Social scientists have recently started discussing the utilization of text-mining tools as being fruitful for scaling inductively grounded close reading. We aim to progress in this direction and provide a contemporary contribution to the literature. By focusing on map analysis, we demonstrate the potential of text-mining tools for text analysis that approaches inductive but still formal in-depth analysis. We propose that a combination of text-mining tools addressing different layers of meaning facilitates a closer analysis of the dynamics of manifest and latent meanings than is currently acknowledged. To illustrate our approach, we combine grammatical parsing and topic modeling to operationalize communication structures within sentences and the semantic surroundings of these communication structures. We use a reliable and downloadable software application to analyze the dynamic interlacement of two layers of meaning over time. We do so by analyzing 15,371 newspaper articles on corporate responsibility published in the United States from 1950 to 2013.
AbramsonCorey M.JoslynJacquelineRendleKatharine A.GarrettSarah B.DohanDaniel. 2018. “The Promises of Computational Ethnography: Improving Transparency, Replicability, and Validity for Realist Approaches to Ethnographic Analysis.” Ethnography19(2):254–84.
5.
AllisonSarahHeuserRyanJockersMatthew L.MorettiFrancoWitmoreMichael. 2011. Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
6.
AmableBruno. 2011. “Morals and Politics in the Ideology of Neo-liberalism.” Socio-Economic Review9(1):3–30.
7.
AustinJohn L.1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
8.
BailChristopher A.2014. “The Cultural Environment: Measuring Culture with Big Data.” Theory and Society43(3):465–524.
9.
BaumerEric P. S.MimnoDavidGuhaShionQuanEmilyGayGeri K. 2017. “Comparing Grounded Theory and Topic Modeling: Extreme Divergence or Unlikely Convergence?” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology68(6):1397–410.
10.
BergerPeter L.LuckmannThomas. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Press.
11.
BiberDouglasConradSusannReppenRandi. 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
12.
BiernackiRichard. 2009. “After Quantitative Sociology: Interpretive Science as a Calling.” Pp. 119–208 in Meaning and Method, edited by ReedI.AlexanderJ. C. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
13.
BiernackiRichard. 2012. Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
14.
BleiDavid M.2012. “Probabilistic Topic Models.” Communications of the ACM55(4):77–84.
15.
BleiDavid M.NgAndrew Y.JordanMichael I. 2003. “Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Journal of Machine Learning Research3:993–1022.
16.
BonillaTabithaGrimmerJustin. 2013. “Elevated Threat Levels and Decreased Expectations: How Democracy Handles Terrorist Threats.” Poetics41(6):650–69.
17.
BoyerRobertHollingsworthJoseph R. 1998. “From National Embeddedness to Spatial and Institutional Nestedness.” Pp. 433–84 in Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions, edited by BoyerR.HollingsworthJ. R. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
18.
BrammerStephenJacksonGregoryMattenDirk. 2012. “Corporate Social Responsibility and Institutional Theory: New Perspectives on Private Governance.” Socio-Economic Review10(1):3–28.
19.
BreigerRonald L.Wagner-PacificiRobinMohrJohn W. 2018. “Capturing Distinctions While Mining Text Data: Toward Low-Tech Formalization for Text Analysis.” Poetics68(1):104–19.
20.
BrillEric. 2000. “Part of Speech Tagging.” Pp. 403–14 in Handbook of Natural Language Processing, edited by DaleR.MoislH.SomersH. New York: Marcel Dekker.
21.
CampbellJohn L.2007. “Why Would Corporations Behave in Socially Responsible Ways? An Institutional Theory of Corporate Social Responsibility.” Academy of Management Review32(3):946–67.
22.
CarleyKathleen M.1993. “Coding Choices for Textual Analysis: A Comparison of Content Analysis and Map Analysis.” Sociological Methodology23(1):75–126.
23.
CarleyKathleen M.1996. “Artificial Intelligence within Sociology.” Sociological Methods & Research25(1):3–30.
24.
