Rhetorical History as Institutional Work

Suddaby, Roy ORCID: 0000-0002-9167-9180, Israelsen, Trevor, Bastien, Francois, Saylors, Rohny and Coraiola, Diego (2022) Rhetorical History as Institutional Work. Journal of Management Studies, 60 (1). pp. 242-278.

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Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Rhetorical history has emerged as a useful theoretical construct that bridges the long recognized gap between historical and organizational scholarship. Despite its growing popularity, the precise nature of rhetorical history as a construct, its scope conditions, and its utility in resolving critical issues in historical organizational analysis remains unclear. This paper addresses these issues. We define rhetorical history and contextualize the construct by elaborating its relationship to associated concepts like collective memory, rhetoric, and narrative. We ground the construct by reviewing literature that has applied rhetorical history in both theory and empirical research. Our inductive review identifies four recurring themes in which rhetorical history is used to construct perceptions of; (a) continuity and discontinuity, (b) similarity and difference, (c) winners and losers, and (d) morality and immorality. We conclude with a discussion of how rhetorical history is an essential mechanism of institutional work.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Management
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	19 Aug 2022 15:18
Last Modified:	04 Sep 2023 02:47
DOI:	10.1111/joms.12860
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3161673