INTERDISCIPLINARY ISSUES IN PUBLIC SPEAKING: PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS ON ENTREPRENEURS’ EXPERIENCE

Abstract

This contribution underlines how relevant interdisciplinarity and discourse contamination are in a ‘hybrid’ and/or ‘contaminated’ field of research and practice such as ‘the public speaking domain’. The paper focuses on how entrepreneurs make sense of public speaking within their professional arena. Two different but complementary areas of study, namely linguistics and organisational behaviour, find here a common ground and share the same final objective, that is: investigating the way the pathos of public speaking varies according to business roles (e.g. sales person, buyer, consultant, etc.). This study is based on a small study conducted in seventeen Italian SMEs. The sample is made up by 17 entrepreneurs running international firms in industries such as marble stone, steel, and waste recycling. The study takes a subjectivist, interpretivist stance as it is concerned with the way individuals portray their understanding and experiences through the social construction of meanings. The originality of this paper stands in the fact that the Authors look at public speaking, rather than public speech per se, adopting an entrepreneurship multi-disciplinary perspective, attempting to shed light on aspects not clearly identifiable by using more traditional lenses.