Mautner, Gerlinde, Learmonth, Mark. 2020. From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing. Discourse & Communication.
BibTeX
Abstract
We explore the lexical choices made by authors published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), a major academic journal in business and management studies. We do so via a corpus constructed from all the articles published in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 up until the end of 2018. Specifically, our focus is on lexical items that represent social actors. Our findings suggest that, compared with earlier work, recent articles typically ascribe greater status and prestige to organizational elites. Relatively contemporary papers are also more likely to use language that obfuscates or ignores unpalatable aspects of organizational life, such as power asymmetries, hierarchy and control through identity regulation. We suggest that these changes in word choices can be understood to reflect a wider trend towards neo-liberal rhetoric – a rhetoric increasingly pervading contemporary social life more generally.
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Status of publication | Published |
---|---|
Affiliation | WU |
Type of publication | Journal article |
Journal | Discourse & Communication |
Citation Index | SSCI |
Language | English |
Title | From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing |
Year | 2020 |
Reviewed? | Y |
DOI | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750481319893771 |
Open Access | Y |
Open Access Link | https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1750481319893771 |
Associations
- People
- Mautner, Gerlinde (Details)
- External
- Learmonth, Mark (Durham University, United Kingdom)
- Organization
- Institute for English Business Communication (Mautner) (Details)
- Competence Center for Business Languages WE (Details)
- Research areas (ÖSTAT Classification 'Statistik Austria')
- 6604 Applied linguistics (Details)
- 6605 English language and literature (Details)