Entrepreneurial Podcasting: A Linguistic Ethnographic Perspective

Introduction

Of the wide range of digital communication media that have emerged over the past two decades, podcasting is witnessing one of the fastest and steadiest rises. With over 60% of America’s adult population now listening to podcasts (Edison Research, 2023) it is hard to imagine that the first podcasts were only launched in the early 2000s (Hammersley 2004) . Equally surprisingly, the first blockbuster podcast dates from as recent as 2014, viz. the investigative “true crime” podcast series called Serial hosted by US public radio personality Sarah Koenig, while 2017 saw the start of the widely acclaimed Daily news podcast produced by the New York Times.

While news and true crime were among the earliest podcast interests, a variety of other topics have started to be covered in podcasts, including business. Business podcasts range from corporate branding initiatives like “Inside Trader Joe’s” co-hosted by the retail company’s Communication Director (also referred to as their “Director of Words and Phrases and Clauses”) or McKinsey & Company consultants’ “Inside the Strategy Room” to podcasts launched for internal use, for example “Tell Me Why” by American Airlines. In this podcast the airline’s Vice President of Global Communications publishes a handful of 5-to-10 minute episodes each month to explain company policies and changes, announce new initiatives, and share employee stories for the company’s 122,000 staff.

This article focuses on a specific niche of business podcasts, viz. podcasting as a tool for entrepreneurial and leadership communication. One famous entrepreneurial podcast is Hack the Entrepreneur, hosted by author and entrepreneur Jonny Nastor, who—for over 6 years and in more than five hundred 30-to-40 minute episodes—has interviewed a host of different entrepreneurs. Less narrowly focused on entrepreneurship, the Tim Ferriss Show is an interview-centered business podcast that has been around since 2014 and whose 2-hour-plus episodes have led to around a billion downloads. Past guests include famous entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg but also key figures in politics, sports, entertainment, and the arts like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Madeleine Albright, LeBron James, Margaret Atwood, Jordan Peterson, and Matthew McConaughey (Holiday, 2016). In addition to entrepreneurial podcasts managed by celebrity hosts like Nastor and Ferriss, individual entrepreneurs who are less well-known with the general public are now also taking the lead and producing their own personalized podcast series instead of waiting to be invited by a podcast host for a single episode. It is this specific brand of entrepreneurial podcasting that I will focus on in this article as it can be seen to open up opportunities for leadership communication and, as such, constitutes a unique site for investigating how today’s leaders negotiate the wide-ranging affordances of the new digital medium to disseminate their visions on what it takes to be successful in business and enterprise. To my knowledge, no such investigation has taken place so far. Hence, drawing on the family resemblances of the podcast genre emerging from the scholarly literature, my main objective is to unravel the hybrid nature of entrepreneurial podcasting as it recuperates the popular audio technology and, in doing so, sets out to modify what podcasting is all about. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate how entrepreneurial podcasting is opening up new opportunities for leadership communication.

I will start by surveying some of the key works on the use of podcasting in business communication as well as on podcasting more generally. I will distill a selection of essential features of effective podcasting and then present a qualitative study of a single entrepreneurial podcasting series produced in a North Western European country to find out to what extent it is characterized by these features. My lens is a linguistic ethnographic one, which means that I zoom in on the micro-analysis of in-situ language choices made in the making of the podcast as I go behind the scenes and conduct fieldwork and interviews during the production of the series. I take a qualitative approach towards beginning to answer the following very general research question:

How does entrepreneurial podcasting draw on the general features of podcasting as they can be identified in the literature on podcasts?

My hypothesis is that as entrepreneurs and other corporate elite embrace digital audio, they will be adjusting the genre that originated as a homespun, grassroots medium (McHugh, 2022). Since the present analysis draws on qualitative analysis, I do not claim any generalization. Instead, exploiting the rich and context-sensitive perspective of ethnography, the qualitative endeavor presented here sets out to identify a number of parameters that should be expanded on in future larger-scale inquiry into entrepreneurial podcasting. At this stage my goal is to look for so-called “rich points” (Agar, 2008) illustrating the resemblances and differences between podcasting in general and entrepreneurial podcasts in particular and this can then serve as the basis for further and more systematic research into the genre.

