Management Rhetoric Research Articles

The Implementation and Benefits of Telework in Various Sectors: Reality or Rhetoric?

This article explores the concept of telework, defined as work performed outside the traditional office, using technology to accomplish professional tasks. Initially designed to meet the needs of continuous customer support and to foster technological advancement, telework has been widely adopted by organizations due to its benefits, such as increased productivity, reduced operational costs, decreased traffic, and lower pollution. However, studies have highlighted significant challenges, such as employee feelings of isolation and the lack of effective managerial strategies to ensure connectivity and efficiency in remote work. Furthermore, the inadequate preparation for both the implementation and ongoing support of telework programs has become obvious. This article examines the implementation of telework and its benefits across various HoReCa organizations well equipped with digital tools and platforms, aiming to determine whether it represents a tangible reality or merely a management rhetoric by highlighting, within SWOT analyses, the advantages and challenges associated with this transition brought about by the adoption of telework.

New Public Management rhetoric in developing country: will agencification and management control lead to organisational culture transformation?

Agencification and granting managerial autonomy to public sector organisations are believed to change organisational cultures. This study used path and factor analysis on a sample of 600 public sector personnel in Indonesia to evaluate the role of agencification in the New Public Management (NPM) framework. The study revealed that agencification regarding personnel and financial management autonomy promotes a result-oriented culture while encouraging improved public organisation performance. However, it contradicted traditional NPM concepts by proving that more than management control alone is needed to promote a results-oriented culture among public sector personnel naturally. These findings show that its discourse and application must be modified to realise NPM's promise in the Indonesian setting fully. Future research should investigate the impact of external influences on agency formation and managerial control and ways for cultivating a results-oriented culture in public sector organisations. The study's limitations, such as its concentration on Indonesia and its temporal scope, necessitate comparative analysis across areas and longitudinal studies better to understand the dynamics of agencification and management control. The study's conclusions have ramifications for public sector reform in Indonesia and other nations. Governments must know the intricate interplay between autonomy,management control, and a results-oriented culture. They should also examine the importance of a pragmatic and context-aware approach to NPM.

Implicit Meaning and Gender Ideologies in Interwar Good Housekeeping Magazine

ABSTRACT This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to uncover the linguistic mechanisms of implicit, (counter-)ideological meaning in the female-targeted periodical Good Housekeeping during the interwar period, and chiefly in its “Household Engineering” article series, where a complex discourse of modern housewifery, based on expert advice and industrial rationalisation, was shaped and negotiated through a rhetoric of scientific management and efficiency. In particular, this study investigates the discursive construction of the pervasive image of the female professional homemaker interested in the latest technological methods and innovations, by considering the role played by implicit meaning in shaping feminine roles and dominant gender ideologies. A Critical Stylistic analysis of presupposition and implicature in Good Housekeeping featured articles shows how these strategies reveal implicitly construed ideologies of womanhood, and particularly the way in which the magazine adopted linguistic devices to accommodate modern ideals of femininity without rejecting more traditional ones.

Trust rhetoric and CEO gender

AbstractThis study investigates the perceived and actual trustworthiness of female managers when using rhetoric to advertise their trustworthiness in public disclosure documents. We find that the stock market reacts more favorably to trust rhetoric if the document has been prepared under the responsibility of a female CEO rather than a male CEO. We rule out that this result could be driven by female and male CEOs talking about trust in different contexts. However, inconsistently with the notion that the trust rhetoric of women managers is more truthful than that of their male counterparts, trust rhetoric does not relate to less extensive earnings manipulation if such rhetoric stems from female CEOs compared to male CEOs. Our results thus do not confirm the popular view that higher female trustworthiness explains gender differences in accounting behavior.

How does Workplace Incivility in the Public Higher Learning Institution in Saudi Influence the Job Satisfaction of the Faculty Employees?

Scholars like Vickers have made an interesting observation that while the public administration scholars have put a keen interest in management rhetoric, they have ignored an equally significant area that also has weighty impacts on the public administration practitioners as well as the people they serve; workplace incivility. For this end, this paper examines the prevalence of workplace incivility in the Saudi Arabian public universities’ faculty as well as how does workplace incivility in the Saudi Arabian public universities’ faculties influence the job satisfaction of the faculty employees. The findings revealed that job satisfaction has a positive correlation with workplace incivility. The findings supported the hypothesis which postulated that workplace incivility among the Saudi faculty members could result in reduced job satisfaction. These findings have important policy implications. First, the management of public universities in Saudi Arabia should endeavor to create a healthy workplace climate by cultivating an organizational culture that is intolerant of uncivil practices, and where such practices are actively discouraged by all employees. Second, organizations can mitigate workplace incivility by enforcing a clear policy that defines workplace incivility. A zero-tolerance to incivility policy should be enacted, and efforts should be made to nurture a civil workplace culture through training, counseling, and punishment where necessary.

