Dear colleagues, Curious about adding language to your analytical toolkit or adopting language-based research design? Join us at 8:00 am on Saturday, August 1 for:
PDW: Language and Management: Theory, Method, and the Implications of Generative AI
🗓 Saturday, August 1st 2026 • 🕓 8:00 am -11:00 am •
📍 Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown: Ballroom Level: Liberty Ballroom A
ABSTRACT
This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) brings together leading scholars to advance our understanding of how linguistic elements are mobilized, enacted, and transformed across organizational and institutional contexts. Language is both expressive and performative: it conveys meaning while simultaneously shaping the very realities it purports to describe. This workshop explores three interrelated dimensions: 1) the motivations that drive linguistic choices in organizational settings; 2) the carriers through which language travels, including texts, conversations, visuals, and increasingly, algorithmic systems; and 3) the methodological approaches scholars employ to capture and analyze language in research practices. A dedicated segment addresses the implications of generative artificial intelligence for both organizational communication and research methodology, examining whether computational approaches can capture the linguistic and semiotic operations that constitute organizational life or whether they risk reducing rich interpretive work to superficial thematic extraction. Through presentations, panel discussions, and interactive breakout sessions, participants will gain theoretical grounding in language-based perspectives, practical guidance for designing rigorous studies, and critical awareness of how technological transformations are reshaping both the object and method of language research in organizations.
We look forward to languaging about language with you!
------------------------------
Yuan Li
Professor of Management
Saint Mary's College of California
Moraga CA
------------------------------