Cutting-Edge Linguistic Methods: Taking Stock of Advances in the Study of Meaning Structures

The linguistic turn in management studies (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000) over the last 20 years has produced a surge of work analyzing discourse using a varied toolkit of concepts. A related thread follows the work of sociologist John Mohr (1998, 2013) in the systematic study of “meaning structures,” or the use of computational methods for studying meanings as structural phenomena (Ventresca & Mohr, 2002). Untangling and studying shared meaning is thus a central task for management research, across inductive, deductive, and abductive modes of inquiry (Edmondson & Mcmanus, 2007). Such advances in computational methods hold great promise for organizational theorists, psychologists, and sociologists in studying the complex, multidimensional data that represent language, practice and meaning. But since many of the promising methods have been adapted from more technical and arguably atheoretical (DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013) disciplines, their direct incorporation into social science is fraught with technical challenges and theoretical complexities. We have therefore assembled a group of scholars to discuss and help elucidate the challenges and opportunities in this symposium.