Podcasting: Business Communication Perspectives and Beyond

Literature on podcasting and business communication has been far and few between. Scott’s (2022) latest update of New Rules of Marketing and PR has a couple of paragraphs on podcasting which are meant to capture the state-of-the-art on podcasting in the business communication, marketing, and PR literature as he discusses some of the financial and logistic practicalities of the medium, including the fact that it is “essentially free (except for minimal hosting fees and some cheap equipment)” (p. 323). Continuing the business perspective, he goes on to expand on the fact that it is internet-based so there are no limits to geographical range and it can reach a potentially worldwide audience. As for the user perspective, Scott indicates that podcasts are typically available through iTunes and other services as well as mobile listening apps like Spotify, so users can search and browse as well as subscribing to a feed (in case of sequential or episodic shows). He concludes that podcasts are liberating the public from “the tyranny of mainstream hit-driven broadcast radio” as we can now listen to shows based on our interests (p. 324). No analysis of the typical features of podcasting is included in Scott (2022)

As for the more scholarly inquiry on podcasting and business communication, the literature is very limited. In an early contribution to IJBC, the only article in the journal devoted to the genre to date, Vernuccio (2014), looks at podcasting as one of a range of content-on-demand multimedia tools for corporate branding in the sense that it “[provides] for access and use as required,” which she calls “consultation interactivity” (215). She suggests that companies should target some of their existing social media in public relations programs at “new online opinion leaders” and “inform them about products and services, societal initiatives, or innovations” (215). Podcasters are one such group of opinion leaders, along with bloggers. At the same time, Vernuccio hints at the option of companies starting their own podcasts when she writes about “initiating direct interactive platforms, feeding them with input from employees and managers, and using these one-to-one and many-to-many forms of communication to establish, maintain, and reinforce the brand’s connections, image, and reputation” (215).

Vernuccio’s wasn’t the first scholarly venture into the podcasting universe. Earlier Poncini (2007) had explored the interface between corporate podcasting and blogging by applying Goffman’s participation framework to a case of IBM’s corporate communication while Tulley (2011) argued that the rise of the podcast should be seen as part of a return to an oral–aural tradition, expanding on the unique benefits of sound as opposed to writing. Alternatively, Stoltenkamp et al (2011) explored the opportunities for rolling out podcasts to enhance teaching and learning (see also Greene, 2018 in the domain of composition studies).

More recently, García-Estévez and Cartes-Barroso (2022) have looked at podcasting as a brand content strategy, drawing on a sample of 100 podcasts. They distinguish different formats (from interviews and panel to solo commentaries), discuss the options when it comes to establishing a presenter (from journalists, experts, celebrities, and communication professionals to the company’s own personnel), and identify three main functions (primarily educating, closely followed by entertaining, and some minimal reporting). They also analyze the wider communicative context to the digital audio boom, pointing to visual saturation and the impact of the pandemic (when listening picked up dramatically). Elsewhere in Europe, Schreyer and Schreyer (2019) have analyzed podcasts as a tool for strategic corporate communication.

Overall, the literature on podcasting and business communication has remained very limited, though, and it has failed to address in any systematic way my focus for this article, viz. what the typical features of podcasting are in a business setting and how digital audio is opening up new opportunities for leadership communication. Podcasting in general has been documented far more elaborately, though, and I will turn to this broader literature now as it will provide the basis for benchmarking the special brand of entrepreneurial podcasting that I am interested in here.

