World Business Leaders’ Performativity of Twitter Language as Social Action

Abstract

This large longitudinal qualitative study advances the theory of leadership language in the digital era by investigating the power of performativity and social action in softening the bust and constituting the boom of the world economy. More than a million tweets were collected from Twitter accounts of 70 CEOs or/and Chairmen of major global companies who had a total number of tweets above hundred and a total number of followers between 10,000 and 50,000,000 on their Twitter. This represents the entire collection of CEOs tweets between March 2006 (when Twitter was launched) and August 2019. We used those tweets to extract over 8.5 million linguistic tokens to analyze the frequency of words and hashtags, networks of bigrams frequency, and sentiments. Our findings show a possibility that the performativity of those leaders’ language on social media contributes to taking the world economy out of one of the toughest economic recessions to a record-long economic expansion built on social media influence and influencers’ impact.