In pursuing the project, I probed the problem of conceptualizing atypicality, as this concept was marked by considerable ambiguity in its theoretical underpinnings and inconsistencies in meaning across scholarly communities adopting different perspectives. For this reason, the first months of the project were devoted to a comprehensive review of the literature on atypicality, covering 129 articles that explored its sources, consequences, and boundary conditions within, across, and around organizations and market settings. Following this review, I developed an integrative framework that identifies three conceptual lenses through which atypicality can be approached: cognitive, normative, and innovative, each highlighting different notions and facets of atypicality.
The project then proceeded with its core objective: introducing an innovative computational approach to model two fundamental dimensions of narratives, namely their contextual embeddedness and their sequential unfolding. To this end, I used a topic-modeling approach to capture the extent to which narratives overemphasize elements widely diffused among other narratives within the same product category, and to explore how narrative conventionality impacts the reception of atypical producers. By analyzing over 80000 narratives of entrepreneurs selling their craft products on Etsy, I found that infusing narratives with conventional elements increases the likelihood that atypical entrepreneurs overcome the disadvantages they would otherwise face.
Following this study, I focused on narrative structure, developing an innovative method that combines word embeddings and sequence analysis to capture how different rhetorical sequences affect evaluations. As I was developing this method, I realized that the interplay between narrative content, structure, and underlying emotional currents plays an important role in shaping audiences’ responses to atypicality across the various settings I was studying. For this reason, I investigated how audiences react when atypical ideas are presented with an emotionally ambivalent framing, that is, one simultaneously expressing both positive and negative emotions. In my analysis of more than 4000 TED talks, I show that narratives are not only navigational devices to help audiences make sense of atypical ideas, but can also induce affective states that systematically shape evaluations of atypicality.
Finally (but far from exhausting an account of project output), leveraging the competencies I developed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, I was invited to collaborate on the development of a methodological template for the simultaneous analysis of visual and verbal data, which was then applied to the domain of creativity.
Over the past two years, research related to the project has been presented at 7 different academic events across Europe and the USA. Moreover, I have organized 2 academic conferences and 2 specialized workshops centered around language, with more than 250 scholars from all over the world attending the various events. Finally, this project has led to the publication of 2 articles in leading scholarly journals, and another is currently under review. Going forward, there are 2 more major papers in preparation for submission.
