Past
Hierarchies of Meaning: Mapping the Semantic Architecture of Corporate Biodiversity Discourse
Date & Time
03/12/2025 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Fredrik Svahn
University of Gothenburg
Fredrik Svahn is Professor of Information Systems at University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on digital innovation in established organizations. He has established the Organizational Dynamics research group, which explores and applies computational approaches to studying organizational phenomena. The group employs machine learning, data analytics, and natural language processing to examine organizational transformation at scales and granularities that traditional methods cannot easily capture.
About the Event
Corporate biodiversity reporting is often examined through standardized disclosures, which can limit our understanding of how firms actually frame biodiversity in voluntary communication. This seminar presents an alternative approach by treating earnings calls as digital trace data and asking how their semantic structure can be modeled and interpreted.
Fredrik Svahn (University of Gothenburg) introduces a methodological framework for constructing hierarchies of meaning within corporate biodiversity discourse. In this session, he examines how small semantic units can be grouped into coherent clusters, how those clusters form higher-level themes, and how these layers together reveal the architecture of firms’ biodiversity talk across industries and time.
The seminar discusses the value of multi-level semantic modeling for identifying underlying logics, such as the emphasis on metrics over governance, and for comparing emergent discourse patterns with the expectations set by frameworks like the TNFD. The focus is on what these computational steps make analytically visible and how they support research on sustainability communication, institutional dynamics, and digital trace data.
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