Rhetorical Identification Research Articles

Pitching to Win Hearts: The Effects of Relational Communication on Entrepreneurial Funding Pitches

Entrepreneurial communication in funding pitches has long been considered a means of persuasion by which the pitching entrepreneur acquires resources. Angel investors on the receiving end of a pitch, however, report looking for more than just the attributes of an entrepreneur, prioritizing instead the ‘interpersonal chemistry’ and ‘collaborative potential’ they feel from an interaction when making investment decisions. Building on this existing literature, we introduce a relational view to funding pitches, that considers pitching as an exercise in relationship-building, as an alternative to the traditional model of communication as persuasion. In two experimental studies, we test the effects of verbal and nonverbal relational cues on perceptions of the entrepreneur’s coachability, and how willing investors are to make mentorship and/or monetary commitments to the entrepreneur. Counter to what we theorize, we find that high levels of relational communication, that builds rapport and rhetorical identification between interactants, makes an entrepreneur appear less coachable, and thereby renders them as less likely to be mentored. This relationship is further mediated by perceptions of the entrepreneur’s humility. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings, and distinguish between social competence and coachability competence.

On English Ceremonial Speeches from the Perspective of Identification Theory: A Case Study of British Prime Ministers’ New Year Speeches

Ceremonial speeches play different roles on different occasions, and Kenneth Burke's rhetorical Identification Theory provides a new perspective for the study of ritual speeches. Based on this theory, this study explores British Prime Ministers’ new year speeches with qualitative and quantitative methods. According to the findings, Identification by Inaccuracy is used most frequently, followed by Identification by Sympathy and Identification by Antithesis, the frequencies of which show no significant difference. The high frequency of Identification by Inaccuracy is mainly due to the repeated use of “we” and intensive depiction of future visions. Apparently, this strategy is in line with the thematic features of new year speeches, i.e., uniting people and looking into the future. This study, examining the rhetorical features of ceremonial speeches with the example of new year speeches, hopes to inspire speech enthusiasts with useful speaking strategies and rhetorical awareness.

#ShopSmall because #ArtAintFree: Instagram artists’ rhetorical identification with community values

This article analyzes #ShopSmall and other hashtags related to the small business economy used in Instagram posts by fine artists in one community to determine how artists perform rhetorical identification through shared values. The study upholds previous hashtag research in illustrating how hashtags contain extensive rhetorical activity beyond categorizing or labeling content. The study goes beyond existing research by demonstrating how hashtags enact different levels of rhetorical performance, including hashtags that perform a Shop Small ethos in service of individual values and hashtag clusters that draw on a collective Shop Small ethos to perform identification with community values, effectively transcending appeals for one's own sales by appealing to broader values of the small arts economy. The article concludes with a description of an online course module that applies concepts from the study to a senior undergraduate Rhetoric of Social Media course.

Rhetorical moves in disclosing fan identity in fandom scholarship

The position of the acafan in fan studies remains under negotiation, and authors must make choices about if and how identities as fans are disclosed within scholarship. An analysis of sixty-nine articles published in Transformative Works and Cultures identified the rhetorical moves made when disclosing fan identities and assessed the trends in these disclosures that are present across a sample of fan studies scholarship. These moves of disclosure facilitate rhetorical identification between author and audience, enable negotiation of overlapping fan and scholar identities, and demonstrate a valuing of fan identities in scholarship. The question of disclosing fannish identity reflects the ongoing evolutions of the role of acafandom and questions about the intersections of identity and scholarship. Making choices and practices explicit and visible will help acafans continue to examine the dual position of fan and scholar and will help better reflect the balance between the two.