CarleyKathleen M.1997. “Extracting Team Mental Models through Textual Analysis.” Journal of Organizational Behavior Management18(S1):533–58.
25.
CarrollJohn A.2004. “Parsing.” Pp. 233–48 in The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, edited by MitkovR. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
26.
CarstensenKai-UweEbertChristianEbertCorneliaJekatSusanneKlabundeRalfLangerHagen. 2010. Computerlinguistik und Sprachtechnologie: Eine Einführung. Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag Heidelberg.
27.
ChakrabartiParijatFryeMargaret. 2017. “A Mixed-Methods Framework for Analyzing Text Data: Integrating Computational Techniques with Qualitative Methods in Demogra.” Demographic Research37(42):1351–82.
28.
ChenDanqiManningChristopher D. 2014. “A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser Using Neural Networks.” Pp. 740–50 in Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Doha, Qatar: Association for Computational Linguistics.
29.
CornelissenJoep P.DurandRodolpheFissPeer C.LammersJohn C.VaaraEero. 2015. “Putting Communication Front and Center in Institutional Theory and Analysis.” Academy of Management Review40(1):10–27.
30.
CornelissenJoep P.WernerMirjam D. 2014. “Putting Framing in Perspective: A Review of Framing and Frame Analysis across the Management and Organizational Literature.” Academy of Management Annals8(1):181–235.
31.
DavisGerald F.2009. Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
32.
de GeorgeRichard T.1999. Business Ethics. 5th ed.Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Press.
33.
de MarneffeMarie-CatherineMacCartneyBillManningChristopher D. 2006. “Generating Typed Dependency Parses from Phrase Structure Parses.” Pp. 449–54 in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Genoa, Italy: European Language Resources Association.
34.
DiMaggioPaul J.NagManishBleiDavid. 2013. “Exploiting Affinities between Topic Modeling and the Sociological Perspective on Culture: Application to Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Government Arts Funding.” Poetics41(6):570–606.
35.
DobbinFrank R.JungJiwook. 2010. “The Misapplication of Mr. Michael Jensen: How Agency Theory Brought Down the Economy and Why It Might Again.” Pp. 29–64 in Markets on Trial: The Economic Sociology of the U.S. Financial Crisis, edited by LounsburyM.HirschP. M. Bingley, UK: Emerald.
36.
EdelmannAchimMohrJohn W. 2018. “Formal Studies of Culture: Issues, Challenges, and Current Trends.” Poetics68(1):1–9.
37.
EderMaciej.2014. “Stylometry, Network Analysis and Latin Literature.” Pp. 457–58 in Digital Humanities 2014: Book of Abstracts. Lausanne: EPFL-UNIL.
38.
EvansJames A.AcevesPedro. 2016. “Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology42(1):21–50.
39.
FillmoreCharles J.1985. “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni Di Semantica6(2):222–54.
40.
Finkel, Jr.Trond GrenagerManningChristopher. 2005. “Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling.” Pp. 363–70 in Proceedings of the 43nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics-ACL 2005. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
41.
FligsteinNeilBrundageJonah S.SchultzMichael. 2017. “Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008.” American Sociological Review82(5):879–909.
42.
FlorianRaduIttycheriahAbeJingHongyanZhangTong. 2003. “Named Entity Recognition through Classifier Combination.”Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Natural Language Learning (HLT-NAACL)4:168–71.
43.
FranzosiRoberto. 1989. “From Words to Numbers: A Generalized and Linguistics-Based Coding Procedure for Collecting Textual Data.” Sociological Methodology19(1):263–98.
44.
FranzosiRoberto. 1990. “Computer-Assisted Coding of Textual Data: An Application to Semantic Grammars.” Sociological Methods & Research19(2):225–57.
45.
FranzosiRoberto. 2010. Quantitative Narrative Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
46.
FranzosiRobertode FazioGianlucaVicariStefania. 2012. “Ways of Measuring Agency: An Application of Quantitative Narrative Analysis to Lynchings in Georgia (1875–1930).” Sociological Methodology42(1):1–42.
47.
