In this paper, we articulate how nonprofit legitimacy is generated through the rhetorical construction of symbolic capital by nonprofit organizations. Our analysis demonstrates how symbolic capital responds to and reflects the local values of a donor/volunteer base, thus allowing nonprofits to assuage the potential for dissonance between image and behavior in humanitarian aid. To make this claim, we engage in a rhetorical analysis of one international nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States that conducts most of its humanitarian work in and around Africa. Implications of this study underscore how nonprofits capitalize on organizational identification and point to the value of understanding nonprofit legitimacy as the rhetorical construction of a "donor gaze" and a nonprofit "space of freedom.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality as accomplished in interaction, and particularly national difference as a component of intersectionality. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use ethnographic, shadowing methods to examine intersectionality in-depth and developed vignettes to illuminate the experience of intersectionality. Findings – National difference mitigated the common assumption in scientific work that tenure and education are the most important markers of acceptance and collegiality. Moreover, national difference was a more prominent driving occupational discourse in scientific work than gender. Research limitations/implications – The data were limited in scope, though the authors see this as a necessity for generating in-depth intersectional data. Implications question the prominence of gender and (domestic) race/gender as “the” driving discourses of difference in much scholarship and offer a new view into how organizing around identity happens. Specifically, the authors develop “intersectional pairs” to understand the paradoxes of intersectionality, and as comprising a larger, woven experience of “intersectional netting.” Social implications – This research draws critical attention to how assumptions regarding national difference shape workplace experiences, in an era of intensified global migration and immigration debates. Originality/value – The study foregrounds the negotiation of national difference in US workplaces, and focusses on how organization around said difference happens interactively in communication.

This article addresses two intertwined aspects of difference that have yet to be deeply examined by organizational communication scholars-language and national identity. Accordingly, in this research, which is taken from a larger study on scientific occupational identity, I use Tompkins and Cheney's enthymeme as an analytical device to explore the ways that participants reject and simultaneously instantiate discrimination in the workplace. In doing so, I contribute to the theory of occupational control by demonstrating how perceptions of language and national identity are used as part of occupational decision making in order to evaluate "good science" at work. Findings in this article indicate, regardless of the common assumptions that "science does not discriminate," that the concept of good science is based, in part, on the identity of the embodied subject and his or her English language performance.

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