Everyday rhetoric: Argument and persuasion in everyday life

Abstract

While the study of rhetoric in the humanities has an impressive pedigree, rhetorical analysis in organization studies is rather less developed. In this article, I want to provide an introduction to rhetorical analysis, drawing particularly on the work of Billig (1996) and Potter (1996), and illustrate its application to organizational issues through a case example concerning technological change in a public sector organization. In doing this, I demonstrate how alternative approaches to traditional positivism may augment the explanatory power of research in work and organizational psychology. In particular, I want to argue that an awareness of the everyday rhetoric of organizational talk can be illuminating in explaining how the work of an organization is accomplished.

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