Projecting Agency: The Conversion of Power and Performative Pressure into Language

Strategy & Business Policy

Speaker: Oscar Stuhler

Professor - Northwestern University

Conference  Jouy-en-Josas / room meeting S219

Abstract: 

Language is a primary vehicle through which power differentials between individuals are expressed and reproduced in social life. Whereas prevailing accounts focus on stable dispositions that emerge from enduring positions in social structure and yield between-person linguistic differences, we instead develop a theory of within-person variation in the conversion of power into language across different contexts. Taking a constructivist approach to displays of power, we focus on individuals' attempts to manage others' impressions of their power through projections of individual agency. We theorize that such agency projections increase with structural power and audience characteristics that amplify performative pressure, while they decrease with contextual power — an individual’s power relative to others in an ephemeral social encounter. Applying the tools of computational linguistics to a corpus of 16.6 million Slack messages in a work organization, we find support for our theory. Supplemental analyses suggest that positive deviations from normative expectations of agency projection can have advantageous consequences for individual attainment. (co-authored with Sameer B. Srivastava and Yutao Chen)