Language as a Window into Culture

What is it about?

Culture is assumed to play a pivotal role in organizational success and failure. In contrast to prevailing top-down perspectives, this article proposes an approach to studying culture that accounts for myriad organizational subcultures, how individuals fit into those subcultures, and the causes and consequences of shifts in culture and cultural fit. The language through which people communicate with colleagues offers a powerful lens for studying cultural dynamics and its relationship to individual, group, and organizational success. This article describes a burgeoning stream of research that uses language as a window into culture and discusses its implications for managerial practice.

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Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------ Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- The extant literature on organizational culture tends to take a top-down perspective—one that sees culture as unified, enduring, and resistant to change. In contrast, this article looks at culture through a different lens—one that starts from the bottom up and takes into account the myriad local subcultures that exist in organizations, how individuals fit into those subcultures, and the causes and consequences of subtle shifts in cultural fit over time. A core premise underlying this work is that the language through which people communicate with colleagues in an organization can serve as a powerful lens through which to conceptualize and measure how culture emerges and evolves. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- The use of language to measure different aspects of culture and cultural fit potentially has a wide range of applications in both the intra- and inter-organizational contexts. Linguistic analysis can place cultural similarities and differences into sharp relief and can be readily integrated into policies and practices related to hiring, workforce management, organizational restructuring, alliances, mergers, and acquisitions. ---------------------------- Author Perspective ---------------------------- Culture is one of the most important yet poorly understood and measured constructs in the social sciences. Although culture is assumed to matter for individual, group, and organizational success, it is exceedingly difficult to observe, means different things to different people, and has been only crudely measured—typically using surveys populated with pre-existing cultural categories defined by researchers. We believe that language provides a powerful new way to understand and measure culture.