What the Language of Business Reveals About the Corporate Soul ...
Language reflects social reality. For example, the language of the Himba tribe in Namibia has distinct terms for various shades of green, because distinguishing between these shades is crucial in an environment where plants and their conditions are important for survival. Conversely, the Himba language has no separate words for blue and green—instead, a single term encompasses both colors, reflecting the lack of importance of this distinction in the daily lives of the Himba.
Language Adaptation
Language adapts not just to the environment but also to the specific situation: We speak differently to colleagues than to friends—more formally, more precisely, and leveraging industry jargon. But to what end? In other words, what does the language of business reflect about the social reality of corporations?
This article uses language to delve into the corporate soul. Finding it to be impoverished in certain respects, we discuss what has caused the narrow focus of corporations on the functional. Then, we explore how to reshape corporate reality toward the humanistic—which we show will be needed to unlock competitive advantage.
Peering into the Corporate Soul
To peer into the corporate soul, we analyze the frequency and relationship of semantic clusters in a representative set of texts from business and everyday life.
For everyday texts, we chose to analyze posts on the social media platform Reddit, as well as transcripts from shows and interviews on National Public Radio (NPR).
Across all texts, we collapsed the word variants down to their stems and then further grouped semantically related word stems together, leveraging a large language model supplied by OpenAI.
Language Analysis Insights
Our analysis reveals that the language of business is characteristically narrow—with the richness of the vocabulary in an earnings call being many times lower than in our proxies for everyday language.
Moreover, the language of business leans toward the functional—with terms revolving around strategy, management, financials, as well as leadership and innovation being significantly more common than in everyday language.
Meanwhile, terms related to the human experience are underrepresented in business language, relative to the language of our daily lives.
Historical Context
This narrow and functional language has its roots in the era of industrialization, which gave rise to scientific management. Standardization extended to the expectations the company had of its workers, reflected in language that would strengthen conformity and enable quick integration of new joiners.
In summary, this new approach to management prioritized the functional value of the workers over their broader human value.
Limitations and Consequences
Make no mistake: The introduction of scientific management was successful. However, scientific management also showed its limitations from the beginning, with issues such as employee turnover and absenteeism.
Today, with surveys showing consistently that less than a third of workers feel engaged at work, it seems that language plays a role in employee engagement. Firms whose language incorporates more terms associated with human values and emotions have more engaged employees.
