1 A Rhetorical Critic of Organization

I study organizations from a rhetorical-critical perspective, a perspective that reflects more of an attitude (at the term is term was used by Kenneth Burke, 1973) rather than a particular methodology. Let me explain. First, why rhetorical? The answer is that all organizations, especially the highly collaborative, team-based firms that have been the focus of my work, are intensely rhetorical sites. The traditional study of rhetoric has focused primarily (albeit not exclusively) on how people use language to create persuasive messages, such as the familiar political speech. While workers in highly collaborative organizations may not do a lot of public speaking, they certainly engage in persuasion, a persuasion that molds and shapes their experience of work and of themselves. Collaborative work systems – as we have grown fond of calling team-based organizations these days-- revolve around the creation of shared discourses as a means of controlling work activity (Barker & Cheney, 1994, p. 20). From the senior executive’s articulation of a company vision statement to a self-managing team arguing over how best to solve a problem, people in collaborative organizations use language to create ways of working together. They use language to persuade themselves as to how best to work together for the company. They use language to control their work activity and work lives (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985, p. 195; also see Watson’s, 1994, ethnography of ‘ZTC Ryland,’ which concerns persuasion and discourse among the firm’s workers)