Strategic Linguistic Change: An Ideal-Type Model of Institutional Norm Diffusion
Authors: Davidson, Craig Kyrle Strachan, Davidson, Lucie Mary Elise, Davidson, Alfie Christian Strachan
Type: Preprint
Published: 2026-08-03
Keywords: Institutional Isomorphism, Gatekeeping, Preference Falsification, Norm Diffusion, Strategic Language Steering, Lexical Standardization, Statutory Friction, Administrative Governance, Coercive Isomorphism, Authoritarian Epistemic Control, Symbolic Power, Institutional Logics, Framing Theory, Moral Entrepreneurship, Resource Mobilization

<p>Existing accounts of linguistic change typically emphasize either decentralized cultural drift or broad ideological persuasion. This paper isolates a third distinct mechanism: top-down institutional norm diffusion driven by upstream gatekeeping, risk-management incentives, administrative compliance, and statutory friction. By constructing a Weberian ideal-type model across five discrete stages—Institutional Access, Resource Mobilization, Norm Diffusion, Coalition Reinforcement, and Norm Enforcement—this framework details how high-leverage administrative actors convert optional vocabulary into legally or professionally enforced standards. The paper integrates environmental risk governance, public health administration, and corporate workplace policies directly across each stage to illustrate real-world application, and grounds each stage further in primary-source style guides, discourse-analytic scholarship, and current case material. It distinguishes explicit, coordinated campaigns from uncoordinated, emergent isomorphic steering, expanded cascade dynamics of preference falsification collapse, a dedicated limitations analysis, and formal empirical methods appendices for corpus linguistics and tribunal data coding. This revision develops the coercive end of the same isomorphic spectrum, cross-validating a case study of state-mandated curriculum control in the Islamic Republic of Iran against independently reported repression infrastructure, and situates anticipatory self-censorship among foreign researchers operating under authoritarian conditions as a related but distinct chilling-effect mechanism. The paper is explicit that this coercive pole differs from the mimetic and normative Western examples in degree and enforcement mechanism, not merely in position on a continuum, and reinforces its organic-discourse boundary condition with a second independent population-level dataset. Building on this foundation, the present revision repositions institutional sociology, rather than sociolinguistics, as the paper's primary theoretical home: it grounds the model's ideal-type methodology explicitly in Weber's own formulation, extends the coercive pole using institutional-logics theory to argue that Western and authoritarian cases may differ in kind and not only in degree, and incorporates moral-entrepreneurship, resource-mobilization, and framing theory from social-movement sociology to sharpen Stages 1, 2, and 4 respectively. It further adds the Associated Press Stylebook's 2022 Inclusive Storytelling chapter as the paper's flagship large-scale primary-source example of Stage 1 gatekeeping, Stage 3 iterative diffusion, and reflexive Stage 4 coalition management. This revision additionally replaces the monetary-policy case studies with figures independently computed from the primary BIS speech archive rather than carried forward from an earlier draft, correcting a data-source misattribution in the process; extends this analysis to a complete, gap-free 1996–2026 archive that supplies a two-decade flat baseline and a dateable 2013 policy-adoption natural experiment for "forward guidance"; extends the climate-language claim into a five-bank cross-institutional test consistent with mimetic isomorphism at a field level, including an identified 2015 Bank of England precursor episode; and documents a real elite-defection episode — Christine Lagarde's June 2026 retirement of "forward guidance" at the Sintra forum, echoed by the Federal Reserve and Bank of England — that instantiates the cascade mechanism in Failure Mode 3 empirically rather than only theoretically.</p>