Two recent key full-length publications deserve to be mentioned first, viz. Baham and Higdon’s (2022) Podcaster’s Dilemma: Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism and McHugh’s (2022) Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories through Sound, as they begin to address the issue of what are the typical features of podcasting that this article sets out to investigate. Both document in great detail the rise of a so-called “homespun medium” (McHugh, 2022). unhampered—at least initially—by institutional gatekeepers Mc Hugh’s focus is on how intimacy and authenticity determine the nature of storytelling in podcasts as well as presenting a detailed analysis of some of the specific interactional characteristics underlying the genre. Baham and Higdon’s perspective, on the other hand, is more historical, using a decolonizing link to investigate interrogation and critique, counter-narrative, and call to action in podcasts. Not much earlier, the interdisciplinary volume edited by Llinares et al. (2018) had explored the definition, status, practices, and implications of podcasting through a Media and Cultural Studies lens while Spinelli and Dann (2019) had dissected what they called the “audio media revolution” that constituted podcasting. Crucially, much of the empirical work on podcasting is to be situated in the field of journalism studies, including Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau’s (2022) article on transparency as metajournalistic performance in The New York Times’ much-contested Caliphate podcast as well as Nee and Santana’s (2022) analysis of storytelling in podcasts against the background of the pandemic.

A comprehensive analysis of the podcasting literature in journalism and media culture studies is of course beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I will now turn to the key features that have been predominantly put forward across a wide range of the studies mentioned above and that will provide a benchmark for analyzing the specific brand of entrepreneurial podcasting that I focus on later in this article

Key Features of Podcasting

Drawing on a selection of the literature presented above it can be argued that the following key features determine the nature of podcasting (most prominently, but by no means exclusively McHugh, 2022; Nee & Santana, 2022; Perdomo & Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2022):

In what follows I will illustrate these four features by drawing on a random recent episode of the Daily podcast looking back on the contested politics of the 2022 soccer World Cup in Qatar.

This is a transcript of the start of the episode, attesting the interactive nature of the podcast (my italics):

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.” For the past few weeks, the world has been riveted by the drama of soccer’s biggest tournament being played in Qatar, the World Cup. On Sunday, it culminated in a breathtaking win for Argentina and its star player, Lionel Messi. Today, I talk to my colleague Rory Smith about how the tournament’s tainted beginnings were eclipsed by the thrill of the games and why this World Cup may be an unsettling sign of things to come in professional soccer. It’s Monday, December 19.

Up front it is announced by this episode’s host Sabrina Tavernise that there will be two interlocutors: she will be joined by a guest, in this case fellow journalist from the New York Times Rory Smith. In other words, the episode takes the form of the kind of journalist-to-journalist interview that Montgomery (2008) called “affiliated interviews” and for which Lundell (2010) coined the phrase “intraprofessional dialogues.” So the podcast is essentially interactive in that it adopts the interview format. The following extract is a good example of the turn-taking and floor distribution:

Clearly, unlike in a regular interview, the interviewer-host is very much involved, asking elaborate and complex questions, recapping answers in a challenging way, and doublechecking her own understanding of what the interviewee said. All this results in a more or less equal distribution of the floor.

It has been argued that the interactive format creates an unedited feel and a sense of authenticity (McHugh, 2022), with the listener framed into a position of eavesdropping on what sounds like an informal chat between the two interlocutors (cf. Goffman, 1981). This goes hand in hand with a double sense of personal and process transparency, two of the other four key features of podcasting mentioned above. The following is from the very beginning of the episode:

In this extract personal transparency is manifested in the informal, first-name greeting, and casual inquiry into the call’s context, just like with friends who are chatting on the phone, as well as some self-deprecating cynicism about the role of international news correspondents. At the same time, the unique insider perspective on the source of the background noise that is hampering the recording of the podcast can be seen as a form of process transparency. Both kinds of transparency can also be observed in the next extract:

The personal transparency is in the two interlocutors exchanging anecdotes about their own and family members’ passionate involvement in the suspense surrounding the World Cup final, which is said to be “unbelievable,” while the process transparency is in the host’s reference to how she was preparing for the production of the episode.

