[Excerpt] This paper is valuable to any social scientist, whether he or she studies culture or not, because it empirically investigates the extremely important question of the linkage of theory and practice. Barley, Meyer, and Gash are deserving of considerable praise for their effort to take the question beyond the realm of ideological positions, into the domain of testing patterns of change and influence. They employed an innovative methodology to compare the pragmatics (connotative meanings) of language usage in academics\u27 and practitioners\u27 articles. However valuable this methodology might be for subsequent research, I will concentrate on the results themselves, and use them as an opportunity to reflect on how organizational researchers do social science
