When Corporations Are People: Agent Talk and the Development of Organizational Actorhood, 1890–1934

Research in organizational theory takes as a key premise the notion that organizations are “actors.” Organizational actorhood, or agency, depends, in part, on how external audiences perceive organizations. In other words, organizational agency requires that external audiences take organizations to be agents. Yet little empirical research has attempted to measure these attributions: when do audiences assume that organizations are agents and how have these attributions changed over time? In this article, I suggest that scholars can triangulate across computational methods—including named entity recognition, dependency parsing, topic models, and dictionary methods—to analyze attributions of agency in text, discourse that I term “agent talk.” I demonstrate the utility of this approach by analyzing how business organizations were discussed as agents during a key period of organizational development, the turn of the twentieth century. Analyzing articles from two of the leading national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, I examine agent talk in everyday business discourse. I find that agent talk generally increased over the early twentieth century, as organizations were depicted as active subjects in text and personified as speakers. Moreover, I find that this discourse was concentrated in social and legal semantic contexts: in particular, contexts relating to labor, regulation, and railroads. Finally, I show the uneven growth of this rhetoric over time, as organizations across different semantic arenas were personified as speakers. Overall, these results show how measures of discourse can provide a window into how and when audiences endow organizations with actorhood.