Ethos-Based Entrepreneurial Framing: The Case Study of Alibaba’s Jack Ma

This paper examines how entrepreneurs at different levels of ethos alter their framing strategy to secure support from audiences, while making a claim of credibility or authority. We draw on the literature of entrepreneurial framing to analyze the rhetoric of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, under the low, medium, or high levels of ethos attributed to him. Adopting a mixed methods approach that combines topic modeling with qualitative evaluation, we found that, under a high level of ethos, Ma’s framing strategy is visionary or future oriented. In comparison, at a medium level of ethos, his framing strategy tends to focus on the current problem; under low ethos, he becomes more conservative and rule-following. Our central contribution is the development of a typology of ethos-based temporal framing by which entrepreneurs draw on the human experience of time to mobilize market and moral resources.