Parkinson’s Law and an Ironic Rhetoric of Management

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, British historian, fiction writer, and, so to say, management guru, in Parkinson’s Law created his own successful way of critiquing organizational bureaucratization. Parkinson’s work falls under the Burkean category of “literature for use,” in which affectivity becomes guaranteed by the peculiarity of irony. As Wayne C. Booth suggested, even in the case of “stable irony” there may often be some possibility of further considerations (that is, the factor of uncertainty), despite all the efforts to rhetorically control this type of irony. Booth, however, also noted that a paradoxical situation may arise in which “unstable” irony, intended to be open-ended, becomes capable of creating possibilities for referential reading and practical application. Thus, Parkinson’s Law provides the duality of entertainment through its satire and the seriousness of its management thoughts (for instance, the relationship of work and time, work and headcount, workforce selection methods, and the extension of committees or departments). These two aspects, constantly intermingling, are examined through the rhetoric of irony working in Parkinson’s Law and the practical influences it may exert. (AS)

The language of profit warnings: a case of denial, defiance, desperation and defeat

PurposeTaking a communication perspective, the paper explores management's rhetoric in profit warnings, whose sole purpose is to disclose unexpected bad news.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a close-reading approach to text analysis, the authors analyse three profit warnings of the now-collapsed Carillion, contrasting the rhetoric with contemporaneous investor conference calls to discuss the profit warnings and board minutes recording boardroom discussions of the case company's precarious financial circumstances. The analysis applies an Aristotelian framework, focussing on logos (appealing to logic and reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) to examine how Carillion's board and management used language to persuade shareholders concerning the company's adverse circumstances.FindingsAs non-routine communications, the language in profit warnings displays and mimics characteristics of routine communications by appealing primarily to logos (logic and reason). The rhetorical profiles of investor conference calls and board meeting minutes differ from profit warnings, suggesting a different version of the story behind the scenes. The authors frame the three profit warnings as representing three stages of communication as follows: denial, defiance and desperation and, for our case company, ultimately, culminating in defeat.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited to the study of profit warnings in one case company.Originality/valueThe paper views profit warnings as a communication artefact and examines the rhetoric in these corporate documents to elucidate their key features. The paper provides novel insights into the role of profit warnings as a corporate communication vehicle/genre delivering bad news.

When entrepreneurial rhetoric meets strict regulations: Implications for the valuation of health science firms

AbstractResearch SummaryHealth science firms have long product development horizons and need regulatory approval for market entry. In communicating with investors, they may use entrepreneurial orientation (EO) rhetoric to emphasize their strategic and behavioral commitment to product innovation and market entry. However, because EO rhetoric constitutes a soft‐information signal rather than evidence of substantive commitment, investors may suspect firm insiders using such rhetoric of impression management. The solution, we argue, is EO rhetoric sustained over time, which produces more reliable information for investors—in contrast to occasional increases in EO rhetoric, which invite skeptical scrutiny. Nevertheless, investors' potential concerns regarding changes in EO rhetoric can be mitigated by concurrent hard‐information signals that carry signaling costs or penalty costs for false signaling.Managerial SummaryEntrepreneurial orientation (EO) rhetoric can reduce information asymmetry between managers and investors. In strictly regulated contexts such as health science industries, using such rhetoric may be challenging. For firms embracing entrepreneurial strategies and behaviors, maintaining EO rhetoric over time is critical to overcoming skepticism that it is merely “cheap talk.” For investors, this study also suggests that health science firms maintaining higher EO rhetoric over time deserve higher valuations, given the variety of benefits an EO can have for health science firms. If a health science firm aims to ramp up its EO rhetoric, managers should be aware that investors may interpret the increase as impression management and should confront this interpretation head‐on—for instance, by simultaneously increasing entry commitment or corporate social responsibility.

