Management and Marketing - Research Publications

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Subject: Business and Management × Start date: 2010 × End date: 2012 × Author: Ainsworth, Susan ×

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    The Rhetoric of Institutional Change
    Brown, AD ; Ainsworth, S ; Grant, D (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2012-03)
    This paper analyses how a case for institutional change is made through rhetoric in an individual text. Drawing on Aristotle’s three types of rhetorical justification, logos, pathos and ethos, we make three contributions. First, we show that the multiple competing logics which often dominate a field can become incorporated into key texts. As a result, the notionally rational argumentation repertoires which underpin each logic exist in tension, and are prone to contradict each other, making it difficult for a text to support convincingly one logic rather than another on the basis of logos appeals. In such instances, the authors of a text may favour one logic over another through the strategic use of ethos (moralizing) and pathos (emotion-evoking) rhetoric. Second, we demonstrate how ethos and pathos function to construct social categories (identities) and draw on dominant cultural myths. Third, we theorize these textual strategies as acts aimed at reconfiguring relations of power/knowledge.
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    'A Blinding Lack of Progress': Management Rhetoric and Affirmative Action
    Ainsworth, S ; Knox, A ; O'Flynn, J (WILEY-BLACKWELL, 2010-11)
    In this study we explore how versions of organizational reality and gender are constructed in management discourse and whether such patterns change over time. Specifically, we examine management explanations and accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations through their commentaries on their affirmative action programmes. In Australia private sector organizations with 100 or more employees are required to report to government on their affirmative action programmes for women. In these documents, management representatives outline objectives for the coming year and report on their progress in reducing employment‐related barriers for women. In doing so they account for the ‘problem’ of gender‐based discrimination that affirmative action is designed to address, justify their actions (or lack of action) and reproduce versions of gendered identity. Thus we use affirmative action reporting as cases of management rhetoric to explore how aspects of gender and organization are constructed, taken for granted, challenged or problematized. Comparing reports from the hospitality sector over a 14‐year period, we explore whether there is any evidence of discursive change in management accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations.
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