After the autumn harvest: rhetoric and representation in an asian industrial dispute
Title:
After the autumn harvest: rhetoric and representation in an asian industrial dispute
Author:
Linstead, Stephen
Appeared in:
Culture & organization
Paging:
Volume 1 (1995) nr. 2 pages 231-251
Year:
1995-10
Contents:
This paper focuses on the practice of rhetorical analysis in the analysis of managerial talk, specifically in relation to management control. Rhetoric is the means by which discursive fields are linked in specific texts to concrete social forms, with the persuasive aim of naturalizing particular preferred arrangements. With great economy, it links belief to action. When it is successful it makes a partial, ambiguous or incomplete relationship appear complete and natural by encouraging its audience to gloss over any contradictions or inconsistencies by a process of mystification. As it does so, it effaces its own working so that rhetorical artifice appears to be plain speaking, as if stating the more or less unadorned truth. Rhetorics acquire a distinctive and cohesive character according to the discursive fields which they link and become an active intervention into social and managerial power relations. Of special importance in relation to management control is the “rhetoric of bureaucratic control”. This is illustrated by the analysis of textual examples drawn from the representation of a strike by Cathay Pacific flight attendants. This case is of interest for two reasons - first because of the explicit attention paid to rhetoric by the participants in the dispute, and second because of the particular social turbulence being experienced in Hong Kong at the time of the strike. This social upheaval, change, uncertainty and tension should, and does lead to increased contradiction and heterogeneity within these texts, such that the capacity of rhetoric to naturalise them is tested to the point of destruction. Finally I argue for a more complete recognition of the inseparability of text and context (frequently neglected in linguistically oriented analyses of rhetoric), and an incorporation of the relationships between text, discourse and rhetoric into rhetorical analysis. It should then be an important component of any attempt to transcend disciplinary boundaries in reflecting the multiple realities of management and developing a postmodern form of management studies.
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