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Article Excerpt
Presenter: So we're gonna say, we're gonna take a leap here and say you I'm gonna call you "You Inc." okay? We're gonnna say that you decide to be a business owner.
THESE LINES COME from the interaction between a presenter and prospect during a business plan presentation for an e-commerce multilevel marketing "opportunity." Since their inception in the 1940s, multilevel marketing (MLM1) organizations, like Amway and Mary Kay Cosmetics, have dealt with various social and legal challenges regarding the legitimacy of their business practices (Biggart, 1998; Pratt, 2000). MLM organizations have been described by some as cults (Butterfield, 1985), pyramid schemes (Fitzpatrick & Reynolds, 1997), or organizations rife with misleading, deceptive, and unethical behavior (Carter, 1999), such as the questionable use of evangelical discourse to promote the business (Hopfl & Maddrell, 1996), and the exploitation of personal relationships for financial gain (Fitzpatrick & Reynolds, 1997).
A common organizational strategy that MLM organizations pursue in order to legitimate the often mundane, and sometimes socially questionable, activities is to cultivate an entrepreneurial identity among their distributors (i.e., the value of owning one's own business and being a "business owner"; Biggart, 1989; Kong, 2001). For example, Biggart (1989) claimed that an American entrepreneurial ethic offered a culturally valued ideal that productively blended (and]or blurred) distinctions among the social, political, and economic spheres. Further, Kong (2001) claimed that MLM organizations do not just sell products, but they "also attempt to reconstruct their sales agents' identities to the advantage of their business operations" (p. 473).
To investigate legitimacy, communication researchers have historically adopted a corporate advocacy approach that studies how organizational spokespersons manage public messages to cast the organization in a favorable light, and to respond to critical incidents, or crises (Marcus & Goodman, 1991; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001; Suchman, 1995). The rhetorical strategies that organizations use to repair the organization's image after a crisis (such as excuses, justifications, mortification, ingratiation, corrective action, etc.), for example, have been compared to how individuals make conversational repairs (for important differences between corporate and individual actors, see Allen & Caillouet, 1994; Tyler, 1997). While MLM organizations do have official spokespersons that disseminate press releases as well as provide media interviews and news conferences, individual distributors that are affiliated with MLM companies can also manage legitimacy in face-to-face contexts when interacting with other distributors as well as new prospects interested in the business. Although managing legitimacy as an ongoing process in face-to-face contexts has received far less research attention than a corporate advocacy approach (Boyd, 2000), no necessary justification exists for this on theoretical grounds. Indeed, the institutional nature of particular forms of discourse is not given by the context, but rather made relevant by the work practices in which people are engaged (Drew & Heritage, 1992).
In addition to examining an under-studied context, important theoretical issues are at stake when considering how to investigate the processes of legitimacy and identity management. In their review of discursive approaches to organizational communication, Putnam and Fairhurst (2001) claim that corporate legitimacy research, by focusing on the rhetorical strategies that organizations use to communicate with various target audiences (often via channels as press releases, conferences, and interviews), conceives messages "in light of senders and receivers rather than through the way they are embedded in an interactive process" (p. 104). Although more and more organizational scholars have recognized that the study of organizations and discourse represents a promising path for "knowledge about organizational life" (Putnam & Fairhurst, p. 121), research studies do not always pay close attention to the concrete, interactive discourse practices. For example, organizational legitimacy research that constructs typologies of impression management strategies helps us to understand the strategies and circumstances under which they are used, but it does not provide insight into how the pursuit of these strategies are accomplished interactively on a sequential basis, nor how discourse processes are simultaneously processes of organizing.
To address both of these concerns--the under-studied context of how MLM distributors manage legitimacy in face-to-face settings as well as the interactive, collaboratively constructed nature of the relationship between discourse and organizing processes--the purpose of this present study is to investigate how legitimacy is managed in actual MLM business presentations, especially in terms of how the discourse of entrepreneurialism is deployed and how entrepreneurial identities are interactively constructed in face-to-face settings. Before addressing these issues, I will review past research on MLM organizations, especially in terms of organizational identification and constructing entrepreneurial identities, and then discuss the methods and materials to be analyzed.
Past Research on MLM Organizations: Organizational Identification and Constructing Entrepreneurial Identities
While MLM organizations are not studied as frequently as other kinds of organizations and institutional arrangements (Eisenberg & Goodall, 2001), a growing body of academic work has grown over the past two decades. Biggart (1989) documented the history of American direct selling organizations (DSOs; a precursor to MLM organizations) and analyzed their social and economic structure. She concluded that DSOs succeed because they offer the opportunity for people to perceive themselves as entrepreneurs, even though many people involved in MLM organizations actually perform highly routinized behaviors in terms of selling and recruiting. Biggart argued that offering entrepreneurial status (i.e., a socially valued, independent identity linked with "ambition, self-direction, and autonomy," p. 163) is an effective strategy because entrepreneurship is a cultural ideal rooted in capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. Further, she noted that DSOs tap into this cultural resource by emphasizing "less what distributors [or people involved in DSOs] do than who they are as being entrepreneurial" (p. 163; italics in original).
