Rhetorical Enthymeme: The Forgotten Trope and its Methodological Import

Abstract

Despite growing interest in rhetorical analysis by management scholars, the study of enthymemes or arguments-inuse, arguably the mainstay of rhetoric, has been scarce. We argue that enthymeme analysis holds promise in enabling researchers to access agents'shared beliefs, in turn shedding light on organizational processes. We draw from two key studies of enthymeme analysis; one interpretivist and one objectivist, to propose a mixed methods approach that combines the situationally-specific, grounded insights of the former, with the confirmation, population validity aspects of the latter.

From Big Data to Rich Theory: Integrating Critical Discourse Analysis with Structural Topic Modeling

“…In practice, STM can provide not only an important methodological component for CDA scholars focusing on how specific discourses and strategies are used in and around organizations, but also enable new research questions around complex longitudinal and multiactor processes, which would be more difficult to address without this methodological integration. While our paper's main contribution is that it elucidates how CDA can benefit from STM in the field of management and beyond, STM's approach of seeing discourses as composed of interrelated topics may also help other discursive approaches, such as interpretive discourse analysis (Heracleous, 2006), and rhetorical analysis (Sillince and Suddaby, 2008; Heracleous et al ., 2020). To combine these approaches scholars need to consider their integration from a methodological and epistemological perspective, similar to our present analysis, an aspect that is often missing when simply transferring quantitative approaches into traditionally qualitative fields.…”

“…Potter and Wetherell (1987) have famously stated that one could have two discourse analysis textbooks with virtually no overlap. In management research, several discursive approaches have become popular in recent decades (Grant et al ., 2004; Phillips and Oswick, 2012); notably, interpretive discourse analysis (Heracleous, 2006), narrative analysis (Vaara et al ., 2016), rhetorical analysis (Sillince and Suddaby, 2008; Heracleous et al ., 2020), and CDA (Phillips et al ., 2008; Vaara, 2010). We focus on CDA as an increasingly popular approach that has guided scholars across the humanities and social sciences in examining the discursive construction of social phenomena from a critical perspective (Wodak and Meyer, 2016).…”

Methodology Matters; Even More

“…Heracleous et al . (2020) discuss enthymemes. They highlight that enthymemes, although an integral component of the concept of rhetoric – which has quite widespread usage in the management disciplines – have so far been given insufficient consideration in rhetorical analysis.…”