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From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing

Mautner, G.; Learmonth, M.

From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing Thumbnail


Authors

G. Mautner

M. Learmonth



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 to 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.

Citation

Mautner, G., & Learmonth, M. (2020). From administrator to CEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing. Discourse & Communication, 14(3), 273-293. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319893771

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 19, 2019
Online Publication Date Dec 27, 2019
Publication Date Jun 1, 2020
Deposit Date Nov 19, 2019
Publicly Available Date Jan 3, 2020
Journal Discourse & Communication
Print ISSN 1750-4813
Electronic ISSN 1750-4821
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 14
Issue 3
Pages 273-293
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319893771
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1277022

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Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (344 Kb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).





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