Abstract
In public communication contexts, such as when a company announces the proposal for an important organizational change, argumentation typically involves multiple audiences, rather than a single and homogenous group, let alone an individual interlocutor. In such cases, an exhaustive and precise characterization of the audience structure is crucial both for the arguer, who needs to design an effective argumentative strategy, and for the external analyst, who aims at reconstructing such a strategic discourse. While the peculiar relevance of multiple audience is often emphasized in the argumentation literature and in rhetorical studies, proposals for modelling multi-audience argumentative situations remain scarce and unsystematic. To address this gap, we propose an analytical framework which integrates three conceptual constructs: (1) Rigotti and Rocci’s notion of communicative activity type, understood as the implementation of an interaction scheme into a piece of institutional reality, named interaction field; (2) the stakeholder concept, originally developed in strategic management and public relations studies to refer to any actor who affects and/or is affected by the organizational actions and who, accordingly, carries an interest in them; (3) the concept of participant role as it emerges from Goffman’s theory of conversation analysis and related linguistic and media studies. From this integration, we derive the notion of text stakeholder for referring to any organizational actor whose interest (stake) becomes an argumentative issue which the organizational text must account for in order to effectively achieve its communicative aim. The text stakeholder notion enables a more comprehensive reconstruction and characterization of multiple audience by eliciting the relevant participants staged in a text and identifying, for each of them, the interactional role they have, the peculiar interest they bear and the related argumentative issue they create. Considering as an illustrative case the defense document issued by a corporation against a hostile takeover attempt made by another corporation, we show how this framework can support the analysis of strategic maneuvering by better defining the audience demand and, so, better explaining how real arguers design and adapt their topical and presentational choices.
Highlights
Between 2006 and 2012, Dublin-based low-cost airline company Ryanair made three attempts to take control of Aer Lingus, the Irish national flag carrier
We propose an analytical framework which integrates three conceptual constructs: (1) Rigotti and Rocci’s notion of communicative activity type, understood as the implementation of an interaction scheme into a piece of institutional reality, named interaction field; (2) the stakeholder concept, originally developed in strategic management and public relations studies to refer to any actor who affects and/or is affected by the organizational actions and who, carries an interest in them; (3) the concept of participant role as it emerges from Goffman’s theory of conversation analysis and related linguistic and media studies
The Ryanair-Aer Lingus saga brings to light, in particular, a crucial aspect, which is inherent in takeovers and their argumentative interactions (Palmieri 2008; Brennan et al 2010), and in numerous other types of argumentative activity: in designing arguments aimed at justifying a standpoint that should be advanced and defended in a public context, organizational actors such as corporate or political leaders need to account for the presence of a multiple audience, made up of different groups of people simultaneously reading/listening to the argumentative discourse
Summary
Between 2006 and 2012, Dublin-based low-cost airline company Ryanair made three attempts to take control of Aer Lingus, the Irish national flag carrier. The Ryanair-Aer Lingus saga brings to light, in particular, a crucial aspect, which is inherent in takeovers and their argumentative interactions (Palmieri 2008; Brennan et al 2010), and in numerous other types of argumentative activity: in designing arguments aimed at justifying a standpoint that should be advanced and defended in a public context, organizational actors such as corporate or political leaders need to account for the presence of a multiple audience, made up of different groups of people simultaneously reading/listening to the argumentative discourse.
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