Gamified Identification: Gamification and Identification in Indigenous Australian Interactive Documentaries

Abstract This article introduces a theory of gamified identification: rhetorical identification facilitated by the use of gaming technology in digital stories. To illuminate a theory of gamified identification, this article evaluates two interactive online documentaries by the mainstream broadcaster, SBS: My Grandmother’s Lingo and K’gari. Both use rhetorical techniques and gaming technology to immerse audiences in their communications. Through the prism of Indigenous rhetorics and digital rhetorics, this article asks, how does gamification in digital rhetoric assist identification? This article concludes that a theory of gamified identification can provide a method to analyse how digital games facilitate rhetorical listening between rhetors and their audiences. Gamified identification has four common foundations that scholars can use as points of analysis: audiences participate in the creation of the narrative; the digital design process involves stakeholders; ownership of the digital space of communication is moderated so that audiences have freedom of choice; and the texts not only provide a call-to-action, but provide audiences with the means to advocate for change.

Agency, Authority, and Epideictic Rhetoric: A Case Study of Bottom-Up Organizational Change

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics by Shannon Walters

“I’m On My Long Journey Home”: Rhetorical Identification in the Bluegrass Gospel Singing of Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers

The gospel songs of Ralph Stanley offer solace by means of identifi cation with the singer’s losses and struggles, but they also offer a metaphoric framework of journey and homecoming found in many folk and country songs. The framework gives shape and meaning to the troubled aspects of life that make up much of the content of bluegrass songs, sacred and secular. Referencing Kenneth Burke’s early theories of rhetorical identifi cation and symbolic appeal, this study reads the inclusion of gospel songs in stage and recorded performance as a secularized means of self-definition: singers and listeners are linked as people with common origins and destinations. While expected themes of repentance and faith run throughout these gospel songs, the progressive form of home that is lost and then recovered sets up a secular analogy to the story of sin and redemption so common in American Protestant Evangelicalism. By scattering these songs throughout a bluegrass performance, the journey toward home becomes the pathway by which all the troubles of betrayal, heartbreak, conflict, and hard times are borne and transformed. In place of creed or practices of piety, all are invited to find common purpose in the experiences of disappointment, regret, and loss in the knowledge that they are on the “Long Journey Home.”

Found Things: Genre, Narrative, and Identification in a Networked Activist Organization

ABSTRACTThis article examines the inter-relational role of genre and narrative in a social justice organization. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this test presents a process-centered approach using genre ecology modeling and narrative maps. This approach can help scholars understand how genre and narrative dialectically promote collaboration and coordination while simultaneously promoting the process of consubstantiality and rhetorical identification in networked organizations.

Teaching grounded audiences: Burke's identification in Facebook and composition

Abstract More college students than ever are participating in social networking sites such as Facebook and are engaged in composing messages to their virtual audience through these sites. Composition scholars have continued to stress the potential these sites have in their use in composition and analysis. Many have responded to this call in expanding the pedagogy about Facebook's uses in composition, but more research is needed regarding the theory of “transfer” to use students’ previous experience and prior knowledge with audience in social media to help them learn audience awareness in academic writing. Therefore, because Facebook and other social media sites demonstrate so much user generated text that students are familiar with, students can transfer their prior knowledge with audience awareness and appeal on social media to formal and academic writing. Facebook users consciously or unconsciously appeal to a specific audience, their friends. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke described this interaction as identification. He described how individuals will persuade their audience by “identifying” with them in certain ways. I claim Facebook can be used in composition to accomplish “high road” transfer with what students already know about friends and user profiles to teach them about audience awareness and appeal through Burke's identification theory. By implementing strategies of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical identification, students can better understand, analyze, and appeal to their potential audiences in both their social networking, in their academic writing, and in their everyday communication.

