Social media backlashes have emerged as important phenomena complicating how businesses communicate online and representing significant brand risk. This article demonstrates the value of content analysis and argumentation theory for understanding and responding to social media backlash events, using two examples from the UK fashion industry (hashtags #ThanksItsASOS and #boycottboohoo). The results provide lessons about the way backlashes operate in practice, how to analyze these effectively, and have implications for business approaches to communicating about Corporate Social Responsibility and managing social media. The authors conclude with suggestions for training on social media and CSR for businesses.

This study examines the use of persuasive language by male and female entrepreneurs in high-stakes negotiation settings, focusing on gendered communication strategies. With a particular emphasis on Aristotle’s modes of persuasion (Ethos, Pathos, and Logos), the research analyzes 44 negotiation conversations from Shark Tank US , Season 11, using a quantitative approach. Data were processed with SPSS to assess gender differences in persuasive strategies. The findings reveal significant gendered patterns: male entrepreneurs predominantly used Logos as a way to emphasize on logical reasoning and evidence to persuade investors, while female entrepreneurs more often employed Pathos, sparking emotional appeals to build empathy and engagement. These differences are discussed in light of social constructivist theories of language, which suggest that gendered communication reflects broader societal power dynamics. The study highlights the challenges women face in balancing authority with warmth in negotiations, a double bind identified in earlier research. This research contributes to our understanding of how gender influences persuasive strategies in entrepreneurial contexts and offers implications for promoting more equitable communication in business settings. It also suggests that future research should further explore how these findings can be applied to support female entrepreneurs in overcoming communication barriers and achieving greater success in negotiation and leadership roles.

This article examines how Aristotelian rhetorical principles— ethos, pathos, and logos—can help manage social media outrage in complaint handling by translating them into defensive and accommodative response strategies commonly used in service recovery. Two online experiments evaluated four strategies for their effects on complainants’ moods: (a) blame-shifting; (b) promising action; (c) apologizing; and (d) a combination of empathy, apology, and promise. The results showed that accommodative strategies were more effective than defensive ones, with the combination of empathy, apology, and promise as the most effective. The findings suggest incorporating rhetorical training in business communication to enhance response efficacy.

This article presents an observational case study of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Resource Manager working with community members through a contested project. Using the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, credibility, and character development, I examine ethos appeals the Resource Manager used to align Corps’s sustainability values with the community’s values. Transcribed interviews with community members reveal this alignment evolved through a coconstructed ethos negotiation process between the Resource Manager and the community. The article concludes with rhetorical and pedagogical insights gained from the case study that apply to conflict resolution in organizational communication.

This study tests the recognition of errors in context and whether the presence of errors affects the reader’s perception of the writer’s ethos. In an experimental, posttest only design, participants were randomly assigned a memo to read in an online survey: one version with errors and one version without. Of the six intentional errors in version one, on average, readers only noticed two errors, which suggests that readers notice some but not all errors. The ethos ranking for the writer was also statistically significant between the two versions, suggesting that the presence of errors can affect the writer’s ethos.