Making sense of organization dynamics using text analysis

Abstract Being able to understand the implicit power structures and dynamics among members plays a crucial role for the management of the organization. This paper introduces a novel and comprehensive approach to analyzing organizational discourse data. The proposed approach provides a holistic view of the power structure implied by the communications. The paper contributes to the domain of text mining by integrating various text-mining techniques to demonstrating different aspects of a power structure within an organization. It also contributes to the domain of supply chain management by using the conventional communication discourse method as the guideline for the development of the tool. We applied the proposed approach to a seven-year collection of meeting minutes from a co-op and our findings were largely confirmed by members of the organization. We provide a roadmap of using the multi-aspect approach to analyzing organizational discourse data in supply networks.