Textual Agency: How Texts Do Things in Organizational Settings
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on organizational discourse typically reduces it to what members do when producing and using texts in organizational contexts, but fails to recognize that texts, on their own, also seem to make a difference. This essay shows that one way to approach discourse is to analyze the active contribution of texts (especially, but not only, documents) to organizational processes, that is, to what extent texts such as reports, contracts, memos, signs, or work orders can be said to be performing something. After reviewing what other scholars have been saying on the question of textual agency, I show how it is possible to ascribe to texts the capacity of doing something without falling into some modern form of animism. Having done that, I explore systematically the different types of action that texts can be said to be performing by taking up Searle’s well-known classification of speech acts. This review then leads me to address questions related to the constitution of organizations, that is, to what extent this reflection on textual agency enables us to redefine the mode of being of organizational forms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it