Organizational Rhetoric

Conceptual Overview

Because rhetoric addresses an audience, it shows sensitivity to the audience's probable response by, for example, using commonplaces or ethos, logos, and pathos appeals; establishing audience identification; appealing to a universal audience; or aligning with widely known folk stories. Rhetoric usually involves the use of language, but it also has a symbolic meaning beyond the literal. That meaning is contained in images such as advertisements; words such as figures and tropes; and symbolic actions, such as saber rattling, displaying an impressive lifestyle or impressive equipment, and firing top executives and closing factories. Rhetoric usually has an ambiguous intent because it seeks an effect beyond the one suggested by the immediate context; rhetoric therefore undermines our notion of context because current linguistics models of context are based merely on what was said immediately beforehand. Because rhetoric is used in everyday language about common controversies, it is used in settings where there is an absence of credible source, clear evidence, certain backing, or logical support.

Organizations are engaged in multiple rhetoric efforts simultaneously, and the same rhetoric may be directed internally and externally at the same time. Organizations and their environments are partly socially constructed and enacted. Hence, organizational strategizing is not passive to objective environmental forces, but instead, the environment is enacted by organization members. So organizational strategizing is richly rhetorical, used for closure among many possible meanings in which the organization gets closer to its audience by means of identification. Rhetoric achieves closure by positioning some interpretations as taken for granted versus others as excluded or by privileging rhetorical figures that either accept or construct reality.

The use of organizational rhetoric has involved a reduction in the determinacy of organizational boundaries. There are several reasons for this. First, marketing rhetoric disrupts the traditional container metaphor of the organization because the consumer is placed at the center, inside the organizational activity. A second, reinforcing trend is that because of high worker mobility, organizations are beginning to view employees as consumers, to which the organization must adapt and whose needs it must satisfy. Third, issue management rhetoric involves the organization's proactively taking the role of external constituents. Therefore, marketing and issue management rhetorics have eroded the importance and clarity of organizational boundaries. Because of this erosion, it is understandable that many organizations are consolidating their internal and external communications in a single function. Organizations, therefore, are communicating with themselves. The external audience acts as a mirror in which the organization examines itself and its identity and also seeks confirmation of that identity through various closed, self-confirming autocommunications with external actors such as market research and consultancy organizations.

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