Rhetoric and Rational Enterprises: Reassessing Discourse in Organizations

MARY G. LaROCHE ; SHERYL S. PEARSON University of Michigan–Dearborn

Abstract

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
1985-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088385002003002
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (8)

  1. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  2. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  3. Technical Communication Quarterly
  4. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  5. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Show all 8 →
  1. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  2. Written Communication
  3. Written Communication

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