The Network Structure of Organizational Vocabularies
- 26 September 2017
- book chapter
- Published by Emerald
Abstract
We study organizational vocabularies as complex social structures emerging from the association between organizational participants and words they use to describe and make sense of their experiences at work. Using data that we have collected on the association between managers in a multi-unit international company and words they use to describe their organizational units and the overall company, we examine the relational micro-mechanisms underlying the observed network structure of organizational vocabularies. We find that members of the same subsidiary tend to become more similar in terms of the words they use to describe their units. Members of the same subsidiary, however, do not use the same words to describe the corporate group. Consequently, the structure of organizational vocabularies tends to support consistent local interpretations, but reveals the presence of divergent meanings that organizational participants associate with the superordinate corporate group.This publication has 60 references indexed in Scilit:
- Knowledge Sharing in OrganizationsJournal of Management, 2014
- Local Structural Properties and Attribute Characteristics in 2-mode Networks: p∗ Models to Map Choices of Theater Events1The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 2008
- Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of Understanding on a Production FloorOrganization Science, 2003
- Varieties of Discourse: On the Study of Organizations through Discourse AnalysisHuman Relations, 2000
- Taking the Linguistic Turn in Organizational ResearchThe Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 2000
- Extracting culture through textual analysisPoetics, 1994
- Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural EquivalenceAmerican Journal of Sociology, 1987
- An approach for relating social structure to cognitive structureThe Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1986
- Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an OrganizationAdministrative Science Quarterly, 1984
- The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The Validity of Retrospective DataAnnual Review of Anthropology, 1984