About the case: Female entrepreneurs play a significant role in new business creation, yet women's entrepreneurship stories remain largely absent in professional communication research. Therefore, a need exists to “give voice” to female entrepreneurship stories, and this exploratory case examines the unique identities that three female entrepreneurs express in their narratives. This case asks how three female entrepreneurs reconciled the discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture to construct a unique entrepreneurial identity in their reflective narratives. Situating the case: Professional communication has only recently begun to explore entrepreneurship communication, and little of that literature explicitly investigates women's experiences. This case, by comparison, uses three conceptual categories-entrepreneurial identity, gender identity, and cultural identity-to explore how three women negotiated their workplace identities. Methods: We recruited three women who self-identified as technology company entrepreneurs, each from a different culture, and recorded their oral narratives about their entrepreneurial journeys. Three raters independently coded data drawing on dimensions extracted from prior literature to build “identity curves” for each narrative. Results: Analysis suggests that each participant negotiated discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture differently, with the greatest divergence appearing on cultural codes, and the least divergence appearing on gender codes. Conclusions: Based on these results, we suggest that future research should begin with the assumption that no single “entrepreneurial identity” exists for female entrepreneurs, and more broadly that professional communication research should foreground differences among individuals rather than attempt to aggregate individual experiences into homogenous characterizations.

Research problem: This study investigates entrepreneurship as a rhetorical practice and seeks to illustrate how narratives of individuals from different cultures create a discourse of entrepreneurship. We offer theoretical and methodological considerations for comparative international analyses in entrepreneurship research. Research questions: (1) How do the stories that are told by entrepreneurs from different cultures reveal their values? (2) What can those stories tell us about entrepreneurship in different cultures? Literature review: An emerging stream of authors proposes to study entrepreneurship from individual narratives, but studies on entrepreneurship rhetorics are scarce, seldom use an international approach, and rarely cover the cultural aspects. Methodology: We collected entrepreneurial narratives in the US, Spain, and China, and deployed a novel two-fold method to retain cultural nuances and validate translation accuracy. Narrative data were studied based upon the coding, constant comparison, and memo writing used in grounded theory. Results and conclusions: We identify three core metaphorical devices used by participants to structure their entrepreneurial journeys (action and learning, autonomy and money, and exceptionalism and networks), and we suggest that the use of these metaphorical pairs varies both within and across cultures. These findings offer preliminary evidence, for the first time in the literature, that building a rhetorical understanding of entrepreneurship requires that we consider two axes: the individual and the cultural.