Content analysis is valuable in organizational research because it allows researchers to recover and examine the nuances of organizational behaviors, stakeholder perceptions, and societal trends. It is also an important bridge between purely quantitative and purely qualitative research methods.
In one regard, content analysis allows researchers to analyze socio-cognitive and perceptual constructs that are difficult to study via traditional quantitative archival methods. At the same time, it allows researchers to gather large samples that may be difficult to employ in purely qualitative studies.
Although content analysis is increasingly used by management researchers as a tool to analyze text and qualitative data, many researchers are unfamiliar with the various content analysis techniques and how to deal with challenges inherent in its application.
These challenges include finding adequate measures, developing proxy dictionaries and coding schemes, working with texts from various sources, ensuring reliability and validity, and conducting manual versus computer-aided content analysis.
Goce Andrevski
Queen's University
Andrevski’s research interests include competitive dynamics, strategic entrepreneurship
and alliance networks. He uses a content analysis approach to examine competitive
aggressiveness and entrepreneurial behavior of firms over time.
Mike Bednar
University of Illinois
Bednar's research focuses on corporate governance and executive leadership. He has
used content analysis to measure the tone of media coverage and to examine how the
media can serve as a governance mechanism and in some cases, prompt firm action.
Jon Bundy
Arizona State University
Bundy’s research focuses on the social and cognitive forces that shape organizational
outcomes and behavior. He uses content analysis to study social evaluations, crisis
management, and organizational wrongdoing. His content analysis experience ranges
from simple hand-coding to advanced topic modelling and natural language processing.
David Deephouse
University of Alberta
Deephouse used content analysis to examine the social evaluations of business organizations,
specifically the legitimacy and reputation of Twin Cities commercial banks, the reputation
of accounting firms, and stakeholder-specific evaluations of Wal-Mart.
Joseph Harrison
Texas Christian University
Harrison uses content analysis to examine social and psychological processes among
top executives and corporate directors. His recent work has examined the tone of media
coverage as a form of social evaluation influencing directors’ reputations and decisions
to serve on particular boards. He is also using content analytic techniques to understand
how executives’ cognitions and personalities influence firm-level outcomes.
Tim Hubbard
University of Notre Dame
Hubbard researches social approval assets, Chief Executive Officers, and boards of
directors. He has used a combination of dictionary-based and machine learning techniques
to analyze rhetoric and discourse. His research has analyzed the content of press
releases, media coverage, conference calls, Facebook posts, and transcripts from various
experiments. His methods have used a combination of R, LIWC, and NVivo.
Candace Jones
University of Edinburgh
Jones’s research interests focus on cultural frameworks, cultural meaning and social
structures. She examines vocabularies to locate actors’ logics and cultural meanings
within professions and creative industries.
Mark Kennedy
Imperial College London
Kennedy’s research combines strategy and organization theory to understand how new
product market categories, organizational forms, and related social movements come
to be seen as social realities. He uses content analysis of media and online commentary
to analyze the emergence of shared understanding of terms used to refer to these important
social structures.
Jason Kiley
Oklahoma State University
Kiley researches firm perceptions and impression management are related to significant
firm outcomes and behaviors. His recent work uses content analysis for event classification,
impression management detection, and sentiment analysis.
Brayden King
Northwestern University
King's research focuses on how social movement activists influence corporate governance,
organizational change, and legislative policymaking. He also studies the ways in which
the organizational identities of social movement organizations and businesses emerge
and transform in response to their institutional environments.
Andreas König
University of Passau
König studies the socio-cognitive effects of top executives’ communication. He uses
various approaches of content analysis – from manual coding to deep learning algorithms
– to measure concepts such as metaphorical communication, leader humor, cognitive
frames, and the favorability of journalists and securities analysts.
Aaron McKenny
Indiana University
McKenny’s research using content analysis has focused on how researchers can use computer-aided
text analysis to measure organizational phenomena directly at the organizational level.
Moriah Meyskens
University of San Diego
Meyskens uses content analysis to analyze social ventures and corporate social responsibility
trends. Specifically she has used Nvivo and manual content analysis to evaluate the
profiles of social entrepreneurs and social venture business plans to better understand
their partnerships and resources used to attain a competitive advantage. She also
has content analyzed the websites of organizations to better understand their corporate
social responsibility practices.
