MappIng profit Legitimacy Language by Exploring Historical NArrativeS – MILL-EHNAS

This project addresses a key societal issue by examining the historical construction and impact of narratives surrounding the (il)legitimacy of corporate profit. With an interdisciplinary approach that combines computer science, history, economics, and management science, the study leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) technologies through a Large Language Model (LLM) tailored for historical discourse analysis. Focusing on the period between 1907 and 1950, the research maps the emergence, structure, and dissemination of narratives about corporate profit, drawing on digitized press archives from the Gallica Digital Library. Analytical tools, such as multimodal content analysis, diachronic network mapping, and sentiment analysis, will uncover key actors and concepts, tracing their evolution over time through the development of user-friendly visualizations.

The selected period includes critical events such as wars, geopolitical tensions, financial crises, protectionism, and pandemics, all of which fueled public debates about corporate profit. The project focuses on how these events shaped public discourse on corporate profit and how these debates influenced tax policies and corporate practices. By integrating discourse analysis with corporate accounting data from firms listed on the Paris Stock Exchange, sourced from the Equipex DFIH, as well as annual company reports, the study bridges macroeconomic fiscal policies and firm-level behavior. It offers a detailed examination of how companies responded to societal and fiscal pressures in the absence of standardized accounting frameworks, revealing nuanced corporate decision-making influenced by external narratives.

This project advances both NLP methodologies and social science scholarship, providing a novel perspective on the legitimization of corporate profit. It links discourse analysis to real-world economic outcomes and offers a platform for further interdisciplinary research in narrative economics.