The algorithm for articulating meanings of entrepreneurship as a social concept

Abstract

The development of social sciences based on positivism led to a multiplicity of social concepts’ definitions. The study aims to operationalize a constructionist approach to the formation of concepts’ meanings in specific place and time. The study used metadata of articles on entrepreneurship from OpenAlex with the “entrepreneurship as” search syntagm. The resulting sets of authors’ operational metaphors and analogies were analyzed semantically and contextually; social cartography was used to study the distribution of meanings within discourse. The results of the study are: (1) identification and schematic modeling of social concept`s sense as an outcome of discourse consolidation process through basic metaphor detection; (2) the notion explication and schematic modeling of the concept`s meaning as an interplay of complementary tensions within discourse; (3) the construction of a generalized model of articulation and dispersion of the social concept’s meanings based on the interaction of discourse’s metaphors and its tenseness.