Dragons’ Den: Enacting persuasion in reality television Antonio García-Gómez Departamento de Filología Moderna, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras – Edificio Caracciolos, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, c/ Trinidad, 3, 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain article info Article history: Received 7 June 2017 Received in revised form 25 September 2017 Accepted 29 September 2017 Keywords: Entrepreneurial discourse Persuasive practices Social influence tactics Reality television abstract This article aims to cast more light on how persuasive practices in business are enacted for an audience on television by comparing two versions of the television programme Dragons’ Den. The main objective is to examine different interactional features of the programme within a cross-cultural analysis. Drawing on data from the Spanish and UK versions of the programme, the present paper is placed at the intersection between routine and cross-cultural business practices on the one hand and reality based broadcast on the other. The results show that the analysis of the key structural patterns in exerting interpersonal influence makes it possible to measure the impact and effectiveness of specific social influence tactics in entrepre- neurial discourse. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper investigates how business persuasive practices are enacted for an audience in reality television. Given the complexity of persuasive effects and the identification of any particular persuasive tactic that is effective in all situations (O’Keefe, 2002), ‘‘persuasive practices” is used here as a cover term for any con- scious attempt by one individual to change the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour of another individual through communication (Perloff, 2010). As such, persuasion in general and business persuasive practices in particular are here understood as a psycho- logical phenomenon, which is inexorably bound up with language (Wilson, 2002). The interactional architecture of persuasion, argumentation, and manipulation has been approached from the adjacent domains of linguistic research as varied as rhetoric (Jowett and O’Donnell, 2012; Wallace, 1963; Warmick, 2007), discursive psychology (Billig, 1999), and argumentation theory (Toulmin, 1959; Eemeren and Van Grootendorst, 2004). More specifically, contem- porary approaches have started to realise that any form of commu- nication is persuasive insofar as it attempts to influence people’s behaviour and thinking (Díez-Prados, 2016; Díez-Prados and Cabrejas-Peñuelas, 2013). Drawing on data from the Spanish and UK versions of the TV programme Dragons’ Den, I take the prevail- ing persuasive feature of language use (Dillard and Lijiang, 2013; Tindale, 2004) and try to bring forth the interactive nature of persuasion (Antaki, 1994) in order to conceptualise persuasion as an analytical tool that can give an account of the way(s) persuasive business discourse influences people’s behaviour and thinking (Shotter, 1983) and determines interpersonal relations (García- Gómez, 2012). The structure of the present papers is as follows: I begin with a brief and necessarily selective review of the literature, focusing pri- marily on televised entrepreneurial discourse. This is followed by a discussion of the data collection. I then explore the (in)effective deployment of social influence tactics in the data. I conclude the paper with a summary of the key findings of the study and a dis- cussion of the implications. 2. Literature review 2.1. Media discourse: Televised entrepreneurial pitch The potential of discourse analysis in the study of entrepreneur- ship has been recently acknowledged (Ahl and Marlow, 2012) and, over the last two decades, a new and increasingly dominant gener- ation of entrepreneurship researchers has been trying to engage with entrepreneurship as discourse (Ahl, 2004; Bill et al., 2010; Stiff and Mongeau, 2003). These studies present entrepreneurial discourse from different and sometimes opposing angles. More specifically, most of these studies have attempted to broaden entrepreneurship research by including the social and cultural variations of entrepreneurship (Steyaert and Katz, 2004, p. 192). As a result, there is now a substantial body that conceptualises entrepreneurial discourse as a grand narrative (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004; Weiskopf and Steyaert, 2009) and focuses on the effects of ideological control in conventional entrepreneurial https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.09.014 2211-6958/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. E-mail address: antonio.garciag@uah.es Discourse, Context & Media 21 (2018) 1–9 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Discourse, Context & Media journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dcm