discourse analysis looks at the “diverse range of modes involved in producing meaning and experience” and hence understands the “world as multimodal” (Prini, 2017, p. 1). Kress and van Leeuwen focused on the potentiality of images in Reading Images (1996/2006), a work which was later developed in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Communication (2001). One important concern of multimodality is studying how language is nested in other modes, as Jewitt, Bezemer and O’Halloran explain (2016, pp. 17–18): “Multimodality aims to unveil the relationships and combinations between different modes (i.e. photos, text, typography, color, etc. in webpage design), and how these are culturally and socially shaped to communicate, and to make meaning.” Multimodality underscores the need to understand that “modes work together to produce a greater meaning than either mode could on its own” (Rowsell, 2013, p. 147).

The present study is based on the analytical tools proposed by Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) to examine the interpersonal discursive construction of meaning in the websites for women entrepreneurs. Kress and van Leeuwen’s work is set within the theoretical framework of social semiotics and offers a systematic and comprehensive account of the grammar of visual design. We ←72 | 73→mainly draw on the notions of contact, social distance and mood as systems that construct relations between represented and interactive participants in a given visual design (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006, p. 149). First, contact refers to how entities represented in images relate to viewers. Visual contact on a home page determines the type of relation between the viewer and the website designer and may be determined examining gaze, which is a socially organized way of viewing and experiencing the world (Urry 2002). There are two kinds of contact based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) model that we study in these websites: demand, and offer. A demand picture is one in which the people or entities represented look at the viewers, hence asking the viewer for attention or for a reaction. In the offer picture, the represented entity looks off-frame and comes across as an object of contemplation. Second, social distance refers to how women entrepreneurs are presented to the audience by checking the different sizes of their photos (frames). Third, mood is another multimodal concept; it means how bold and saturated colors may communicate emotional intensity (interpersonal function). In addition, we also pay attention to the particular process types (whether women entrepreneurs are presented with active or passive discourse roles) and the constructed dynamic identities of women pertaining to entrepreneur networks as institutional actors with their discursive practices, that is, how the adopted presentational styles reflect women entrepreneurs’ sociocultural values.

Research on the multimodal rhetoric of discourse has grown in the last decade or so (Bezemer & Kress, 2008; Buehl, 2016; Kjeldsen, 2015), calling for a verbal and visual integrated approach to the study of the effect of multimodal discourse constructions on the audience. Rhetoric, nonetheless, is an ancient discipline concerned with “the ability, in each (particular) case, to see the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle, 2007, p. 37). It is an exercise of justification that focuses on the relationship between arguments and audiences (Zarefsky, 2014, p. xvi), and hence, on the interpersonal level of discourse. Roland Barthes defines rhetoric as “a manual of recipes, inspired by a practical goal, and a code, a body of ethical prescriptions whose role is to supervise (i.e. to permit and to limit) the ‘deviations’ of emotive language” (Barthes 1994, p. 14). He also contends that rhetoric is a privilege, “a social practice that permits the ruling classes to gain ownership of speech” (Barthes, 1994, p. 13). More research in multimodal rhetoric has been carried out in recent years (Tseronis & Forceville, 2017). Oakley (2017) focuses on the multimodal dimension of political speeches’ rhetoric; Hawreliak (2019) studies the multimodal configurations in video games and their effect on the player´s experience and their interactive decisions. As information systems and technologies have yielded new possibilities for communication and the ←73 | 74→circulation of arguments that draw on a vast array of semiotic resources, a multimodal approach to discourse analysis has become inevitable.

Invention is one of the five canons of rhetoric and is concerned with “a system or method for finding arguments” (Corbett & Connors, 1998, p. 23). LeFevre defines invention as “the process of actively creating as well as finding what comes to be known and said in the discourse of any discipline” (1986, p. 33). In this system which describes the persuasive core of rhetoric, certain common categories of thought became conventional to use (Silva Rhetoricae). These categories, known as “topics of invention”, common topics or, more commonly, “topoi” (a Greek term, sing. topos), delineate the basic relationship among ideas. Corbett & and Connors (1998) describe five major topoi: definition (genius), comparison (analogy), circumstance (consequence), relationship (contraries) and testimony (authority, law, example, etc.). Rubinelli (2006) explains that the term topos is used with reference to a subject-matter that orators might take into consideration for pleading their cases and argues that the concept is highly relevant to modern theories of argumentation (2006, pp. 253–4). Both the oratory type categorization and the analysis of topoi give hints to the persuasive appeals realized in discourse. Among the three types of appeals, logos, pathos and ethos, the present study focuses on the last, ethos, which is the persuasive appeal of one’s character (Silva Rhetoricae), and attempts to examine how women entrepreneurs’ websites establish relations with their viewers through the construction of their credibility and trust.

The rhetorical analysis serves our aim of uncovering the interpersonal meaning constructions of the multimodal discourse under study. Indeed, while rhetoric uses the principle of invention to search for material to develop texts or to locate their subject-matter (Lauer, 2004, p. 3), the ideational function in SFL does the same. Generating or inventing ideas and lines of arguments is in ←74 | 75→itself an exercise that fulfils both the ideational and the interpersonal functions of discourse. Likewise, the audience forms an integral part of this exercise and is devised along with the ideas and arguments. This probably explains why the art of persuasion has always been at the heart of any rhetorical inquiry. The synergy between the ideational and the interpersonal construction of meaning in discourse is rhetorically interpreted using tools from invention to identify the way in which the discourse for women entrepreneurs is invented and determine the functions and effects they have on the audience.

The study of the multimodal discourse of websites for women entrepreneurs combines analytical tools from the framework proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) for the interpretation of the interpersonal meaning in visual texts with tools from the theories of classical and contemporary rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). The analysis aims to determine the underlying persuasive strategies used by multimodal discourse producers, and to see how this social group constructs a discourse targeting women entrepreneurs. The analysis focuses on the home pages as primary entry points to the websites and as main sources revealing the web structure along with the principle objectives for the creation of the website as a platform for business communication.