Claim, Intent, and Persuasion: Organizational Legitimacy and the Rhetoric of Corporate Mission Statements

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One of the most notorious differences between the academic production on management carried out in Europe, compared to that in the United States, is the attention that European scholars give to the managerial discourse and rhetorics, especially in their textual or written embodiments. In fact, it is one of the few topics where the usual dominance of American scholarship (Engwall, 1998) does not hold. Discourses in management address basically two issues, most often of analytical intertwined in practice, differentiated here only because requirements. One, is the legitimization, both ideological and political, of management, basically geared at the justification of the differentials of power present in the coordination of collective action aimed at the consecution of economic objectives. As Bendix points out in Work and Authority in Industry, the most pressing challenge for this ideological work stems from the fact that in capitalism the logic of efficiency is hegemonic, and this is not easily conducive to the justification of status differentials. This is why managerial discourses are never open, straightforward, and why they are, in sum, clearly ideological.