Belinsky, S. J., & Gogan, B. (2016). Throwing a change-up, pitching a strike: An autoethnography of frame acquisition, application, and fit in a pitch development and delivery experience. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(4), 323-341.

Belinsky, S. J., & Gogan, B. (2016). Throwing a change-up, pitching a strike: An autoethnography of frame acquisition, application, and fit in a pitch development and delivery experience. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 59(4), 323-341.

This is an autoethnography where Author 1 was a member of a startup and Author 2 acted as a consultant. They use frame theory to study the genre of the pitch deck. 

The whole article is filtered through a baseball metaphor. So the entrepreneur is a pitcher and the audience is the catcher. 

Their literature review is pretty extensive. They draw on three main bodies of literature: "one pertaining to the framing of professional communication, one to the development of the pitch genre, and one to the framing of the pitch genre." OK, that makes sense. They have to synthesize multiple bodies of literature. If nothing else, they have to review all of the literature in tech comm on framing, then all of the literature on pitching, then it looks like any literature that happens to smoosh the two together. Oh, no, it's the popular literature. That makes sense. 

These are their research questions:

(1) How do pitchers acquire frames for pitches?

(2) How do pitchers apply frames to existing

pitches?

(3) How do pitchers gauge the fit between the

innovation, frames, and stakeholders?

To answer these questions, Author 1 took field notes and recorded herself pitching, although I don't know if she was pitching to anyone or not. Probably. Ok, no, it was live. And it looks like Author 2 was there too. He was in the audience and taking notes on the feedback she got. Looks like some of this was done over email too. And there were interviews. Ok, so Author 1 interviewed 25 people but didn't record them, which probably just amounted to her asking for feedback. There were artifacts too, but I don't see how that fits in--where was this? an accelerator? why are they circulating heuristics? 

So no, it was a non-profit. How is this even a startup then? Hacker Gals. That's the name of the non-profit startup. I wish we knew more about the startup itself.  

In terms of analyzing data, the task was to distinguish between frames and themes. This happened with the themes:

...we identified a set of preliminary themes that emerged from the field notes and focused on the what of Author 1’s startup—that is, what was occurring with the startup, what advice about the startup was being received, and what artifacts were being generated for the startup. (not my emphasis)

I also thought it was interesting that Author 2 and Author 1 read the notes in order to generate themes. 

They also used analytic memos as opposed to open coding, which I think Spinuzzi even mentioned at one point. 

It looks like they're following  Kuypers's recommendations from “Framing analysis” in The Art of Rhetorical Criticism. The latter says that you need to generate themes before locating frames.  "Frames are, in and of themselves, a communicator’s interpretation of a given theme; thus, the identification of themes allows researchers to analyze frames." Not really following here. Maybe it has something to do with the "what" from earlier. 

"both authors individually identified various “framing devices”—including words, metaphors, concepts, names, images, phrases, sentences, and sources—used by the pitcher and catchers in each transcript "

Ok. They never use the phrase inter-rater reliability but they frequently confer with each other. 

Looks like I pulled the trigger a little too early on that one. 

We triangulated data by constellating various data points. For example, a theme that emerged from the composition of the analytic memo (such as membership) would be triangulated against a cultural artifact (such as a business model canvas) and a piece of stakeholder feedback (such as a post-pitch question) to establish that the startup’s membership was framed as female—that is, regularly represented as “women” or “gals,” as will be discussed in the results below. Both authors analyzed data independently and then conferred with each other, discussing interpretive points and revising interpretations accordingly. While no measure of interrater reliability was taken, interrater agreement was achieved.

Oh wow, so they're not getting into the startup itself until the results. Makes sense I guess. 

OK, interesting. So it looks like Author 1 went through an accelerator and they recorded everything and brought Author 2 on only relatively late in the game. It also looks like this is a study in which they're trying to show development, as indicated by them saying that the what of the business didn't change but the how did--thus giving you the idea that you should make your RHE 309k course test students' arguments. 

Is framing linked to the how rather than the what?

It's also interesting in that Spinuzzi and I basically did what Belinsky and Gogan did, since the latter broke their results section up with frame, whereas the former did the same thing but with "strategies."

Who did the salience thing? The salience versus selection thing? Entman. 

In terms of frames, there are the 

• Problem/solution frame
• Narrative frame
• Space frame
• Community frame
• Hacker frame
• Maker frame
• Gender frame

Is a frame just a recurrent theme?

They model the seven themes using Entman in Fig. 1. I don't really get the distinction between salience versus selection yet. 

Actually, I think this selection versus salience thing could help explain what you're seeing with the distinction between problem and opportunity. Problem could be there but not salient, whereas it's salient if it's used as a headline tag or whatever. 

It's interesting then because if you look at fig 1, you see that community and gender weren't emphasized at the beginning, but they became prominent later on, after she received feedback. 

Frame acquisition relates to a RQ. So I guess what frames are there? wasn't a RQ. 

The whole frame acquisition thing is also interesting because that's kind of what you're doing with your dissertation pretty much. Where did these elements come from? Where did this form originate from?

The whole frame stacking and/or selection thing also resonates with Baehr and Loomis, who talk about the different kinds of stories you can tell. 

"Author 1’s decision to give less emphasis to the problem-solution frame and more to other frames was a critical strategic decision that pushed back against the unquestioned endorsement of the problem-solution frame in the literature [5], [6]" Yes. I was thinking the same thing. 

Interesting. Then they say that de-emphasizing the problem/solution frame wasn't received well by all audiences. They were also male, which is also interesting. 

Fig 2 is def recalling applying the OOW framework in the Xville study. 

https://utexas.box.com/s/mmgx49oozevgegx1u5mrt85s0n3v2nh7