Jones, N. N. (2017). Rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs: The business of race, agency, and cultural empowerment. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 319-349.

Jones, N. N. (2017). Rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs: The business of race, agency, and cultural empowerment. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 319-349. 

In this original research article, Jones aims to undermine traditional narratives of Black business owners as unsuccessful and parasitic on White entrepreneurs by interviewing Black business owners through a framework of cultural empowerment. 

"Drawing on the narratives of 12 black business owners, I examine how these particular business owners resist the damaging dominant narrative and perceptions about the weakness of and challenges to black entrepreneurship, creating viable rhetorical spaces for their cultural empowerment. I am not making large claims about the black community in general; instead, I am describing my participants’ lived experiences." That last part is the part I wanted. "I am not making large claims about the black community in general; instead, I am describing my participants’ lived experiences."

The 12 interviews is also comforting too. Maybe you should shoot for 12 just to feel better. 

Narrative as a tool. "Using narrative as a methodological tool (Boje, 2001; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and a viable site of study (Berkenkotter, 2008; Miller, 1994), I address the following questions: 

• How do black entrepreneurs leverage rhetorical agency and create rhetorical spaces for resisting the dominant negative discourse and perceptions about black entrepreneurship? 
• How do black entrepreneurs’ rhetorical narratives frame and influence their entrepreneurial activities?"

It's probably coming back to strategies again.

I'm not sure how the lit review is structured. Sure, there's a division between historical and contemporary approaches to and literature in Black entrepreneurship, which is below an unmarked section. But what does this history have to do with the results? and what is the unmarked section if not a review of contemporary entrepreneurship? Looks like it's Black entrepreneurship in the field first, or perhaps even in the academic literature. No, it's rhetoric, tech comm, organizational comm, etc. The current state part repeats the concerns of the intro: i.e., "But this dominant narrative is not fully representative of blacks’ experiences with self-employment. Further, the dominant narratives do not often celebrate the successes of black business owners."

The theoretical framework is made up of the concepts of "cultural empowerment" and "rhetorical agency." It looks like they're related temporally. "While rhetorical agency pushes us to think about possibilities for action, cultural empowerment provides a framework for considering both process and outcome." Possibilities seems first, whereas the other two seem to be derivative from that. Other frameworks would certainly disallow this temporalization of an essence (Burke), but I don't see anything to prevent it here. Just look at this. "Once rhetorical agency is enacted, the process of cultural empowerment begins with the desired goal of achieving cultural empowerment as an outcome."

"Kenneth Burke calls 'temporalizing the essence,' that is, placing first in time things that appear to us of first ontological importance. (Burke, 1966, pp. 9-13)." Or from the KB Journal: "The assimilation of Marx to Spinoza and Plato are both examples of Burke’s tendency to de-historicize—to essentialize the temporal rather than temporize the essential (see Trevor Melia’s “Scientism and Dramatism” in The Legacy of Kenneth Burke, edited by Herbert W. Simons and Trevor Melia, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, pp. 66-67)."

"Although there are multiple ways to enact rhetorical agency in order to promote cultural empowerment, I focus here on cultural empowerment in relation to being a black business owner in general and on four specific dimensions of cultural empowerment." Four. 

The particular. "the goal of narrative inquiry, as a method, is not to draw broad generalizations about phenomena based on the narratives of the participants. Instead, this method is meant to acknowledge the “power that a focus on the particular brings” (p. 22). In other words, embracing a narrative inquiry approach requires appreciating the specific and unique as an informative and valuable research focus"

"Essentially, “experience[s] can be studied as storied, lived phenomena as well as studied in the stories that one tells about the living” (Clandinin, 2007, p. xiv)."

"I used a thematic analysis with two levels of coding: themes across participants and within interviews"

"I asked participants to share a story about success in their business. I did not provide participants with a definition of success and avoided projecting my perceptions of success onto my participants."

"Cultural empowerment emerged as an overarching consideration across participants. Specifically, this code accounted for participants’ stories and discussion about how they perceived that culture or being black affected their business activities and goals."

The results section is organized into six sections--technically seven. If we think about it in terms of seven, there's the meta blurb; the part that sums up the findings in general (Cultural Empowerment and Black Business); the four themes (economic, community, legacy, social justice); and "Rhetorical Agency, Cultural Empowerment, and the pedagogy of the oppressed." The last section though is the implications really. In it, she situates the findings within what we might call critical race theory, although  ... No, not critical theory. Critical consciousness, yes. Cultural studies? No...  Critical pedagogy. That's it. 

So hooks and Freire.

This is really the call Jones responds to. "Clark (2007) called for the need for a more complex and culturally oriented understanding of empowerment narratives, pointing out that at the time, “responses to narrative have failed to adequately embrace the best of what we know about how information—texts, in a broad sense—is connected to more complex and localized distributions and applications of power” (p. 156). And while Clark examined empowerment narratives in regard to new technologies and organizations, his suggestion that culture must be addressed in relation to ideas about empowerment holds for the examination of empowerment narratives in other domains—for instance, entrepreneurship." 

62min

https://utexas.box.com/s/i64n5nlxdb3lxib2na6m8voqouwqpqi7