Abstract
Entrepreneurial pitching has attracted growing scholarly attention, yet most research enters the story late: at the moment of presentation rather than in the preparatory labor that precedes it. Drawing on an organizational autoethnography of pitch preparation in Central Asia, this paper opens the black box of pitching by tracing how three differently positioned practitioners – a marketing agency, a strategic consultant, and an economic anthropologist – co-constituted a pitch deck for a CSR project oriented toward an anticipated but absent bank evaluator. The paper proposes the concept of ‘valorization alignment’ to capture the project through which divergent evaluative logics are provisionally ordered within a shared sociomaterial artifact, held in justifiable tension, and oriented toward an anticipated external evaluation regime. Three tasks that structure the project are identified: anticipatory formatting (crafting for the absent), legitimacy re-weighting (negotiating internal credibility), and relational mediation (holding difference in tension). Extending Leins' concept of ‘narrative authority’ from a single professional community to a multi-practitioner constellation, and Boltanski and Thévenot's ‘sociology of justification’ from synchronic compromise to iterative, materially mediated process, the paper contributes to Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) by relocating the analytical site: from pitch performance to pitch production, thereby showing that entrepreneurial legibility is crafted internally before it is publicly enacted.