Entrepreneurial activity is inherently oriented toward the future, yet we know relatively little about how entrepreneurs enact the future in their everyday practices. To overcome this gap, this study focuses on entrepreneurial pitching as a situated site of future-making practices where entrepreneurs perform possible futures in the present. Through an ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis of 14 video-recorded pitches, the study explores how future-making practices are enacted through bodily movements, voices, emotions, artefacts, and interactions during live pitching. Four interrelated future-making practices are identified: (i) materialising futures, (ii) collapsing time, (iii) projecting momentum, and (iv) moralising futures. The study contributes to research on entrepreneurship-as-practice and future-making by providing empirical insights into how entrepreneurial futures are enacted and made recognisable and accountable in real time. The study also contributes to the growing literature on entrepreneurial pitching by theorising it as a site where socially available future-making practices are enacted. Finally, the study makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the value of video-based multimodal conversation analysis for capturing the embodied, material, affective and interactional nature of entrepreneurship practice in motion.
Jarrod Ormiston (Mon,) studied this question.