Power and vulnerability: managing sensitive language in organizational communication
Patrick G. T. Healey, Prashant Khare, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Mladen Karan, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Matthew Purver · 2024
Read Power and vulnerability: managing sensitive language in organizational communication by Patrick G. T. Healey, Prashant Khare, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Mladen Karan, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Matthew Purver (2024) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-10922920.txt.
Description
Patrick Healey and eight co-authors study how rank shapes the use of sensitive words at work, in work whose text is dated 2023. Rank brings power, but it also brings watchful eyes. Those forces pull in opposed ways on whether staff use words tied to race, faith, or politics. The team mined a large set of work emails with standard word-count tools.
Senior staff used sensitive words about three times less often than junior staff. That care held whether or not peers used such words in the same thread. It also held whether or not the words sat in a touchy context. The authors say exposure and answerability, more than power, seem to tame word choice at the top.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Patrick G. T. Healey, Prashant Khare, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Mladen Karan, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, Matthew Purver |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2024 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 26 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |