Author(s): Hasan Tutar / Language(s): Turkish
Issue: 3/2018
In recent years, there have been many studies in organizational behavior literature which are far away from scientific concern and conducted under the influence of management fashion and enthusiasm. In these studies, contextless rhetoric which is based on an arbitrary use, contrary to semantics and syntax, obtained by taking a word from its context and called as “metaphorical neologism” is used. Moreover, it can be argued that the presentation of these studies under the name of scientific activity does not mean anything other than wasting time and mind. The main purpose of this study is to problematize the “metaphoric neology” which is frequently used in the organizational behavior literature and to draw the attention to the risks of problems related to the interest in “saying new things” which is conducted for scientific studies and expressed as “neologism” in foreign literature. It is thought that the study will contribute to the fact that literature polluted by metaphorical neologisms which are contrary to the basic meaning and usage of language and far away from scientific concerns cannot have any contribution to scientific processes in general and to literature in particular. The main philosophy of the study is handled in an interpretative and critical manner.
“Neologism” is called as the production of rootless, careless concepts with the interest of fashion, enthusiasm and meaningless “drunkenness of innovation” which are contrary to the morphological and semantic structure of the language. While neologism sometimes adheres to the rules of conception production of language, these “new words” emerged as coinages or neologisms have some important problems in terms of morphological informational and semantic or morpho- semantics. These studies carried out on behalf of scientific activities do not contribute to scientific knowledge, literature and practice. The neologisms, which have no meaning in the word presence of the language and the factual world, threaten the organizational behavior discipline in terms of knowledge and the structure of language. In addition, researches which are fed to neologism in order to add scientificity to the process are supported by false causations and researches which do not go beyond stating the obvious have increased pollution in the literature.
Neologisms are the conceptions that are produced without paying attention to the harmony between form, meaning and non-language reality. Their production is not due to the need for new concepts required by scientific, cultural, technological, economic and social progress. In contrast, it is enthusiasm, fashion, or obsessive “passion for innovation”, an unquestionable childish enthusiasm for innovation. When metaphoric neologism is taken in terms of “Organizational Behavior”, “what” of “neologism” which in fact is not found in language and emerged as a result of the combination of word production with ignorant courage and fashion enthusiasm starts to be important. Neologism, an English word, is derived from Greek neo (νέο)) “new” and logos (λόγος) words, and in Turkish, it is expressed as new “word”, “derived word”, “innovation”, and neologism. Neologism, new derived words, are the words or phrases which are not yet fully accepted in the language but are new or try to find a place in language. The word neologism was used in French in 1734 as néologisme and in 1759 as néologie. The word was first recognized in the English language in the studies written in 1800 and the usage of this word as “neological”, “neologist” and “neology” was seen in these years. In Turkish language, this word was first used by N. Ataç in his work “Diyelim” written in 1954. The concept is relatively new in Turkish Dictionary. In the large Turkish dictionary, it is expressed that the concept of neologism has the origin of the French and its meaning is given as “derived”.
The neologisms in the field of organizational behavior, which emerge as a form of syntaxes consisting of a definer and defined, are in two ways as naming and variational neology. In naming neology, neologism is produced to name a new object, phenomenon, or thought. Whatever this kind of neologisms call, they actually qualify them because they are made with retronyms. In the literature of organizational behavior, “Cyber slacking”, “Psychological Contract”, “Materialism Tendency”, “Workplace Impoliteness”, “Organizational Deviation Behavior”, “Self-Leadership”, “Distributed Leadership”, “Organizational Attractiveness”, “Work Engagement”, “Work Place Spirituality”, “Entrepreneur Behavior”, “Innovative Behavior” etc. are the examples of neologism. In variational neologism, neologisms are produced by taking the language from its context in order to increase the expression power of the language. In this kind of neologism, the expression possibilities of language are challenged and strange forms of expression emerge. In variational neologisms, the existing word or sentence is used in different meanings from its most known meaning. Servant Leadership, Psychological Capital, Organizational Socialization, Contextual Performance, Confidence Asymmetry, Prosaically Motivation, Recruitment, Employee Sabotage, Organizational Organicity, Paternalistic Leadership, Nightmare management, Deontological Justice etc. These words sometimes occur in the form of chain noun phrases: Toxic Personality Characteristics, Resistance of the Leader and Followers, Hybrid Third Party Response Strategies are the examples of this kind of neology.
As a result, science first of all wants to investigate events and facts. This is the expression of the desire of science to know the cause of the events in question. For example, the scientist consciously or possibly intuitively focuses on a phenomenon and examines whether an event occurs in the phenomenal world and whether this event happens again when the necessary and sufficient situations occur. This is the fact (repeats constantly) and the science or scientist tries to find out the conditions under which this fact is re-emerged, in short, find out the reason. In the scientific process, this phase is called as “scientific explanation”, that is explaining the cause of the facts. The explanation is to present how the process is, what are the situation, person or events and their reasons. In this sense, both explanation and description are related to making complex things understandable but correspond to different activities used to make the things understandable at different levels.
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