Alert! Treating the language game in competitive interaction seriously
Khoa Ngoc Duy Nguyen, Tomi Samuli Nokelainen · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2021
Competitive dynamics research has recently conceptualized, in line with Wittgensteinian tradition, competitive interaction between rival firms as a “language game” – interaction in which speech acts play a visible and influential role. However, extant competitive dynamics research comprises two separate streams of research: the language game school which focuses on rivalry as verbal challenges and responses, and the traditional, theoretically more developed school which studies rivalry as an exchange of “concrete” actions while occasionally including a bulk “signaling” category for speech acts. Our purpose in this paper is to lay groundwork for rigorous and nuanced theorization about why and how companies use speech acts. We present an initial attempt to bring the language school of competitive dynamics research to an equal footing with the traditional school.