Organizational context and budget orientations: a computational text analysis

Abstract Local governments operate in contexts that significantly vary in their complexity, turbulence, and munificence. Such variations in context have important implications for organizational outcomes and practices, including budgetary orientations. To evaluate public sector organizational practices, we focus on budget functions in California county proposed budgets during 2012–2017. These public documents present a wealth of untapped information, which shed light on a number of key organizational variables of interest. Computational text analysis methods offer a highly generalizable means of tapping into public documents in order to generate objective organizational data. Using budget narratives and a general method for analyzing texts offered by the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, we assess the relevance of organizational context for control, management, and planning budget functions.

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