Stock Price Crash Risk and the Managerial Rhetoric Channel: Evidence from Narrative R&D Disclosure

This study proposes the managerial rhetoric channel, which is exploited as a vital conduit through which managers convey information to the investment community. Managerial narrative in corporate reports featuring technology and innovation disclosure activities is positively associated with one year ahead stock price crash risk. Moreover, the positive relation between managerial narrative and stock price crash risk is more pronounced for firms with powerful, more able, younger CEOs and CEOs with higher industry tournament incentives. The adverse impact of managerial narrative on future stock prices prevails among firms that face high competition and firms with lower anti-takeover provisions. Finally, this managerial rhetoric-crash relationship cannot be attenuated in the presence of stronger internal corporate governance.

Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-state Fusion in India

Abstract Many concerned citizens, including judges, bureaucrats, politicians, activists, journalists, and academics, have been claiming that Indian democracy has been imperilled under the premiership of Narendra Modi, which began in 2014. To examine this claim, the Article sets up an analytic framework for accountability mechanisms liberal democratic constitutions put in place to provide a check on the political executive. The assumption is that only if this framework is dismantled in a systemic manner can we claim that democracy itself is in peril. This framework helps distinguish between actions that one may disagree with ideologically but are nonetheless permitted by an elected government, from actions that strike at the heart of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Liberal democratic constitutions typically adopt three ways of making accountability demands on the political executive: vertically, by demanding electoral accountability to the people; horizontally, by subjecting it to accountability demands of other state institutions like the judiciary and fourth branch institutions; and diagonally, by requiring discursive accountability by the media, the academy, and civil society. This framework assures democracy over time – i.e. it guarantees democratic governance not only to the people today, but to all future peoples of India. Each elected government has the mandate to implement its policies over a wide range of matters. However, seeking to entrench the ruling party’s stranglehold on power in ways that are inimical to the continued operation of democracy cannot be one of them. The Article finds that the first Modi government in power between 2014 and 2019 did indeed seek to undermine each of these three strands of executive accountability. Unlike the assault on democratic norms during India Gandhi’s Emergency in the 1970s, there is little evidence of a direct or full-frontal attack during this period. The Bharatiya Janata Party government’s mode of operation was subtle, indirect, and incremental, but also systemic. Hence, the Article characterizes the phenomenon as “killing a constitution by a thousand cuts.” The incremental assaults on democratic governance were typically justified by a combination of a managerial rhetoric of efficiency and good governance (made plausible by the undeniable imperfection of our institutions) and a divisive rhetoric of hyper-nationalism (which brands political opponents of the party as traitors of the state). Since its resounding victory in the 2019 general elections, the Modi government appears to have moved into consolidation mode. No longer constrained by the demands of coalition partners, early signs suggest that it may abandon the incrementalist approach for a more direct assault on democratic constitutionalism.

Vivências de “grades afora”: rotinas e experiências disrupturas do trabalho prisional no Recife oitocentista

O propósito deste artigo é investigar as dinâmicas do trabalho prisional na Casa de Detenção do Recife durante o século XIX. Manuseando diversas fontes primárias, buscamos avançar para além da retórica dos gestores e dos regulamentos prisionais e enfatizar alguns aspectos do trabalho prisional como a possibilidade dos detentos transitarem fora do perímetro das instituições prisionais, quando da execução de algumas das suas atividades laborais. Não raro, essa modalidade de trabalho conferia aos presos uma vivência menos isolada do que se supunha e permitia uma experiência de “liberdade parcelar”. A observação dos presos em suasandanças pela cidade permite dimensionar os fluxos que atravessavam e interligavam a sociedade recifense e o universo do encarceramento e sublinhar as inúmeras implicações dessa contiguidade para o cotidiano prisional. No que concerne ao recorte cronológico, nossa observação está circunscrita à gestão de Rufino de Almeida (1861-1875).

Subordinated to Oneself: The Switchboard Operator as Early Self Manager

As the ‘voice with a smile’, the telephone operator was the human interface for a complex telecommunications infrastructure, recalling voices, conversing with customers, and carrying out requests. Such service had to combine cognitive and affective labor in a way that felt natural. Drawing on workers memoirs, training manuals, and managerial rhetoric between 1890 and 1940—an era of taylorist rationalization—the article tracks how the operator highlighted the limits of such rationalization. Rather than the mold of management, the operator required a more supple regime of self-management. This labor form initiated a shift from a prescriptive, mechanical worker to a more holistic, self-directed model. Anticipating by several decades Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ and Rose’s ‘enterprise of the self’, these theories nevertheless provide insight into this more flexible, more economic form of power. The operator thus provides a precursor for the contemporary subject who must also deftly combine cognitive and affective labor into an always-on, always-improving performance. In setting goals, auditing activity and integrating feedback, self-management proves more effective than any managerial intervention.