GeNiyuHaleJohnCharniakEugene. 1998. “A Statistical Approach to Anaphora Resolution.” Pp. 161–70 in Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Very Large Corpora. Montreal, Canada: The Association for Computational Linguistics.
48.
GeorgeGerardOsingaErnst C.LavieDovevScottBrent A. 2016. “Big Data and Data Science Methods for Management Research.” Academy of Management Journal59(5):1493–507.
49.
GildeaDanielJurafskyDaniel. 2002. “Automatic Labeling of Semantic Roles.” Computational Linguistics28(3):245–88.
50.
GoldensteinJanPoschmannPhilippHändschkeSebastian G. M.WalgenbachPeter. 2019. “Global and Local Orientation in Organizational Actorhood: A Comparative Study of Large Corporations from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology6(2):201–36.
51.
GriffithsThomas L.SteyversMark. 2004. “Finding Scientific Topics.” Pp. 5228–35 in Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.
52.
HißStefanie. 2009. “From Implicit to Explicit Corporate Social Responsibility: Institutional Change as a Fight for Myths.” Business Ethics Quarterly19(3):433–52.
53.
JockersMatthew L.MimnoDavid. 2013. “Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature.” Poetics41(6):750–69.
54.
KabanoffBorisWalderseeRobertCohenMarcus. 1995. “Espoused Values and Organizational Change Themes.” Academy of Management Journal38(4):1075–104.
55.
KahlSteven J.GrodalStine. 2016. “Discursive Strategies and Radical Technological Change: Multilevel Discourse Analysis of the Early Computer (1947–1958).” Strategic Management Journal37(1):149–66.
56.
KangNaheeMoonJeremy. 2012. “Institutional Complementarity between Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Three Capitalisms.” Socio-Economic Review10(1):85–108.
57.
KaplanRami. 2015. “Who Has Been Regulating Whom, Business or Society? The Mid-20th-century Institutionalization of ‘Corporate Responsibility’ in the USA.” Socio-Economic Review13(1):125–55.
58.
KennedyMark T.2008. “Getting Counted: Markets, Media, and Reality.” American Sociological Review73(2):270–95.
59.
KhaireMuktiWadhwaniR. Daniel. 2010. “Changing Landscapes: The Construction of Meaning and Value in a New Market Category—Modern Indian Art.” Academy of Management Journal53(6):1281–304.
60.
KirchnerCorinneMohrJohn W. 2010. “Meanings and Relations: An Introduction to the Study of Language, Discourse and Networks.” Poetics38(6):555–66.
61.
KobourovStephen G.2012. “Spring Embedders and Force Directed Graph Drawing Algorithms.” ArXiv (1201.3011):1–23.
62.
KrippendorffKlaus. 2004. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
63.
LangackerRonald W.1986. “An Introduction to Cognitive Grammar.” Cognitive Science10(1):1–40.
64.
LangleyPat. 1996. Elements of Machine Learning. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
65.
LasswellHarold D.LernerDanielde Sola PoolIthiel. 1952. The Comparative Study of Symbols. An Introduction. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
66.
LeeHeeyoungChangAngelPeirsmanYvesChambersNathanaelSurdeanuMihaiJurafskyDaniel. 2013. “Deterministic Coreference Resolution Based on Entity-Centric, Precision-Ranked Rules.” Computational Linguistics39(4):885–916.
67.
LeeMonicaLevi MartinJohn. 2015. “Coding, Counting and Cultural Cartography.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology3(1):1–33.
68.
LehmannJensIseleRobertJakobMaxJentzschAnjaKontokostasDimitrisMendesPablo N.HellmannSebastianMorseyMohamedvan KleefPatrickAuerSorenBizerChristian. 2015. “DBpedia—A Large-Scale, Multilingual Knowledge Base Extracted from Wikipedia.” Semantic Web6(2):167–95.
69.
MaignanIsabelleRalstonDavid A. 2002. “Corporate Social Responsibility in Europe and the U.S.: Insights from Businesses’ Self-Presentations.” Journal of International Business Studies33(3):497–514.
