Estrutura social, poder e linguagem: um estudo crítico dos CEOs das big techs

• Autor(a) principal: Ferratti, Gustavo Mendonça
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFSCAR
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufscar.br/handle/ufscar/19287
• topic: Estrutura social; Linguagem; Poder; Trajetórias; Capitais; CEOs; Big Techs; Social structure; Language; Power; Trajectories; Capitals; ENGENHARIAS::ENGENHARIA DE PRODUCAO

This doctoral thesis analyzes the intricate relationship between social structure, power, and language of the CEOs of the five largest information technology companies in the West, collectively known as the "Big Five." The research explores the social, material, and linguistic aspects that condition the actions of these agents, while also investigating the diversity of subgroups within such technological elite. The central theoretical premise is that language not only reflects external material reality but also actively helps to construct and transform it through a politically structuring narrative dynamic. The thesis contributes to the field of critical organizational studies, filling the existing gap at the interface of management and other disciplines as computer science and social sciences. It does this through three interdisciplinary and multiparadigmatic articles that use mixed methods and multilevel analyses. The first article is a computational experiment that harmonizes opposing epistemological perspectives in textual analysis, namely: text generation methods with positivist engagement and hermeneutic methods of text analysis with interpretivist engagement. The article proposes a dialogic approach capable of expanding the possibility of creative interactions between researchers and generative linguistic models. With a training corpus of heroic canons of literature, text was stochastically generated and analyzed through the lenses of archetypal theory and literary criticism. The experiment not only indicates the reproduction to some extent of archetypes present in the original literary texts but also suggests a generalist path for theorization and ideation processes in the humanities and social sciences. The second article, through Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, offers a critical analysis of the trajectories, relations, and capitals of Big Tech CEOs. In it, we analyze the objective relational structure of the CEOs through multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and the dynamics of position-taking in the field through the more subjective controversies of their public speeches, which are approximated by semantic networks and prosopography. The study highlights the distinction of the subgroups of Big Tech CEOs, revealing a highly heterogeneous corporate elite with varied ideological inclinations. It also exposes the complex power dynamics existing between members of this technological elite and the State. The third article investigates the narrative power of Big Tech CEOs on Twitter, mobilizing diverse linguistic perspectives from the currents of natural language processing (NLP), discourse analysis, and antenarratives. It thus uses more structuralist text analysis techniques, such as lexicometry and topic modeling, along with more hermeneutic and qualitative analyses such as discourse and grand narratives. The results reveal that such CEOs use Twitter to legitimize themselves in a space where their economic power is limited. They use a discursive strategy of a neutral-positive tone and accessible vocabulary to increase their popularity. Furthermore, the more powerful CEOs tend to address broad socio-political issues, while the less powerful focus on more technical and innovation aspects of their own company. We believe that the three articles, taken together, outline a novel approach to problematizing and understanding the relationship between social structure, language, and power. Additionally, the unusual combination of methods employed throughout the thesis may assist future researchers in carefully integrating disciplines that are somewhat hermetic today but whose interface has much to contribute to the analysis of different organizations and social groups.