Language and Organizations

Conceptual Overview

In the humanities and social sciences, the 20th century heralded a radical departure from views of language as a simple mirror of nature. Traditionally, language was seen as a passive descriptor of objects that preexist the development of appropriate labels to facilitate effective communication about them. Language from this viewpoint is “true” when it correctly reflects reality and “false” when it does not; reality is always the arbiter of claims to truth.

A number of philosophers spent considerable time and effort developing philosophical frameworks that explained this relation of language and reality. This view arguably reached its zenith with the development of logical positivism by the group of European philosophers often referred to as the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. Work in this vein also led to the perspective that has had perhaps the greatest impact on social science of any work in philosophy of science, Karl Popper's work on falsificationism.

The postwar era saw a decisive shift in focus with language increasingly seen as performing a very different role: Rather than just reflecting a preexisting reality, it began to be understood to have a profound role in the production of social reality. From this point of view, humans do not encounter a preorganized reality to which they attach labels but rather actively construct reality through meaningful interaction. Meaningfulness is a characteristic of human interaction, not a characteristic of reality itself. This change in perspective in Western philosophy, which subsequently swept across the humanities and social sciences more broadly, has come to be known as the linguistic turn. This fundamental change in understanding initiated a new era in the humanities and social sciences in which social reality is increasingly understood as being dynamically constructed through the production of texts that are themselves subject to a constant process of mediation and negotiation.

The work of linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein played a key role in this radical shift. Of particular note is his seminal volume Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in German in 1953. In it, he addresses the conceptual complexity of language and semantics. Wittgenstein engages the reader in a series of “thought experiments” through which he shows that linguistic meaning and definition are inherently variable and socially constructed. Other important, early works that highlight the role of language as constitutive of social reality include writings by Alfred Shutz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and Peter Winch. All of these writers continued the development of a theory of social construction based on this new view of language.

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