70.
MalsbergerJohn W.MarshallJames N., eds. 2009. The American Economic History Reader. New York: Routledge.
71.
ManningChristopher D.BauerJohnFinkelJennyBethardSteven J.SurdeanuMihaiMcCloskyDavid. 2014. “The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit.” Pp. 55–60 in Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
72.
ManningChristopher D.SchützeHinrich. 2000. Foundations of Natural Language Processing. 4th ed.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
73.
MarensRichard. 2012. “Generous in Victory? American Managerial Autonomy, Labour Relations and the Invention of Corporate Social Responsibility.” Socio-Economic Review10(1):59–84.
74.
MattenDirkMoonJeremy. 2008. “‘Implicit’ and ‘Explicit’ CSR: A Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Understanding of Corporate Social Responsibility.” Academy of Management Review33(2):404–24.
75.
MatthewsPeter H.1981. Syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
76.
McCormickTyler H.LeeHedwigCesareNinaShojaieAliSpiroEmma S. 2017. “Using Twitter for Demographic and Social Science Research: Tools for Data Collection and Processing.” Sociological Methods & Research46(3):390–421.
77.
McWilliamsAbagailSiegelDonald. 2001. “Corporate Social Responsibility: A Theory of the Firm Perspective.” Academy of Management Review26(1):117–27.
78.
Mel’čukIgor A.1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. Albany: SUNY Press.
79.
MeyerJohn W.PopeShawnIsaacsonAndrew. 2015. “Legitimating the Transnational Corporation in a Stateless World Society.” Pp. 27–72 in Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World, edited by TsutsuiK.LimA. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
80.
MeyerRenate E.HöllererMarkus A. 2010. “Meaning Structures in a Contested Issue Field: A Topographic Map of Shareholder Value in Austria.” Academy of Management Journal53(6):1241–62.
81.
MitchellTom. 1997. Machine Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill Book.
82.
MitkovRuslan, ed. 2004. “Anaphora Resolution.” Pp. 266–83 in The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
83.
MohrJohn W.1998. “Measuring Meaning Structures.” Annual Review of Sociology24(1):345–70.
84.
MohrJohn W.BogdanovPetko. 2013. “Introduction Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter.” Poetics41(6):545–69.
85.
MohrJohn W.Wagner-PacificiRobinBreigerRonald L. 2015. “Toward a Computational Hermeneutics.” Big Data & Society2(2):1–8.
86.
MohrJohn W.Wagner-PacificiRobinBreigerRonald L.BogdanovPetko. 2013. “Graphing the Grammar of Motives in National Security Strategies: Cultural Interpretation, Automated Text Analysis and the Drama of Global Politics.” Poetics41(6):670–700.
MullerMichaelGuhaShionBaumerEric P. S.MimnoDavidShamiN. Sadat. 2016. “Machine Learning and Grounded Theory Method.” Pp. 3–8 in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work—GROUP ‘16. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery.
NederhofMark-JanSattaGiorgia. 2013. “Theory of Parsing.” Pp. 105–30 in The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, edited by ClarkA.FoxC.LappinS. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
PalmerIanKabanoffBorisDunfordRichard. 1997. “Managerial Accounts of Downsizing.” Journal of Organizational Behavior18(1):623–39.
93.
PedersenOve K.2010. “Institutional Competitiveness: How Nations Came to Compete.” Pp. 625–58 in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis, edited by MorganG.CampbellJ. L.CrouchC.PedersenO. K.WithleyR. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
94.
PhillipsNelsonLawrenceThomas B.HardyCynthia. 2004. “Discourse and Institutions.” Academy of Management Review29(4):636–52.
95.
PoolIthiel de Sola. 1959. Trends in Content Analysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
96.
PoppingRoel. 2012. “Qualitative Decisions in Quantitative Text Analysis Research.” Sociological Methodology42(1):88–90.
97.
PoppingRoelRobertsCarl W. 2015. “Semantic Text Analysis and the Measurement of Ideological Developments within Fledgling Democracies.” Social Science Information54(1):23–37.