Softer Lips Tell Sweeter Lies

This study investigates the perceived and actual trustworthiness and truthfulness of female managers when using rhetoric to advertise their trustworthiness in public disclosure documents. We find that the stock market reacts more favorably to trust rhetoric if the document has been prepared under the responsibility of a female CEO rather than a male CEO. We rule out that this result could be driven by female and male CEOs talking about trust in different contexts. However, inconsistently with the notion that the trust rhetoric of women managers is more truthful than that of their male counterparts, trust rhetoric does not relate to less extensive earnings manipulation if such rhetoric stems from female CEOs compared to male CEOs. Moreover, the trust rhetoric of female CEOs is not justified by a subsequent superior one-year stock performance. Our results contradict the popular notion that higher female trustworthiness or truthfulness explains gender differences in accounting behavior.

Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Executive Aggrandizement and Party-State Fusion in India

Many concerned citizens, including judges, bureaucrats, politicians, activists, journalists and academics, have been claiming that Indian democracy has been imperilled by the current government in power at the Union level since 2014. To examine the claim, the paper sets up an analytic framework for accountability mechanisms liberal democratic constitutions put in place to provide a check on the political executive. The assumption is that only if this framework is being dismantled in a systematic manner can we say that democracy itself is in peril. This framework helps distinguish between actions that one may disagree with ideologically but are nonetheless permitted to an elected government from actions that strike at the heart of liberal democratic constitutionalism (the first set of actions are reversible when political opponents come to power, the second set of actions make it harder, if not impossible, for such opponents to come to power). Liberal democratic constitutions typically adopt three ways of making accountability demands on the political executive: vertically by demanding electoral accountability to the people, horizontally by subjecting it to accountability demands of other state institutions like the judiciary and fourth branch institutions, and diagonally by requiring discursive accountability to the media, the academy and civil society. This framework assures democracy over time -- i.e. it guarantees democratic governance not only to the people today, but to all future peoples of India. While each elected government has the mandate to implement its policies over a wide range, seeking to reduce the effectiveness of these modes of accountability is legitimately understood as an effort to entrench the ruling party's stranglehold on power in ways that are inimical to the continued operation of democracy. The paper finds that the Modi government has indeed sought to undermine each of these three strands of executive accountability. Unlike the assault on democratic norms during India Gandhi's Emergency in the 1970s, there is no evidence of a direct or full-frontal attack today. The BJP government's mode of operation has been subtle and incremental, but systemic. Hence, the paper characterises the phenomenon as 'killing a constitution by a thousand cuts'. The incremental assaults on democratic governance have typically been justified by a combination of a managerial rhetoric of efficiency and good governance (made plausible by the undeniable imperfection of our institutions) and a divisive rhetoric of hyper-nationalism (which brands political opponents of the party as traitors to the state). Unlike paradigmatic examples of the recent wave of democratic deconsolidation -- Poland and Hungary -- India's relatively long experience with democracy has enabled robust, and often successful, opposition to many of these moves. And yet, many democratic norms and mechanisms have been seriously undermined. The direction of travel is unmistakably towards a 'guided' or 'managed' democracy which will structurally ensure the political dominance of the ruling party.

Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus

Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externalities and their operation within an urban system of systems. This article introduces a collection of case studies aimed at critically appraising how concepts of nexus and infrastructure integration have become guiding visions for the development of green, resilient or smart cities. It assesses how concepts of nexus and calls for higher interconnectivity and ‘co-management’ within and across infrastructure domains often forestall more politically informed discussions and downplay potential risks and institutional restrictions. Based on an urban political and sociotechnical approach, the introduction to this special issue centres around four major research gaps: 1) the tensions between calls for infrastructure re-bundling and the urban trends and realities driven by infrastructure restructuring since the 1990s; 2) the existing boundary work in cities and urban stakeholders’ practices in bringing fragmented urban infrastructures together; 3) the politics involved in infrastructural and urban change and in aligning urban infrastructures that often defy managerial rhetoric of resource efficiency, smartness and resilience; and 4) the spatialities at play in infrastructural reconfigurations that selectively promote specific spaces and scales of metabolic autonomy, system operation (and failure), networked interconnectivities and system regulation. We conclude by outlining directions for future research.

