Ambiguity as Opportunity: A Theoretical Model of Conspiracy Entrepreneurship

Abstract

We challenge the assumption that individuals strive to cope with ambiguity to move forward from it. Indeed, some sensegivers benefit from simultaneously facilitating and obstructing meaning-making to maintain people’s engagement in the sensemaking process. Specifically, we examine conspiracy entrepreneurship—constructing and exploiting a potential opportunity for commercial gain by crafting and disseminating a counternarrative to the official narrative of a negative public event while prolonging the audience’s sensemaking to preserve the opportunity over time. Through an inductive qualitative approach, we develop a theoretical model of conspiracy entrepreneurship. Our study, utilizing multimodal data sources, focuses on the 2022 Lafferty et al. v. Jones et al. court case, in which Alex Jones was sued by relatives of those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. We find that conspiracy entrepreneurship hinges on perpetuated sensegiving—a process whereby an actor continually introduces new cues and questions interpretations to shape and sustain others’ efforts to make sense of an event and prevent narrative closure. We elucidate how entrepreneurs can mobilize stakeholders through identity-based engagement sustained by ambiguity rather than alignment around a clearly defined outcome, and offer insight into how ambiguity can become a source of influence for actors who lack formal authority yet shape others’ sensemaking through communicative and socio-material practices.