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Social entrepreneurs often make public appeals for funding to investors who are motivated by nonfinancial considerations. This emerging research context is an opportunity for researchers to expand the bounds of entrepreneurship theory. To do so, we require appropriate research tools. In this chapter, we show how computer-aided text analysis (CATA) can be applied to advance social entrepreneurship research. We demonstrate how CATA is well suited to analyze the public appeals for resources made by entrepreneurs, provide insight into the rationale of social lenders, and overcome challenges associated with traditional survey methods.

We illustrate the advantages of CATA by examining how charismatic language in 13,000 entrepreneurial narratives provided by entrepreneurs in developing countries influences funding speed from social lenders. CATA is used to assess the eight dimensions of charismatic rhetoric.

We find that four of the dimensions of charismatic rhetoric examined were important in predicting funding outcomes for entrepreneurs.

Data collection and sample size are important challenges facing social entrepreneurship research. This chapter demonstrates how CATA techniques can be used to collect valuable data and increase sample size. This chapter also examines how the rhetoric used by entrepreneurs impacts their fundraising efforts.

This paper analyses the radical reorganisation of English school sport by the coalition government, a move that led to the emergence of a significant discourse of dissatisfaction amongst school sport advocacy coalition groups.

This paper utilises Sabatier’s (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999) Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to identify how the coalition government’s decision to abolish the successful Physical Education School Sport and Club Links (PESSCL) programme has specifically weakened the power of formerly influential advocacy coalitions within the school sport arena. Weber’s (1947) conceptualisation of charisma, in particular, the concept of charismatic rhetoric, is used to explain how these historically extensive policy changes were communicated by the coalition government, and particularly, by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State.

Locating the government’s rhetoric within the charismatic literature allowed the exploration of how a disempowerment of advocacy coalition groups and centralisation of power towards the state might have been partly achieved via the use of charismatic rhetoric (Weber, 1947).

Javidan and Waldman (2003) identified a lack of rigorous empirical study of the role of charismatic leadership and its consequences in public sector leadership, a critique that has been addressed by this paper.

Despite apparent consensus about the importance of leader rhetoric, the topic has not received systematic attention from leadership scholars. The purpose of this article is to advance the study of the relationship between rhetorical behavior and charismatic leadership in three ways: first, by presenting theoretically derived propositions about the expected contents of charismatic leaders’ speeches; second, by offering a thematic content analysis of a representative speech by a charismatic orator, in order to demonstrate the content themes suggested by the propositions; and third, by specifying the requirements for more systematic studies of the relationship between speech content and charisma.

Little is known about what emotionally un(intelligent) CEOs really say to their close collaborators within the boardroom. Would the rhetoric content differ between an emotionally intelligent and an emotionally unintelligent CEO, especially during a crisis? This chapter aims to answer this question.

40 CEOs of large corporations were asked to deliver a verbal address to their board members in reaction to a vignette describing a critical situation for the company. Participants were provided with the Schutte self-report emotional intelligence (EI) test. The verbal content of CEOs' closed-door discourses was analyzed using Cognitive-Discursive Analysis (CDA) and, subsequently, Geometric Data Analysis (GDA).

The results revealed that CEOs with low EI tend to evoke unpleasant emotions, talk about competition, and often blame some – or all – of the board members for their (poor) actions in comparison to CEOs with high or medium EI. In contrast, CEOs with high EI tend to use terms in relation to decision or realization and appear to be more cooperative than those with lower EI and were also ready to make decisions on behalf of team.

Previous research has mainly focused on CEOs' public speeches. But the content of CEOs' speeches within the boardroom might noticeably differ from what they would say in a public address. The results of our exploratory study can serve CEOs as a basis toward improving their closed-door rhetoric during a crisis.

It would be interesting to enlarge the size of our population in order to strengthen our statistical analyses as well as explore other cultural and linguistic environments and other channels through which emotions can be expressed (e.g., human face, gesture, vocal tone).

While organizationally relevant outcomes of charismatic leadership have been studied more extensively, we do not know as much about when and why followers attribute charisma to leaders. Drawing on the self-concept based motivational theory of charisma developed by Boas Shamir and colleagues, we propose that congruence between leaders and followers on a core characteristic, namely organizational identification plays an important role. When leaders are high on identification with the organization, they embody and communicate the values of the organization more strongly in their vision and behaviors, which is likely to affect the attribution of charisma to these leaders, but only for followers who themselves strongly identify with the organization. In contrast, those leaders low on organizational identification are more likely to communicate messages that appeal to followers who are similarly low on identification. A multi-source study in the healthcare sector largely supports our model as congruence between organizational identification levels of leaders and followers is positively linked to perceived charisma and, in turn, charisma relates to followers’ organizational citizenship behavior.

The article addresses the relationship between social distance and charismatic leadership. Current theories of charismatic leadership in organizations have borrowed ideas from the literature on socially distant charismatic leaders and applied them to leadership situations that involve direct contacts between leaders and their immediate subordinates. This article argues that while social distance is not a necessary condition for charismatic leadership, there are fundamental differences between distant charismatic leadership and close charismatic leadership. The article attempts to identify these differences through a theoretical analysis of the two leadership situations and through an exploratory content analysis of interviews about close and distant charismatic leaders.