Situating Speech: A Rhetorical Approach to Political Strategy

Ideas are increasingly acknowledged as factors in explaining political behaviour. But often they are treated as inert resources rather than dynamic instances of action in themselves. The latter, I propose, requires reflection on the character of speech – as the medium of ideas – in responding to and refiguring a prevailing situation. I undertake such reflection by setting out a rhetorical approach to political strategy. Building upon ‘interpretive’ advances in political science I shift the focus from stable cognitive frames to the dynamics of argumentation where ideas work expressively. I then explore the rhetorical aspect of strategising with attention to the way speech serves to orient audiences by creatively re-appropriating a situation. That approach is shown to be consistent with a ‘dialectical’ political sociology that emphasises the interaction of structure and agency. Finally, I sketch a method for undertaking rhetorical analysis and indicate how it might be applied to a concrete example

Shaping strategic action through the rhetorical construction and exploitation of ambiguity

This paper extends existing understandings of how actors' constructions of ambiguity shape the emergent process of strategic action. We theoretically elaborate the role of rhetoric in exploiting strategic ambiguity, based on analysis of a longitudinal case study of an internationalization strategy within a business school. Our data show that actors use rhetoric to construct three types of strategic ambiguity: protective ambiguity that appeals to common values in order to protect particular interests, invitational ambiguity that appeals to common values in order to invite participation in particular actions, and adaptive ambiguity that enables the temporary adoption of specific values in order to appeal to a particular audience at one point in time. These rhetorical constructions of ambiguity follow a processual pattern that shapes the emergent process of strategic action. Our findings show that (1) the strategic actions that emerge are shaped by the way actors construct and exploit ambiguity, (2) the ambiguity intrinsic to the action is analytically distinct from ambiguity that is constructed and exploited by actors, and (3) ambiguity construction shifts over time to accommodate the emerging pattern of actions

Defending the indefensible: Obama’s rhetoric in the aftermath of the torture report

This article offers an analysis of Obama’s response to the publication of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture report. Using rhetoric as its mode of inquiry, the article demonstrates how Obama employed epideictic discourse to define and redefine national ethos, to reconstruct and restore acts and actors and to avoid deliberation about further investigation and prosecution. The article discusses the political implications of epideictic rhetoric, the genre of speech considered the least pertinent to political life, and proposes that epideictic rhetoric can be an effective tool for political actors. Obama, the article argues, by using epideictic rhetoric shifted topic from a political issue, the accountability of members of the executive branch and the CIA, to an ethical issue, ‘who Americans are’. Despite avoiding political rhetoric, Obama’s epideictic affirmed torture as policy choice and left the possibility open for the use of similar practices in the future