Features of the Terms for Designating Economic Entities in Academic Discourse

In modern economic science and business practice, a lot of synonymous terms used to designate autonomous economic entities engaged in social production. Authors often put particular meaning into them, which complicates the scientific dialogue and the development of scientific knowledge. In practice, the words “firm”, “organization”, “corporation”, “enterprise” can mean both the same subject and its sub- and supersystems. The article presents the results of an analysis of the frequency and context of using various terms denoting autonomous public production entities in English based on analysis of data from universal search engines (Google), as well as specialized databases of scientific publications (Social Science Research Network, Academia, National Bureau of Economic Research, Scopus, Web of Science). A quantitative analysis of the frequency of use of these terms in academic works, as well as the rate of their joint application, is carried out. The dictionary definitions of these terms compared from the three leading online dictionaries (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Free Dictionary, and Cambridge Dictionary). Particular attention paid to the analysis of the context for the use of these terms in recent highly cited publications. Intersections and differences in the use of these terms are established, based on which clarifications of their definition for scientific researches proposed