{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0268389662027833, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012922465208747515, 'mean_word_length': 5.008955223880597, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Reclaiming the Legacy of the Linguistic Turn

One of the major aspects of the more critical and philosophically grounded studies of organizations in the past 20 years has been a central interest in language and discourse. The so-called ‘linguistic turn’ is now taken for granted, but the phrase is used today often without much critical reflection and with little sense of the important change of direction that gave birth to the phrase. This I think is a mistake, and frequently leads to discussions and studies that yield little of the original insights that the ‘turn’ made possible. In my brief space here I will attempt neither a history lesson nor a philosophical reclamation. Rather I offer a story of the hope of the ‘turn’, its journey in organization studies and its ultimate demise as simply a road less traveled (for development, see Deetz, 1992, 2000a, 2000b; Deetz and Putnam, 2001; Deetz et al., in press). I will stay at the level of an overview, the advantage being to see directions and trends even if the cost is that specific qualities of some studies are not mentioned. My own hope is not to produce a sophisticated argument about what is the proper understanding of the ‘turn’, but to reclaim, and hold open for a moment, an important possibility. My underlying position is that the ‘linguistic turn’, like other historical attempts to escape subject/object dualism—the psychologization of experience and the pretense of natural objects—has frequently become a justification for new forms of subjectivism and objectivism. While the phrase suggested a particular relation of language to social/historical embedded ‘seeings’ of the world and every person’s situated existence, today it often merely justifies any interest in language and discourse (see Alvesson, 2002; Barker and Galasinski, 2001). My telling stays within the continental tradition, though I believe that a similar story is possible in both the British tradition following Wittegenstein and the American pragmatist tradition.