Whose questions? Ventriloquation in entrepreneurial podcasts

Abstract

While interaction is a signature feature of podcasts, new research on selected entrepreneurial podcasts has shown how they are de-dramatized as part of the leadership branding project, indexing the genre’s transition from a homespun to a corporate medium and echoing the notion of media re-colonization. This article reports on a case study of the use of questions in a single entrepreneur’s six-episode podcast series. We set out to identify and analyse what we see as ‘re-dramatization’ strategies, creating a sense of interaction and heteroglossia in what is essentially a monologue. Next, triangulating with insights from multimodal discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography, our analysis points to ventriloquation. Through questions that are presented as reported (i.e. referring back to questions that were raised on some earlier occasion), the entrepreneur makes himself or others say something, staging a specific past situation (real or imagined) where questions were asked and thus creating an enhanced sense of author-ity. As for questions that are presented as asked at the moment of speaking (we call them direct questions), the results of our inquiry indicate that the entrepreneur is ventriloquating either what he believes the listener might want to ask him or what he himself was previously asked by the podcast producer. We suggest that the entrepreneur is accommodating more actively to his listenership than it seems at first sight and conclude by reflecting on how this sheds new light on the entrepreneurial podcast as a tool of leadership communication as part of the wider digital mediascape, on the interactive use of questions in general and on the potential of our multi-method approach.