The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): I 635-G17. Dennis Jancsary, Renate Meyer, and Markus Höllerer wish to thank SCANCOR for providing an excellent working environment during their sabbaticals. Dennis Jancsary also thanks the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for its support. We are indebted to our editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their in-depth engagement with our ideas and their valuable suggestions.
This article develops the idea of 'interlinking theorization' in the context of management knowledge. We explain how management concepts are theorized through their direct co-occurrence with other management concepts, on the one hand, and their embeddedness in general business vocabulary, on the other. Conceptually, we extend a semantic network approach to vocabularies and suggest both cohesion between management concepts (i.e. a clustering in bundles) and their semantic equivalence (i.e. similar patterns of connectivity to general business vocabulary indicating specific types) as core dimensions of interlinking theorization. Empirically, we illustrate and further develop our conceptual model with data collected from magazines targeting management practitioners in the Austrian public sector. Our article contributes to existing literature by extending theorization to include different kinds of relationships between management concepts and focusing on direct and indirect relations across populations of management concepts as characteristics of the overall 'architecture' of management knowledge.Theorization, in its initial definition by Strang and Meyer (1993, p. 492), entails 'the self-conscious development and specification of abstract categories and the formulation of patterned relationships such as chains of cause and effect'. It creates generalized models constituted through language.
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