The latter has been called a “meta-scene” where the listener is allowed “to peek into the host’s life and “witness” the production procedure” (McHugh, 2022, p. 56), indexing both personal transparency (with the host center stage, revealing herself as a real person), and process transparency (opening up about the making of the podcast as a research process). Process transparency implies that this specific episode is not just about the World Cup, it’s also—like for many other Daily episodes and for podcasts in general—about the art and business of making a (news) podcast. In Erving Goffman’s terminology, the boundary between frontstage and backstage seems to be blurred, resulting in a certain reflexivity that has been explained as a strategy of legitimation and authority (Perdomo and Rodrigues-Rouleau, 2022): because listeners receive a unique, seemingly unedited insider view of the podcast people and process, they are taken on board of the journalists’ exploratory process and they are encouraged to suspend their disbelief and learn together with them.

The fourth podcasting feature is storytelling, and it is central to the following extract from the episode, which details the minute-by-minute unfolding of the World Cup final.

Clearly the narrative here is driven by chronology: there’s a sense that the events are evolving in real time, with the sound bites from live match reporting as a key strategy of “present-tense storytelling” (McHugh, 2022, p. 52). Note that, in multi-episode podcasting, the story is often serialized or “storified” across multiple episodes.

In the next section I will use the key features identified here (interactivity, personal and process transparency, and storytelling) as a benchmark for analyzing entrepreneurial podcasting. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate how entrepreneurial podcasting is opening up new opportunities for leadership communication.

Case and Data

In this article I will focus on an entrepreneurial podcasting initiative started in the fall of 2022 by a 56-year-old businessman in a North Western European country, whom we will call David. David is the chairman of a privately owned accounting and consulting firm that he took over from his father about 25 years ago and that had just a handful of employees at that time, with a turnover of a couple of millions of euros. Today there are well over a 1,000 employees and the turnover for 2022 was around 135 million euros. There are 25 regional offices all across the country. The company’s baseline is helping customers grow.

As part of a personal development project that was suggested to him by his mentor, David set out to produce a podcast series of six episodes; the longest one is about 16 minutes, the shortest is 10 minutes. The podcast is in one of the country’s official languages, which is not English; for this article, we present the translated extracts. The overarching theme of the six episodes is the concept of balance, with the pun at the double meaning intended here: on the one hand, balance refers to a person’s “equilibrium” (both physical and mental), which—according to David—is what entrepreneurs need to be successful; on the other hand, it refers to the “balance sheet,” a bookkeeping term for the correspondence between assets and liabilities in a firm’s financial situation. The latter reference is appropriate given the fact that one of the core areas of expertise of David himself and of David’s firm is accounting.

Each of the six episodes is focused on an entrepreneurial quality that David goes on to illustrate based on his own personal experience, including authenticity, life-long learning, and spirituality.

The data set for the analysis presented here includes

The reason why I decided to investigate David’s podcast series is that I was granted the unique opportunity of going behind the scenes and monitoring the production process as well as repeatedly interviewing key figures in it.

Methodology

My approach is a linguistic ethnographic one, which means that I’m combining close, language-focused scrutiny of what is actually said in the podcast (drawing on discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics) with a broader sensitivity to the people in the process and to how the podcast was actually produced (including its material, economic base as well as “the potential importance of what [got] left out” of the podcast—Rampton, 2007, p. 596). Conceived as a radically qualitative perspective, linguistic ethnography combines a focus on how people use language as well as what they believe about it and why (Heller, 2008), which it shares with sociolinguistics, with a so-called emic perspective, aimed at accounting for lived experience through the local point of view, by close observation of actions and situations, and describing how “members” understand and participate in them (Rampton et al., 2004). Linguistic ethnography, in particular, assumes that “language and the social world are mutually shaping, and that close analysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental and distinctive insights into the mechanisms of social and cultural production in everyday activity” (Rampton et al., 2004, p. 2) as contexts of communication are dynamic, interactionally accomplished and intrinsic to communication (Blommaert & Jie, 2020; see also NT&T, 2011 on the need for an ethnographic dimension in the study of news media discourse, including newsroom fieldwork and interviewing journalists).