Fostering Employee’s Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: Evidence from Emerging Pakistan

Providing quality services is a key condition for the stable functioning of companies in a changing environment. Given the fact that delivering exceptional quality services deemed to foster firm competitiveness, worldwide service quality and customer satisfaction captivate serious considerations from across the globe. An analysis of literary sources allows us to conclude that customer satisfaction and service quality have long-term predictors to enhance firms’ values. Employee service quality plays a significant role in satisfying customer’s needs in these digital times not only to accomplish firms’ particular objectives but also to socialize firms globally – to sustain customer’s confidence among competitors. The relevance of solving this scientific problem lies in the lack of research work, which highlighted functional aspects of employee’s service quality, yet numerous firms from across the globe are pugnacious to progress services, deteriorating money on ill-conceived service daily-routine packages and undermining credibility with management rhetoric not supported up with some strategic actions. Thus, this study aims to bring a deeper insight view, bonding employee’s service quality and customer satisfaction. A survey distributed on a sample of 278 customers of Telecom industry through electronic and simple forms. A statistical package social science (SPSS) was conducted to calculate the collected data. The results of data analysis revealed that three out of five predictor variables ‘assurance’, ‘responsiveness’, and ‘reliability’ have a significant impact on customer satisfaction while ‘empathy’ and ‘tangibility’ have an in-significant impact on customer satisfaction. According to the results of the study, it was concluded that ensuring customer satisfaction in changing conditions becomes a strategic prerequisite for creating competitive advantages of the company, improving the quality of customer service, in the context of easing pressure on profitability and achieving strategic long-term goals of the company. Therefore, this study peculiarly predicts that employee’s service quality is a crucial antecedent of customer satisfaction explicitly within the context of Telecom Industry in emerging Pakistan. Keywords: Service Quality, Customer satisfaction, Telecom industry of Pakistan, Profitability, Economic instability.

What Does It Mean When Managers Talk About Trust?

This paper investigates whether managerial rhetoric in the Management Discussion & Analysis section of 10-K filings can help gauge the level of managerial opportunism in a firm. We find that the use of trust-related words is connected to inefficient investment decisions and poor operating performance. Furthermore, firms making more frequent use of trust-related words are subject to less monitoring by institutional investors or analysts. Their accounting also relies more heavily on discretionary accruals. These results are consistent with the notion that managerial rhetoric to advertise trustworthiness points towards agency problems plaguing the firm.

Citizen perceptions of public management: Hybridisation and post‐new public management in Japan and New Zealand

AbstractAn older body of research claims variously: a world‐wide transformation from new public management (NPM) to new public governance or post new public management (post‐NPM); a ‘layering’, where new management rhetoric and techniques are layered upon existing ones; or a ‘hybridisation’ synthesised from competing systems. More recent studies, particularly in central and Eastern Europe, suggest a nuanced and context‐specific degree of transformation. Influenced by a growing research interest in citizen perceptions of public management, this study expands this more nuanced approach by surveying local government public management perceptions of 1,140 New Zealand and 3,100 Japanese citizen online survey respondents. Using principal component analysis, we show both New Zealand and Japan exhibit degrees of hybridisation of public management paradigms, with Japan exhibiting a higher degree of eclecticism.

Mather work incentive posters and the rhetoric of scientific management in the 1920s

The Charles Mather work incentive posters of the 1920s promoted the philosophy of scientific management that just ten years earlier the US Congress deemed reductionist and dehumanizing. In a time where the rise of middle management and the growing faith in the powers of capitalism were omnipresent, the posters and rhetoric of scientific management made great sense to those in control of big business. Mather’s 78 work posters hung in offices and factories all over the country, and describe what it meant to be efficient, productive and a good member of business society in the 1920s. As a medium, Mather’s posters served to create and reinforce workplace practices of managers and leaders that would advance 1920s corporation and society. As propaganda, the posters appealed to worker’s attitudes, behaviours, emotions and sense of social belonging. This study evaluates the rhetoric and themes of Mather’s 71 posters in the 1926–27 catalogue (the most popular year for the posters). It finds that in a propaganda-like manner, the posters encourage and discourage workplace behaviours that support management at the expense of workers’ thoughts and self-protection in the form of unionism. Further, as Mather worked to create posters that would influence the workplace ecology, his posters dissolved into the environment. The rhetoric used within the posters became adopted by organization leaders and employees, thus facilitating the linguistic transition of 1920s corporate society. An evaluation of these posters lends insight into the history of motivational posters and signs within organizational culture. Today, newer motivational posters are hung in offices around the world, with similar intentions to those of Mather. Because Mather’s posters signify the beginning of motivational posters in the modern western organization, studying the originals could help describe transitions in corporate culture.

Using Knowledge Organization Systems to Automatically Detect Forward-looking Sentiment in Company Reports to Infer Social Phenomena

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