Beyond “Rhetorical Agency”: Skutnik’s Story in the 1982 State of the Union Address

Drury, Jeffrey P. Mehltretter

doi:10.1080/10570314.2017.1294705

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Texts possess agency as they bond with other entities and together become something new (Cooren, 2004). In this relationship, human intentionality stands in tension with a text’s structure (Campbell, 2005; Drury, 2018). Textual agency is limited by the choices of human agents, but the human agent’s choices are limited by the text’s form.…”

Section: Deific Agency: Incarnating Incorporeal Figures Of Moral Auth...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A text’s genre can shape the ways people in organizations share and enact knowledge (Jahn, 2016; 2018), because a text’s generic conventions allow it to be extracted from one context and taken up in another (Campbell, 2005). Due to generic conventions, texts can supposedly only be taken up “in a finite number of ways” (Drury, 2018, p. 51) as determined by the social conventions established by groups in relation to the text (Jahn, 2016). Genres in this sense are “functioning as repertoires of discursive practices enacted over time…becoming institutionalized interaction patterns” (Jahn, 2018, p. 518).…”

Section: The Ambiguous Role Of the Body In Textual Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deific Figures and Human Bodies: Creating Hierarchies of Difference through the Incarnation of Moral Authority

Schnabel

2022

Management Communication Quarterly

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Religious communities have long affirmed the agency of their sacred texts and their God/gods, providing a unique site of study for research on ventriloquizing authority (Jahn, J. L. S. (2016). Adapting safety rules in a high reliability context: How wildland firefighting workgroups ventriloquize safety rules to understand hazards. Management Communication Quarterly, 30(3), 362–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318915623638), textual agency (Cooren, F. (2004). Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization, 11(3), 373–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508404041998), and the power of incorporeal figures like values or principles (Cooren, F. (2012). Communication theory at the center: Ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of reality. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01622.x). This paper uses PraiseMoves, an Evangelical organization selling a “Christian alternative to yoga,” as a case study to develop the concept of deific agency. Deific agency is the agential power of incorporeal projections of moral authority. These projections mediate text-human relationships both in and beyond particular organizational contexts by imbuing visibly-privileged human bodies with moral authority. Deific figures can thus overwhelm textual agency by bonding with visibly-privileged bodies and thereafter organizing perceptions of moral authority in and beyond organizations in ways that disproportionately benefit physically-privileged human beings. This paper concludes by articulating the value of believing bodies for research and suggesting future avenues of inquiry.

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Section: Deific Agency: Incarnating Incorporeal Figures Of Moral Auth...mentioning

confidence: 99%