Findings

In this section I will demonstrate that of the four key features of podcasting presented earlier two are present in David’s entrepreneurial podcast while the other two are absent, as summarized in the table below:

Analyzing the following extract from the episode on authenticity helps us a long way towards explaining these findings (see Kim et al., 2023 on the central place of authenticity in leadership talk):

This extract is marked by significant personal transparency as David shares quite a few non-professional, almost intimate details about himself and some of the mental as well as physical issues he was facing at some points. Elsewhere in this and other episodes he discloses anecdotes about his family and personal relationships and about what makes him happy and what makes him unhappy.

Returning to the extract from the authenticity episode quoted above, it is clear that the podcast has a narrative structure, including standard storytelling components like a crisis and a solution, with the strict chronology of David’s athletic development driving the story. Somewhat similarly, throughout the six episodes the timeline of David’s professional development serves as the central organizing principle of the entire series, with all of the episodes zooming in on key events in his career and with a strong focus on when and where exactly they happened and what happened before and next.

As for the remaining two features, it should first of all be noted that the listener does not get to witness any of the production procedure. In other words, there is no process transparency and there are no meta-scenes. The podcast is very much a frontstage rendering, in Goffman’s terminology: where the Daily podcast invited the listener to join the journalists in their exploratory process, there’s no such joint learning taking place here. Instead, David seems to be engaged in a top-down teaching activity: his rhetoric is a didactic one; it’s highly repetitive, emphatic in terms of highlighting keywords and signaling structure, with the deontic modality of mentoring (you should do this and you ought to do that), and with plenty of direct listener address, as demonstrated by the final part of the episode on authenticity:

Finally, it should be noted that there is no interaction in any of the podcast’s six episodes. There is no host to be heard and from start to end the podcast is in the form of a monolog, with David lecturing to the listeners. In contrast with most podcasting, the latter are not positioned as eavesdropping on the scene but their presence is explicitly and repeatedly ratified through direct listener address.

It is essential to note here that the monologic nature of the podcast is not just in contrast with the interactivity characteristic of most podcasting; it is also in conflict with how David’s podcast was actually made. The picture in Figure 1 reveals the production set-up, with me, in my ethnographic role, keeping a distance from the actual recording process and serving, in Goffman’s terminology, as a ratified overhearer, also called “bystander.” More importantly, it is clear from the picture that throughout the recording process the entrepreneur and the podcast maker were facing each other. During the fieldwork I observed that there was plenty of verbal as well as non-verbal interaction between the two of them. In addition to asking a number of questions that would initiate David’s long turns, the podcast maker was also doing a lot of so-called acknowledgement work or backchanneling (Bjørge, 2010): there was, for example, intensive nodding and a constant exchange of gazes. Every now and then, the podcast maker stopped the recording and took the floor to give feedback, raise concerns, ask for clarification. Crucially, in the podcast product all this has been edited out; in other words, David’s entrepreneurial rhetoric is, what I would call, “de-dramatized.” This was the idea from the very beginning and it explains why during the recording process the podcast maker’s backchanneling was exclusively non-verbal, very different from the Daily episode, where interactivity—and the process transparency that comes with it—were very prominent. It is worth noting that some of this is reminiscent of Mapes’s (2023) analysis of professional speechwriting as “behind the scenes,” invisibilized high-end language work, which demands a certain “letting go” on the parts of professional speech writers as they are erased from the products of their own labor. It has been argued that this results in a form of “quiet power,” one that can be framed as a resource for claiming professional status and prestige (see also Thurlow, 2019, on elite wordsmithery).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Fieldwork set-up.

