Global vs. National Change Agents: The Audience’s National Identity in Entrepreneurial Narratives

Abstract

As the role of identity begins to draw more attention in the entrepreneurship literature, studies have so far focused on the role of the identity of an entrepreneur, and not on the identity of an entrepreneur’s target audience. To address this research gap, this study investigated how the interaction between the national collective identity of an entrepreneur’s target audience and the entrepreneur’s narrative can influence the cognitive and affective evaluation by the target audience. Using online experiments with American and Chinese audiences, we found that a narrative portraying the entrepreneur as an agent to change the world was preferred by an American audience, whereas a narrative portraying the entrepreneur as an agent to help the focal nation was preferred by a Chinese audience. Moreover, this study found that an audience’s perception regarding the competitiveness of the focal nation further moderated this relationship. An American’s audience’s affective evaluation for a national-change-agent narrative strengthens when the US is perceived as less competitive. Conversely, the Chinese audience’s evaluation would be stronger when China is perceived as more competitive. The findings thus suggest a nuanced role of political psychology in national audiences’ evaluation of entrepreneurial narratives.