Although providing insight into the importance of the entrepreneurial strategy, Biggart's study did not address the processes through which newcomers to MLM organizations come to identify themselves as MLM distributors. Pratt (2000) investigated the process of organizational identification with Amway in terms of attempts to manage members' self-concepts and argued that identification succeeds when "an individual's beliefs about his or her organization become self-referential or self-defining" (p. 457). In a MLM organization, Pratt contended, the process of identification works through seekership (searching for a satisfactory system of meaning to resolve one's discontent), sense-breaking (breaking down of meaning), and sense-making (construction of meaning). According to Pratt's social-psychological model of sense-making, then, an entrepreneurial strategy would be successful to the extent that prospects' current identities were found to be lacking in some way, creating a void of meaning, and then having prospects fill the void by seeing themselves as entrepreneurs.
Other work also lends support to the idea that MLM organizations attempt to reconstruct the identities of their agents. Kong (2001) situated his study of network marketing organizations in the context of postmodern enterprises where traditional bureaucratic controls do not fit the needs of a workforce seeking greater meaning from work. Here, workers have been encouraged to become more autonomous, flexible, and self-regulating "entrepreneurs of the self" (Du Gay, 1996). Using a structural-functional framework to analyze written messages from the directors of three network marketing organizations, Kong claimed that the texts justified network marketing as a socially legitimate activity by attempting to balance the pragmatic, business aspects of participation with the personal, emotional aspects. Kong suggested that through their use of linguistic resources, network marketing organizations are not simply persuading, but instead try to reconstruct the identities of their agents in a sophisticated way.
Although researchers have productively and insightfully argued the MLM organizations deploy an entrepreneurial strategy to manage their legitimacy, and studied the process of distributor identification, four important limitations to this research occur. First, although Biggart (1989), for example, claims that offering entrepreneurial status to MLM distributors is a successful strategy, it is not clear how this strategy is embedded and accomplished (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). Paying attention to actual interaction might provide greater insight into a number of issues including the invocation (or challenging) of a range of identities (such as being a consumer, a salesperson, or someone who is intelligent and reflective versus someone who is being duped, etc.), the sequential context for invoking an entrepreneurial identity, and difficulties or challenges then confronted (Drew & Heritage, 1992).
The second limitation concerns the joint construction of identities by audience members and presenters (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998). Business plan presentations offer audience member interaction that is not available when studying written texts (Kong, 2001), but existing MLM research has not transcribed and sequentially analyzed actual business plan presentations. Actual interaction makes it possible to see how presenters and audience members collaboratively manage the legitimacy of the MLM organization, their own identities, as well as how both display their understanding of the communicative event (for example, is it a legitimate business presentation or a crafty sales pitch?), all three often accomplished simultaneously. Further, close attention to conversational details allow an understanding of how certain kinds of interaction are constrained in important ways or constructed as (in)appropriate.
A third limitation, related to the first two, concerns the relationship of communication to organizational processes. Although most organizational communication researchers would acknowledge that communication is central and constitutive of organizational processes, the attention to actual communication practices may be taken-for-granted (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001) or made abstract through typologies (Allen & Caillouet, 1994). For example, Pratt's (2000) ethnographic study of organizational identification in MLM organizations treats the identification process as bound up with the social-psychological process of sense-making. By adopting this perspective, our analytic attention is directed more toward the sense-making process and away from the communicative interaction that is purportedly responsible for the construction of the identification.
A fourth limitation to existing research is that it has not addressed the emergence of the internet and e-commerce to the MLM industry and how this may affect the use of an entrepreneurial strategy identified in earlier research. According to certain industry watchers (Byrnes, 2000), the emergence of the internet has transformed the way MLM companies do business. For example, MLM companies have set up "virtual malls" that link their company's products with other companies' products, thus allowing the distributors to "surf and earn," or buy products over the internet while generating business volume (a process similar to accumulating frequent flyer miles; Buechner, 1999). Further, the individual distributor is no longer responsible for placing the order for the customer and spending hours dealing with the paperwork, since this can all be handled electronically. This development raises the question of whether or not the entrepreneurial strategy is still necessary or relevant for an e-commerce MLM organization. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to address fully...
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