The role of cunning misrepresentations in entrepreneurial impression management

This paper develops a dramaturgical theory of cunning misrepresentations, an important but previously unexplored aspect of entrepreneurial impression management. By cunning misrepresentations, we refer not to illegal activities such as fraud or corruption but rather impressions constructed during everyday interactions that actors (and their performance team) know to be false or misleading, such as small exaggerations, white lies or tall stories. We examine three vignettes from an ethnographic study of small business owners. Our analysis reveals three types of cunning misrepresentation: pretending, exaggerating and embellishing. We outline the contribution of our theory of cunning misrepresentations for the study of everyday entrepreneurial impression management and discussing the methodological implications of studying the relationship between the frontstage (when the audience is present) and the backstage (when the audience is absent).