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

Mautner, G.; Learmonth, M.

doi:10.1177/1750481319893771

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

Mautner, G.; Learmonth, M.

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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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).