Abstract
While individual or collective actor’s role in entrepreneuring is widely established and studied, less is known about how texts, specifically multimodal texts that combine words and images, contribute to organization creation. In this study, we draw on the communicative constitution of organizations perspective to explore textual agency in the emergent process of organization creation. Incorporating insights from multimodality and organizational bullshit literature, we conceptualize multimodal texts as construction sites that organize the emergent new order of corporate venture units. We analyze the communicative practices employed in a corpus of multimodal texts containing 230 images and about 20 000 words, which address the corporate venture units of ten Fortune 500 firms headquartered in north-western Europe. In our multimodal analyses, we find that several communicative practices in the texts work together to organize those parts of the organizational reality of CVUs that are settled, as well as those that are still under construction into a loosely coupled system. We identify concretization, embedding, and ambiguity as central communicative practices in and through which texts communicatively constitute the organizational reality of CVUs.