Vilmos Misangyi
Penn State University
Misangyi researches how managerial and organizational actions influence and are influenced
by their external environments. He has used content analysis techniques to examine
the effects that charismatic language in organizational discourse (e.g., CEO vision
statements in letters to shareholders) has on external organizational participants.(e.g.,
securities analysts).
Paula O'Kane
University of Otago
O’Kane uses a combination of content analysis and grounded theory to explore the social
impact of computer-mediated communication on the relationships and communication between
employees within an organisation. Paula supports this through the use of Computer-Aided
Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). She also has a keen interest in examining
the impact of CAQDAS software within research projects.
Mike Pfarrer
University of Georgia
Pfarrer uses content analysis to examine external perceptions of firm actions related
to reputation, celebrity, and crisis management. His recent research has analyzed
traditional and web-based media accounts of stakeholders’ reactions to earnings surprises
and product recalls.
Nelson Phillips
Imperial College London
Phillips uses content analysis in research on organizational discourse, including
theoretical and empirical applications.
Tim Pollock
University of Tennessee
Pollock uses content analysis to investigate the social construction of markets and
the media’s impact on public impressions of the firm. Specifically, he has analyzed
CEO celebrity, earnings surprises, and the role of market ”experts” in shaping impressions
about IPO performance and survival.
Rhonda Reger
University of Missouri
Reger uses content analysis to examine external perceptions of firm actions related
to reputation dynamics. Along with Vincent Duriau and Michael Pfarrer, her paper exploring
the uses of content analysis in management research won the 2007 best publication
award from Organizational Research Methods. She first used content analysis in 1993
(with Marjorie Lyles) to study upward influence in joint ventures. Her recent research
analyzes traditional and web-based media accounts of stakeholders’ reactions to product
recalls and alternative energy.
Violina Rindova
University of Southern California
Rindova uses content analysis to examine patterns of organizational sensegiving and
media sensemaking. She has conducted both open-ended and structured content analysis
for theory development and theory testing.
Jeremy Short
University of Oklahoma
Short’s research focuses on multilevel determinants of firm performance, strategic
decision processes, entrepreneurship, research methods, franchising and family business.
Klaus Weber
Northwestern University
Weber examines cultural and institutional dynamics at the level of markets and fields.
He uses content analysis to identify repertoires of meaning (cultural toolkits), and
to relate these repertoires to social structures. He has used documents produced in
different languages by firms, financial analysts, movement activists and newspapers;
and analyzed them for sensemaking, framing and justification repertoires as well as
for associative meaning structures.
Miles Zachary
Auburn University
Zachary uses content analysis to investigate phenomena related to issues of organizational
identity and signaling by examining a variety of organizational narratives. His work
has focused on operationalizing constructs using CATA and testing the performance
implications of firm-level measures.
Anastasiya Zavyalova
Rice University
Zavyalova uses content analysis to study management of social approval assets, such
as reputation and celebrity. She specifically focuses on the process of social perception
management after wrongdoing. In a recent paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, Zavyalova employed manual and computer-assisted content analysis techniques in the
context of product recalls.
"Content analysis is a class of research methods at the intersection of the qualitative and quantitative traditions. It is promising for rigorous exploration of many important but difficult-to-study issues of interest to organizational researchers in areas as diverse as business policy and strategy, managerial and organizational cognition, organizational behavior, human resources, social-issues management, technology and innovation management, international management, and organizational theory."
from Duriau, Reger, & Pfarrer, 2007."Our use of advanced content analysis techniques to code affective content of articles and blog posts continues to extend recent organizational research on social perceptions management that recognizes the importance of trying to open the “black box” that is often present in strategy research."
from Zavyalova, Pfarrer, Reger, & Shapiro, 2012."Content analysis techniques can help bridge the gap between large-sample archival research, which may suffer from internal validity issues, and small sample research, which allows for the collection of primary data and in-depth analyses but may suffer from external validity problems. Analyzing the content of a firm’s press releases, media coverage, or stakeholder blogs can enhance archival research (which has been criticized for failure to provide insight into cognitive processes), while maintaining the advantages of using large samples."
from Pfarrer, Pollock, & Rindova, 2010.