Organization and Management Theory OMT

Organizations Run on Talk — Dialogue Across Divides

Most research studies monologues. Five contributions on dialogue — racioethnic, functional, gender, network — and what's actually forged in the back-and-forth.

Chairs: Sheen S. Levine (UT Dallas & Columbia) & Sameer B. Srivastava (UC Berkeley) · Discussant: James A. Evans (Chicago)

Speakers: Burint Bevis (Imperial College) Grace Cormier (Harvard) Paul Green (UT Austin) Özgecan Koçak (Emory) Phanish Puranam (INSEAD) Yaoxi Shi (Imperial College) Margaret Shih (UCLA) Simon Siegenthaler (UT Dallas & NBER) Katherine Qianwen Sun (UCLA) Bart J. Wilson (Chapman) Lara Yang (Stanford) Matthew Yeaton (HEC Paris) Michael Yeomans (Imperial College)

Organizations run on talk. Yet most research on language in organizations studies monologues — texts, reports, speeches — rather than the back-and-forth exchanges where coordination, conflict, and belonging are forged.

This symposium turns the lens on dialogue itself, and specifically on dialogue across divides: racioethnic, functional, gender, and network-community. Five contributions combine laboratory experiments, field experiments, agent-based models, and computational linguistics to investigate how network interventions reshape belonging, how a brief linguistic intervention can unlock the economic gains of diversity, how shared communication codes emerge (and who adjusts to whom), why men and women perceive the same conversation differently, and how to measure the structure of speech acts in organizational talk.

If you believe that what people say to each other — not just what they say about each other — shapes organizations, this is your session.

📅 Mon Aug 3 · 13:30–15:00 · Sheraton, Seminar D 🔗 All sessions → https://l.sslevine.com/AoM2026