CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Orientation
The present study investigates the entrepreneurial image of Steve Jobs through a multimodal discourse analysis of the video data based on MMA Video software. More specifically it attempts (1) to examine Jobs’s entrepreneurial image by analyzing the gesture elements and speech elements in the third-party data and primal data, which accordingly construct the image that is reproduced by the third-party media and the one that is produced by Jobs himself; and (2) to interpret Jobs’s image from the perspective of American national culture, American business culture and Jobs’s personal culture.
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1.2 Rationale
If we compare a company to a sailing ship, the entrepreneur is the captain who takes the command and decides where to sail. The whole crew’s well-being is to a great extent depending on the smart decisions of the captain. The importance of business leaders, in many cases CEOs, to the public relations function and to organizational image is widely acknowledged (Park and Berger 2004). Business leaders are rarely observed and described as individuals per se but are seen as representatives or personifications of the corporations to internal and external stakeholders. The image of an excellent entrepreneur helps to build a positive image of a company which goes on to affect customer evaluation of the brand or products the company owns. The current era sees a rapid development of mass media and ever-increasing potency of public opinion, and the effect and impact of leaders’ public image are thus becoming more and more significant, making its construction and communication a highly meaningful research topic for both theory and practice. Jobs, former CEO and one of the founders of Apple Inc., was widely recognized as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Under his leadership, Apple has grown from a startup company in a garage eventually to one of the most valuable companies in the world. Apple products have huge numbers of fans around the world. Customers are crazy about the aesthetic beauty and technology incorporated in their products, which coincide perfectly with the vision Jobs has in his products—”the intersection of the arts and technology” (Isaacson 2011: 44). Every time they launch a new product, tremendous attention from the mass media, customers, and even the whole industry are aroused. Customers line up all night just to be the first ones getting their hands on Apple’s new products. Apple seems to amaze the whole world and raise the bar of the whole industry every time they have something new coming along. Jobs, like a spiritual guide of Apple, has a decisive influence on Apple’s corporate culture. Without Jobs’s leadership, Apple might have fallen in the 1990s when it suffered severe crisis, let alone the glory it has achieved today.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
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