Join us for a hybrid event with Professor Lori Yue of Columbia University
Register at the link above!
About the Speaker:
Lori Qingyuan Yue is an Associate Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. Her research explores the dynamic interplay among business, society, and government, with a particular focus on how firms navigate contentious social environments and regulatory uncertainty. Recently, her work has examined how organizations—especially corporations—respond to the challenges of deglobalization and the global resurgence of nationalism. She has developed a theory of Organizational Nationalism and created a computational linguistic approach to measure firm-level expressions of nationalism.
Title: Organizational Nationalism and Computational Analysis
Authors: Lori Yue (Associate Professor of Business, Columbia University)
Abstract: The global resurgence of nationalism has challenged the neoliberal ideal of a borderless world, where the nationality of businesses would become irrelevant. While nationalism can foster social cohesion and drive progress, it also risks deepening societal divisions and inciting conflict—dynamics that organizations can no longer afford to overlook. In this talk, I introduce the theory of Organizational Nationalism (OGN), which repositions organizations not merely as passive recipients of nationalist pressures or geopolitical risks, but as active agents in shaping nationalistic ideologies, values, and policies. The OGN theory comprises three key components: (1) a four-dimensional framework capturing the core content of organizational nationalism, (2) four archetypes of OGN, representing its expression as either an organizational ideology or strategic orientation, and (3) the intermediary role of OGN in linking state-driven nationalism and individual-level nationalistic attitudes. Organizational nationalism can be empirically measured through computational linguistics, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). I will present the Corporate Rhetorical Nationalism (CRN) database, constructed using word-embedding models applied to Chinese publicly listed firms from 2000 to 2023. This dataset reveals a rising trend of nationalist discourse among Chinese corporations, supported by regression analyses that explore its drivers and implications.
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