A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups

Symbolic boundaries—the conceptual distinctions people use to differentiate themselves from others—are at the root of social boundaries—institutionalized forms of difference between groups. Yet, in many cases, the social boundaries between groups are breached, thereby amplifying the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries. Integrating two seemingly opposing perspectives on boundary maintenance, we introduce two conceptually distinct strategies that people pursue as they seek to maintain cultural difference: boundary retention—that is, entrenching themselves in pre-existing symbolic distinctions—and boundary reformation—that is, continually innovating new forms of symbolic distinction. Traditional approaches to measuring symbolic boundaries—interviews, participant-observation, and self-reports—are ill-suited to detecting fine-grained variation in these two forms of boundary maintenance. To overcome this limitation, we use the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to develop a novel approach to measuring symbolic boundaries based on interactional language use between group members before and after they first come into contact with one another. Specifically, we construct measures of boundary retention and reformation from a set of random forest classifiers that quantify group differences based on preand post-contact linguistic styles (as measured by the well-established LIWC lexicon). We demonstrate the utility of this method by applying it to a corpus of email communications from a mid-sized financial services firm that acquired and integrated two smaller firms. Our findings indicate that: (a) evidence of strong symbolic boundaries can be detected for up to 18 months after a merger; (b) acquired employees exhibit more boundary reformation and less boundary retention than their counterparts from the acquiring firm; and (c) individuals engage in more boundary retention, but not reformation, when their local work environment is more densely populated by ingroup members. We discuss how our conceptualization and measurement of symbolic boundaries can be extended to the study of culture in a wide range of intergroup contexts. ∗Corresponding Author: Anjali M. Bhatt, ambhatt@hbs.edu