Co-Construction of Shared Understandings Under Uncertainty: Computational Linguistic Approaches

Abstract

Stakeholders with different values and perspectives find it challenging to reach common understanding amongst themselves. Given the nature of pluralistic beliefs among various stakeholders that engage in interactions, the assumption that collective meanings emerge as a linear combination of knowledge by a set of actors is insufficient to understand how social understandings dynamically unfold over time through interactions. As such, the goal of this symposium is to showcase works that shed light on how different stakeholders dynamically co- construct shared meanings under uncertainty. The papers invited to the symposium study a wide range of contexts – entrepreneurship, organizational misconduct, and organizational volatility – under which it is crucial to construct shared meaning under uncertainty. Whereas it has been hard to study the concept due to the difficulty in measuring actual communication contents, the recent methodological advancement in computational linguistic methods enables us to accurately capture the communication contents and discourse patterns that underly the construction of shared meanings. The papers invited to the symposium employ a range of cutting-edge computational linguistic approach to understand the language in relational terms and to expand our understanding of the co- construction of meaning. Constructing New Valuation Metrics: Entrepreneurial Arguments in Nascent Markets Presenter: Derek Harmon; U. of Michigan Presenter: Eunice Yunjin Rhee; Seattle U. Crossing the Line or Creating the Line: Media Effects in the 2009 British MP Expense Scandal Presenter: Timothy Hannigan; U. of Alberta Shaping Community Discourse: Entrepreneurs’ Linguistic Divergence and Online Community Mobilization Presenter: Jamie Seoyeon Song; INSEAD The Negative Association Between Firm Performance Volatility and Norm Consensus Presenter: Matthew Corritore; McGill U. - Desautels Faculty of Management