98.
PunyakanokVasinRothDanYihWen-tau. 2008. “The Importance of Syntactic Parsing and Inference in Semantic Role Labeling.” Computational Linguistics34(2):257–87.
99.
RobertsCarl W.1989. “Other Than Counting Words: A Linguistic Approach to Content Analysis.” Social Forces68(1):147–77.
100.
RobertsCarl W.2000. “A Conceptual Framework for Quantitative Text Analysis: On Joining Probabilities and Substantive Inferences about Texts.” Quality & Quantity34(3):259–74.
101.
RobertsCarl W.ZuellCorneliaLandmannJulianeWangYong. 2010. “Modality Analysis: A Semantic Grammar for Imputations of Intentionality in Texts.” Quality and Quantity44(2):239–57.
102.
RuleAlixCointetJean-PhilippeBearmanPeter S. 2015. “Lexical Shifts, Substantive Changes, and Continuity in State of the Union Discourse, 1790–2014.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences112(35):10837–44.
103.
SantoriniBeatrice. 1990. Part of Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
104.
ShamirRonen. 2011. “Socially Responsible Private Regulation: World-Culture or World-Capitalism?” Law and Society Review45(2):313–36.
105.
ShortJeremy C.BrobergJ. ChristianBrighamKeith H. 2010. “Construct Validation Using Computer-Aided Text Analysis (CATA).” Organizational Research Methods13(2):320–47.
106.
SimmonsBeth A.DobbinFrankGarrettGeoffrey. 2006. “Introduction: The International Diffusion of Liberalism.” International Organization60(4):781–810.
107.
StreeckWolfgang. 2014. “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review87(1):35–64.
108.
SudhaharSaatvigade FazioGianlucaFranzosiRobertoCristianiniNello. 2013. “Network Analysis of Narrative Content in Large Corpora.” Natural Language Engineering21(1):81–112.
109.
SuttonCharlesMcCallumAndrew. 2006. “An Introduction to Conditional Random Fields for Relational Learning.” Pp. 1–35 in Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning, edited by GetoorL.TaskarB. Cambridge, UK: MIT Press.
110.
ToutanovaKristinaKleinDanManningChristopher D. 2003. “Feature-Rich Part-of-Speech Tagging with a Cyclic Dependency Network.” Pp. 252–59 in Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology (NAACL). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
111.
TrostHarald. 2004. “Morphology.” Pp. 25–47 in The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, edited by MitkovR. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
112.
TsurOrenCalacciDanLazerDavid. 2015. “A Frame of Mind: Using Statistical Models for Detection of Framing and Agenda Setting Campaigns.” Pp. 1629–38 in Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
113.
van AtteveldtWouterKleinnijenhuisJanRuigrokNel. 2008. “Parsing, Semantic Networks, and Political Authority: Using Syntactic Analysis to Extract Semantic Relations from Dutch Newspaper Articles.” Political Analysis16(4):428–46.
114.
VicariStefania. 2010. “Measuring Collective Action Frames: A Linguistic Approach to Frame Analysis.” Poetics38(5):504–25.
115.
VidalMatt. 2011. “Reworking Postfordism: Labor Process Versus Employment Relations.” Sociology Compass5(4):273–86.
116.
VidalMatt. 2013. “Postfordism as a Dysfunctional Accumulation Regime: A Comparative Analysis of the USA, the UK and Germany.” Work, Employment and Society27(3):451–71.
117.
VossenPiek. 2004. “Ontologies.” Pp. 464–82 in The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, edited by MitkovR. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
118.
VoutilainenAtro. 2004. “Part of Speech Tagging.” Pp. 219–32 in The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, edited by MitkovR. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
119.
Wagner-PacificiRobinMohrJohn W.BreigerRonald L. 2015. “Ontologies, Methodologies, and New Uses of Big Data in the Social and Cultural Sciences.” Big Data & Society2(2):1–11.
120.
WassermanStanleyFaustKatherine. 1999. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
