The identity of social impact venture capitalists: exploring social linguistic positioning and linguistic distinctiveness through text mining

Laura Toschi, Elisa Ughetto and Andrea Fronzetti Colladon ()
Additional contact information
Laura Toschi: University of Bologna
Elisa Ughetto: Politecnico di Torino & Bureau of Entrepreneurial Finance
Andrea Fronzetti Colladon: University of Perugia

Small Business Economics, 2023, vol. 60, issue 3, No 18, 1249-1280

Abstract: Abstract Impact investing is gaining momentum as an investment practice that optimizes both financial and social outcomes. However, the market is still in its emerging stage, and there is ambiguity regarding the definition of players and practices. In this paper, we adopt an investor identity perspective and use a linguistic approach to explore how social impact venture capitalists (SIVCs) communicate their identities and actions to their external stakeholders. Through a text mining analysis of the websites of 195 investors worldwide, our results reveal four types of investors who differ in terms of their social linguistic positioning and linguistic distinctiveness. Finally, by training a tree boosting machine learning model, we assess the extent to which the use of different linguistic styles is associated with website traffic.

Keywords: Social impact venture capital; Investor identity; Linguistic style; Text mining; Semantic brand score; Semantic network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-022-00655-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:60:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s11187-022-00655-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-022-00655-0

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().