Discussion and Conclusion

My analysis has revealed that the entrepreneurial podcast series that I have investigated shares some of the features of traditional podcasting (storytelling and personal transparency) while others are absent or, more precisely, deliberately left out (interactivity and process transparency). In terms of the family resemblances of the podcast genre, it can therefore be argued that the entrepreneurial podcast I analyzed is a hybrid, one that points to a genre on the move and is indexical of how entrepreneurial podcasting is opening up new opportunities for leadership communication. It is these two points that I will briefly develop in this final part of the article.

First, in terms of the hybridity of a genre on the move, I should point to Baham and Higdon’s (2022) claim that podcasts have delivered on the Internet’s promise of media emancipation, of creating a level playing field without gatekeepers, one which allows the public to take back the narrative or—in Habermasian terms—reclaim the communicative infrastructure that used to be in the hands of the world of money and power. Baham and Higdon (2022) see podcasting as a “decolonizing” instrument. Echoing McHugh’s (2022) hint at the “march of corporate podcasting” (p. 253), I suggest that my analysis of David’s podcast provides preliminary evidence that the communicative infrastructure seems to be “recolonized” by the world of money and power, represented here by the entrepreneur, and that what’s happening in my data can be associated with what Fisher (2022) sees as the capitalist imaginary automatically recuperating emerging ideas and technologies: Fisher’s thoughts are in line with the work of Guy Debord, whose “recuperation,” much cited in the political discourse literature, refers to situations “wherein the establishment intercepts radical concepts and, through the mass media processes of the Spectacle, simultaneously trivializes and commodifies them before reincorporating them into the mainstream social order” (Bleakley, 2018, p. 422). In my data, it may be interesting to explore to what extent the recuperation is in the fact that David’s entrepreneurial podcast draws on some of the standard features of the genre without taking on board some of the others.

Where Baham and Higdon (2022) argue that “podcasters use their positionality as outsiders to deconstruct the hegemonic structures that render them invisible” (p. 15), my conclusion is that drawing on the same podcasting machinery David is basically doing the opposite: it can be argued that he is using his positionality as an insider to reconstruct the hegemonic structures that render him visible (my triple emphasis). In doing so, instead of the democratizing, the emancipation, and the level playing field that Baham and Higdon (2022) talk about, David’s use of the podcasting medium may well be seen to point to the use of podcasting in a way that ends up magnifying elite continuities. Of the three distinct activities that Baham and Higdon (2022) identify (critique, counter-narrative, and call to action), the latter in particular features prominently in David’s podcast: each of the episodes ends on a direct invitation addressed to the listener to be authentic, spiritual, and balanced—a plea for what could be seen as “executive activism.”

As for new opportunities for leadership communication, finally, it is worth connecting David’s entrepreneurial podcast with what Learmonth and Morrell (2019) call a “leadership industry,” one that “offers to sell people the recipe for becoming a leader” (105). Some of the key ingredients of the leadership recipe that they identify are exactly—and perhaps not surprisingly—the topics that David talks about in his podcast: authenticity, modesty, emotional intelligence (cf. Clifton, 2019 on guru talk). Hence, David’s podcast can be seen as instance of what Learmonth and Morrell (2019) call the “leadership chatter’ on social media, the selfie-style “look at me” posts that are part of a “personal project of branding” (p. 105). The entrepreneurial podcasts that I investigated turn out to draw on but at the same time be very far removed from the “homespun medium” that is the original podcast, rough round the edges, and some of which you can still see in the Daily World Cup episode, even if, of course, that one is a highly professionalized product too.

The current study should be seen as a starting point for further and more systematic research into entrepreneurial and other types of business podcasting. My analysis has demonstrated that this should be a worthwhile venture, both for those interested in the study of the emerging audio culture, in general, and for those interested in the latest developments in digitizing business communication, in particular. Linguistic ethnography, finally, promises to be a fruitful lens for them as it combines close, language-focused scrutiny of what is actually said in the podcast with the broader sensitivity to the people in the process and to how the podcast was actually produced