Collecting Diversified Opinions from Business Meetings: A Study Based on the Faultline Perspective

This study aims to clarify which communication factor generates diverse opinions using the faultline perspective in diversity management: the faultline is a hypothetical dividing line that splits a group into subgroups according to one or more individual attributes. Text data of business meetings are analyzed for two objects. The first is to check the transition of topics identified by a co-occurrence network of words and the PageRank algorithm to rank pages on websites. The second is to measure participant remarks’ diversity by the faultline strength and the number of subgroups. Therefore, this paper shows the relationship between the transition of topics and diversity of remarks and the facilitator’s role in eliciting various remarks. It became clear that the transition of topics and the diversity of participant remarks are affected by the facilitating style.