The interconnectedness of the economic content in the speeches of the US Presidents

The speeches stated by influential politicians can have a decisive impact on the future of a country. In particular, the economic content of such speeches affects the economy of countries and their financial markets. For this reason, we examine a novel dataset containing the economic content of 951 speeches stated by 45 US Presidents from George Washington (April 1789) to Donald Trump (February 2017). In doing so, we use an economic glossary carried out by means of text mining techniques. The goal of our study is to examine the structure of significant interconnections within a network obtained from the economic content of presidential speeches. In such a network, nodes are represented by talks and links by values of cosine similarity, the latter computed using the occurrences of the economic terms in the speeches. The resulting network displays a peculiar structure made up of a core (i.e. a set of highly central and densely connected nodes) and a periphery (i.e. a set of non-central and sparsely connected nodes). The presence of different economic dictionaries employed by the Presidents characterize the core-periphery structure. The Presidents' talks belonging to the network's core share the usage of generic (non-technical) economic locutions like "interest" or "trade". While the use of more technical and less frequent terms characterizes the periphery (e.g. "yield" ). Furthermore, the speeches close in time share a common economic dictionary. These results together with the economics glossary usages during the US periods of boom and crisis provide unique insights on the economic content relationships among Presidents' speeches

Understanding participant actions in OR interventions using practice theories: a research agenda

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordPractice theory is a collective concept embodying a group of social theories that take practice, in other words actions, as the central focus of their theorising. In this paper we examine the intellectual development of practice theory, highlighting the importance of the key ideas that have shaped thinking on organisational activities and show their relevance to OR. In particular, we examine the social theories that OR researchers have adopted, what data was captured, and how it was analysed in order to establish empirical grounding in case studies involving workshops and meetings published by OR researchers. The cases thus provide a useful empirical basis for comparison to outline the prospects for the use of practice theories by OR academic researchers. Finally, we propose an agenda to advance the understanding of practice theories and their contribution to the theory and practice of OR