Rhetorical touch: disability, identification, haptics

Rhetorical Touch argues for an understanding of touch as a rhetorical art by approaching the sense of touch through the kinds of bodies and minds that rhetorical history and theory have tended to exclude. In resistance to a rhetorical tradition focused on shaping able bodies and neurotypical minds, Shannon Walters explores how people with various disabilities - psychological, cognitive, and physical - employ touch to establish themselves as communicators and to connect with disabled and nondisabled audiences. In doing so, she argues for a theory of rhetoric that understands and values touch as rhetorical. Essential to her argument is a redefinition of key concepts and terms - the rhetorical situation, rhetorical identification, and the appeals of ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic or message). By connecting Empedoclean and sophistic theories to Aristotelian rhetoric and Burkean approaches, Walters's methods mobilize a wide range of key figures in rhetorical history and theory in response to the context of disability. Using Empedocles' tactile approach to logos, Walters shows how the iterative writing processes of people with psychological disabilities shape crucial spaces for identification based on touch in online and real life spaces. Mobilizing the touch-based properties of the rhetorical practice of metis, Walters demonstrates how rhetors with autism approach the crafting of ethos in generative and embodied ways. Rereading the rhetorical practice of kairos in relation to the proximity between bodies, Walters demonstrates how writers with physical disabilities move beyond approaches of pathos based on pity and inspiration. The volume also includes a classroom-based exploration of the discourses and assumptions regarding bodies in relation to haptic, or touch-based, technologies. Because the sense of touch is the most persistent of the senses, Walters argues that in contexts of disability and in situations in which people with and without disabilities interact, touch can be a particularly vital instrument for creating meaning, connection, and partial identification. She contends that a rhetoric thus reshaped stretches contemporary rhetoric and composition studies to respond to the contributions of disabled rhetors and transforms the traditional rhetorical appeals and canons. Ultimately, Walters argues, a rhetoric of touch allows for a richer understanding of the communication processes of a wide range of rhetors who use embodied strategies.

A Cluster Analysis of Gender Discrimination in Chinese and Western News Media

This study is a rhetorical analysis of the gendered language both Chinese and Western news media perpetuate in depicting the female Chinese Olympian Ye Shiwen at the 2012 London Olympics. The analysis reveals that both media employ a language that constructs Ye as an immature, childlike being whose achievements are not only unexpected but unnatural. After initially identifying Ye with the doping history of Chinese athletes in the 1990s, Western journalists depicted her as a passive victim of unethical child training programs, described in terms which imply a rhetorical identification with China’s doping history. In its turn, Chinese news media defended the integrity of its Olympic ethos by casting Ye as a dutiful daughter, and innocent child; this construction of her ethos absolves her of blame by denying her agency, effectively placing strict boundaries around her ownership of achievement, boundaries which reflect normalized assumptions of submissiveness as appropriate female behavior. The readiness of both the Western and Chinese media to default to a rhetoric of gender discrimination when norms are challenged demonstrates how the Olympic ideal of surpassing boundaries can still be a closed border for Chinese women.

A Rhetorical Identification Analysis of English Political Public Speaking: John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address

A Rhetorical Identification Analysis of English Political Public Speaking: John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address

Identification as Civic Literacy in Digital Museum Projects: A Case Study of the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum

Scholars have observed that rhetorical identification is a common strategy used by both physical and virtual museums to engage the public in their narratives of civic history. This essay explores what happens when service-learning students enter this context to build digital projects as agents and as objects of identification. Drawing from my ten-year partnership with the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, I illustrate how identification can arise within a museum-based digital project, how it can enrich and complicate the project, and how my students and I attempt to balance our insider/outsider roles as authors and interpreters of community history.

Interface of Political Opportunism and Islamic Extremism in Bangladesh: Rhetorical Identification in Government Response

Critical approaches to study Bangladesh's political development have been widespread, especially in the fields of political science and international relations. What is missing from the existing critical account is an examination of the language that Bangladesh's political leaders use as symbolic means. This paper will critically analyze a rhetorical event, Address to the Nation by Begum Khaleda Zia, former Prime Minister of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, at the Fourth Anniversary of the former Alliance Government at Dhaka, Bangladesh on October 10, 2005. The purpose is to investigate the responses of the then Bangladesh government to growing Islamic militancy in the country. Kenneth Burke's concept of identification will be used to this end.

Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autofictions

I finally gave up on Catholicism and admitted to Duane Dunham that he knew more about Jesus than I did. We went into boiler room under barracks and he called down Holy Ghost to save me. I took Jesus as my savior and became a Baptist right on spot. --Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (131) I took to rising at 3:00 A.M. to pray and read my Bible.... But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn't have peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. --Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (133) It is Christmas Eve in year of Huitzilopochtli, 1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil's Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of sun have come to drive money-changers out of richest temple in Los Angeles. --Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Revolt of Cockroach People (11) Scholars of Chicano literature have not yet explored nuanced religious content of Oscar Zeta Acosta's two autofictions, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of Cockroach People (1973). (1) Perhaps this is because scenes of Acosta's conversion to Baptist Church in 1954, his deconversion two years later, and his turn back to Catholicism are underplayed in these narratives, and throughout both texts Acosta's autobiographical personae continually make light of deity, religion, and religious practices. And yet, certain passages, sometimes tenebrous or ironic, and supported by extratextual material, betray how deeply religion affected his life. I offer corrective readings for these texts that are attentive to significance of religion for Acosta and thus round out portrait of this important Chicano figure. Recent articles and books look at Acosta's autobiography in context of fat studies (Chamberlain), testimonial satire (Hames-Garcia, Dr. Gonzo and Fugitive), a bildungsroman of Chicano counterculture (Lee, Chicanismo), and magicorealism (Aldama, Postethnie and Oscar). Other than scholars noting that Acosta established a rhetorical identification with Jesus, instantiated in his inaccurate reiteration of his age at time of narration as thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he died (Autobiography 18), and H6ctor Calderon's view that Autobiography follows trajectory of a Christian narrative of guilt, confession and redemption (98-99), only one article specifically deals with role of religion in Acosta's texts. Joe D. Rodriguez's 1981 assessment of religion in three Chicano novels acknowledges religious dilemmas faced by Chicano writers as they confront a multiplicity of blended religio-cultural traditions (Catholicism, curandismo or folk healing, and indigenous Mexican religions) and must reconcile their religious identification with Chicano group identity. Rodriguez fails, however, to grasp complex role of religion in Acosta's texts; his final analysis implies that Acosta sublimates his religious yearnings into drug use, which in turn helps him adapt to opposing religious outlooks. Rodriguez's article thus does little to further an understanding of complex social forces behind Acosta's conversion and deconversion to Baptist Church and role of Catholicism in his life. A more comprehensive approach to matter of religion in Acosta's texts is long overdue. My own research suggests that Acosta's religious experiences instantiate his failed assimilation into mainstream white America and his return to an ethnically symbolic Mexican American Catholicism. However, I register a number of caveats in making these claims. It is difficult to hypothesize widespread sociological significance or to make broad generalizations about Mexican American experience from Acosta's highly experimental autofictions. Furthermore, it is somewhat perilous to claim that Acosta's fictionalized narratives necessarily reflect his own religious experiences or identities. …

Corporations brought to you by NASCAR: rhetorical identification through sponsorship

This study approaches corporate sponsorship of sport as identification rhetoric to further understand the relationship created between consumers and corporate sponsors. The focus is on the corporate sponsorship of the NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Sprint Cup Series, examining how sponsorship messages utilise identification tactics. The study finds that messages rhetorically create identification through common ground and unifying symbol strategies between the sponsor and sponsored activity, and between the sponsor and consumer.

Negotiating Public and Professional Interests: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Debate Concerning the Regulation of Midwifery in Ontario, Canada

This article investigates the uneasy process of integrating midwifery's alternative, women-centered model of childbirth care within the medically-dominated healthcare system in Canada. It analyses the impure processes of rhetorical identification and differentiation that characterized the debate about how to regulate midwifery in Ontario by examining a selection of submissions from diverse health care groups with vested interest in the debate's outcome. In divergent ways, these groups strategically appeal to the value of the "public interest" in order to advance professional concerns. The study considers the implications of this rhetorical process for re-defining midwifery's distinctive professional identity in relation to other health professions, to the state, and to the women for whom midwives care. Likewise, it suggests the relevance of rhetorical analysis for understanding the discursive formation and re-formation of health models, values, and professions in Western culture.

Rhetorical Identification in Paul's Autobiographical Narrative

Rhetorical Identification in Paul's Autobiographical Narrative