Studying Corporate Life with Diction

Between February 14 th and 16 th of 2013, some sixty scholars from a wide variety of disciplines includ-finance, and accounting came to Austin, Texas to exchange ideas about the language of institutions. Most of them had never met before and many had nothing in common except one thing – they had used the same computer program to do their work. The software they used, DICTION (www.dictionsoftware. com), analyzes large groups of texts and does so quickly, accurately, and reliably. In other words, these 50 carpenters had pounded on very different nails but used the same hammer when doing so. Their craftsmanship resulted in this book and its companion volume, Communication and Language Analysis in the Public Sphere. Bringing together such a diverse set of scholars is all too rare in academic circles. Most scholars stay within their own disciplines, talking to people with kindred backgrounds. But for three days in early 2013, things were different. The researchers represented in these two volumes listened carefully and respectfully to one another, disagreeing when disagreement was warranted but mostly they asked questions: What can language tell us about complex institutions? Why are some words repeated with special frequency within a certain era and within a given organization by some social actors and not others? Why are some words never heard at all until they suddenly become dominant, words like Enron, Obamacare, occupy, drones, and QE2? Do these sudden appearances tell us the world has changed? What about words that are used all the time, words like hope and jobs? What does it mean when such words suddenly increase or decrease in frequency? If people stop talking about jobs, does it mean that employment is now bountiful or that workers have lost hope? DICTION can easily detect which words are being used in day-today life but it cannot say why. That is the task of the authors in this volume. In an era featuring the World Wide Web, there are now available a great many programs for doing word searches. DICTION is one of the hardiest and simplest and has been in use for some forty years. Researchers using the program have been especially interested in complex institutions. They have treated DICTION's results as bellweathers to tell them which social arrangements seem to be unraveling and which seem newly emergent. There are other ways of measuring institutions, of course. One could track baseball …