Conceptual Metaphor in Chinese and American Entrepreneurial Image Construction From the Perspective of Framing Theory: The Case of Ren Zhengfei and Tim Cook

Meier XIAO

Abstract


Entrepreneurial image nowadays is closely related to the company’s business performance as speaking in public is a common phenomenon for entrepreneurs to make or break their companies. The present study aims to conduct a comparative study on the impact of conceptual metaphor on entrepreneurial image construction, through careful analysis of 15 Chinese transcripts of 23286 words and 15 English transcripts of 22175 words from Ren Zhengfei and Tim Cook’s interview, keynote speech, commencement address, and speech on product release conference from October 2018 to December 2020. Employing framing theory and conceptual metaphor frameworks, the author examined the metaphorically used expressions with the help of MIPVU, explored how conceptual metaphors play a crucial role in images construction and unpacked national or corporate values for different conceptualization of the same source domains.


Keywords


Image construction; Conceptual metaphor; Framing; Entrepreneur

Full Text:

PDF

References


Anderson, A. R., & Warren, L. (2011). The entrepreneur as hero and jester: Enacting the entrepreneurial discourse. International Small Business Journal, 29(6), 589-609.

Bikse, V., Rivza, B., & Riemere, I. (2015). The social entrepreneur as a promoter of social advancement. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 185, 469-478.

Cameron, L., & Maslen, R. (2010). Metaphor analysis. Equinox.

Cardon, M. S., Zietsma, C., Saparito, P., Matherne, B. P., & Davis, C. (2005). A tale of passion: New insights into entrepreneurship from a parenthood metaphor. Journal of business venturing, 20(1), 23-45.

Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Springer.

Chen, C. C., & Meindl, J. R. (1991). The construction of leadership images in the popular press: The case of Donald Burr and People Express. Administrative science quarterly, 521-551.

Cheney, G. (1992). The corporate person (re) presents itself. Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations, 165-83.

Cornelissen, J. P., Clarke, J. S., & Cienki, A. (2012). Sensegiving in entrepreneurial contexts: The use of metaphors in speech and gesture to gain and sustain support for novel business ventures. International small business journal, 30(3), 213-241.

Dowling, G. (2000). Creating corporate reputations: Identity, image and performance. OUP Oxford.

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of communication, 43(4), 51-58.

Ertner, D. E., & Ulyanova, O. B. (2019). Metaphorical codes in structuring national economic discourse. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 14(3), 258–271.

Fan, L. (2016). Multimodal discourse analysis of entrepreneurial image construction [Master Dissertation, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies]. China National Knowledge Infrastructure.

Ge, J., & Feng, Y. (2011). Entrepreneurs’ public image, media presentation and cognitive legitimacy: Based on an exploratory empirical analysis of Chinese private enterprises. Business Management Journal, 33 (3), 101-107.

Keller, K. L. (2002). Branding and brand equity. Handbook of marketing, 151.

Kovecses, Z. (2010). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, G. (2006). Thinking points: Communicating our American values and vision. Macmillan.

Lakoff, G. (2014). The all new don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

Lin, W. (2020). An analysis of entrepreneurial image construction by attitude resources in Ma Yun’ s English speeches [Master Dissertation, Zhejiang Gongshang University]. China National Knowledge Infrastructure.

Liu, J. (2017). A study on the image building of Chinese famous entrepreneurs in the new meida context: Content and data analysis based on micro message public platform [Master Dissertation, Huazhong Normal University]. China National Knowledge Infrastructure.

McCloskey, D. N. (1995). Metaphors economists live by. Social research, 215-237.

Newsom, D., Turk, J., & Kruckeberg, D. (2012). Cengage advantage books: This is PR: The Realities of Public Relations. Cengage Learning.

Norris, P., Kern, M., & Just, M. (Eds.). (2004). Framing terrorism: The news media, the government and the public. Routledge.

Pang, L., & Zhu, L. (2018). A comparative study on the image construction of Chinese and American entrepreneurs from the perspective of Appraisal system. Economic Affairs, (6), 10.

Qiu, H., Sheng, Y., & Yu, Y. (2019). An analysis of the metaphors and mental models of Chinese entrepreneurs: Taking the speeches of Ma Yun and Ren Zhengfei as examples. Journal of Zhengjiang International Studies University, (03), 57-64.

Roundy, P.T. (2016). Start-up community narratives: The discursive construction of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The Journal of Entrepreneurship, 25(2), 232-248.

Steen, G. (Ed.). (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. John Benjamins Publishing.

Steen, G. J. (2011). The contemporary theory of metaphor—now new and improved. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 9(1), 26-64.

Tillman, R. & C. A. Lorpatrick (1998). Promotion: Persuasive communication in marketing. Houghton Mifflin Co.

Wang, J. (2020). A corpus-based comparative study of metaphors in letters to shareholders of Chinese and American banking industry [Master Dissertation, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies]. China National Knowledge Infrastructure.

Wang, S (2014). The structure and metaphors of the American government. Shandong Foreign Languages Teaching Journal, 35(161), 30-34.

Zhu, L., Wang, X., & Yong, S. (2014). Review and prospect of research on entrepreneur image from the consumer’s perspective. Commercial Times, (06), 102-103.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12038

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2021 Meier Xiao

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

Reminder

  • How to do online submission to another Journal?
  • If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

  • Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/ccc/submission/wizard

  • Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
  • We only use four mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Cross-Cultural Communication are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail:caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net

Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture