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Rhetorical Device (rhetorical + device)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences71%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting28%

Selected Abstracts

Stepping Out: Rhetorical Devices and Culture Change Management in the UK Civil Service

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 4 2001
Amanda Driscoll
Organizational culture is the pattern of values and beliefs held by members of an organization and the management of culture is now one of the most frequently discussed of all organizational concepts. The excitement associated with culture is attributable to two factors. First, it is argued that culture is the key to organizational performance; simply stated, a strong organizational culture can be a source of competitive advantage. Second, culture is perceived as an alternative method of control to traditional and technocratic forms of management and can be manipulated to ensure that employees are enthusiastic and committed to organizational objectives. Despite the extensive interest in this topic, culture remains an elusive concept. This paper investigates the nature of culture and considers strategies for introducing cultural change. Specifically, the aims of the paper are threefold. First, to locate and explain the interests and significance of culture change for the public sector. Second, using a case study of a newly created agency, to investigate the problems and issues affecting cultural change in the civil service. Third, to reassess and critically evaluate the claims for culture management made in the literature. Finally, this paper questions some of the assumptions in the literature, which with few exceptions are biased toward top management and the unitary conception of organization, an ideological frame of reference which is particularly problematic in the public sector. [source]

Expressing the Middle English I

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2009
Isabel Davis
This article surveys the rich ways in which Middle English authors used the word I, considering what it can tell us about the medieval conceptualizations of subjectivity. It argues against the idea of a sharp break between medieval and early modern accounts of selfhood, and in favour of a more sensitive understanding of the genres of medieval first-person writing, suggesting reasons why those genres don't easily correspond to categories of modern life-writing. This article considers allegory, the rhetorical device of the persona, and spiritual and allegorical ,autobiographies' in Middle English in order to arrive at an account of how medieval authors revised the influential accounts of subjectivity that they inherited from late Antique writers like Boethius and St Augustine and dramatized the subject as a site of competing psychological faculties which were in constant dialogue and distress. This article gathers its evidence from, and offers specific readings of a range of Middle English literature by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Thomas Usk, Thomas Hoccleve, Osbern Bokenham, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, the York dramatist and, of course, Anon. [source]

War and peace: the description of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Frescoes in Saint Bernardino's 1425 Siena Sermons

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 3 2001
N Ben-Aryeh Debby
The paper draws attention to a description by Saint Bernardino in 1425 of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's famous fresco cycle in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico. Bernardino uses the frescoes that Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted in the years 1338,1339 in the context of a staged peace ceremony and as a tool of persuasion in order to achieve civic peace in the city. Bernardino's description illustrates how Lorenzetti's painted scheme was viewed by a leading cleric and his audience in the early fifteenth century. Unlike the few other medieval reports of the frescoes available to us, this description is long and detailed, and adds valuable information on the frescoes' particulars. It is particularly interesting that some eighty years after their completion these Lorenzetti paintings were being interpreted as exemplifications of the conditions of war and peace rather than the complex political allegory favoured by many modern scholars. The description is shaped by the historical setting of Siena in 1425 and plays an intriguing role in the sermon itself as a rhetorical device to persuade the listeners to reconcile. [source]

What Does ,Efficiency' Mean in the Context of the Global Refugee Regime?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2006
Alexander Betts
The language of ,efficiency' has increasingly been used as a rhetorical device to legitimate new approaches to refugee policy; in particular, extraterritorial processing and ,protection-in-regions-of-origin'. This article aims to explore what ,efficiency' might mean from the perspective of the global refugee regime in order to, firstly, expose the hidden assumptions implicit in the use of the ,efficiency' discourse in the current debate and, secondly, to explore what the concept might offer in defining the normative contours of a future regime structure. Although the concept is acknowledged to be inevitably political and to carry epistemological assumptions, reconstructing the concept by drawing on economic theory is argued to offer a means to improve the quality of debate on the allocation of resources within the refugee regime. Indeed, a critical application of the concepts of productive, allocative and dynamic efficiency is shown to offer far more nuanced insights for sustainable refugee protection than is implied by the contemporary debate's political manipulation of the term. The article assesses both the theoretical and policy implications that derive from a more rigorous conceptualisation of the meaning of efficiency. [source]

Towards a Metaphorology of the Novel

ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 3 2006
Metaphor, Narration, the Early Modern Novel
Most of the attempts to define the novel seem condemned in advance to an insignificant vagueness or a restricted view on the genre. Not surprisingly, writers have often resorted to analogy and metaphorical language to qualify the genre and talk about the essential aims of their work, thus overcoming the novel's resistance to definition. After briefly examining a number of theoretical implications that this question raises, I will investigate two metaphorical constellations with which the novelistic genre has been identified in early modern Europe (Mateo Alemán and the Marquis de Sade). I will tackle these metaphors not only as rhetorical devices, but also and foremost as authentic ways of grasping the connections between writer, novel form and reader on the one hand, and the novel and its larger cultural-historical context on the other. As such, this essay wants to be a contribution to what one could call, in line with Hans Blumenberg, a metaphorology of the novel. [source]

Laughing With The Gurus

BUSINESS STRATEGY REVIEW, Issue 3 2002
David Greatbatch
Management gurus are among the most influential public orators of the day. But mastery of age,old rhetorical devices, including the use of humour, is central to their effectiveness. [source]

Liminality, Authority, and Value: Reported Speech in Epideictic Rhetoric

COMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2004
Kathleen Glenister Roberts
Reported speech,the verbal phenomenon wherein a speaker attributes words or ideas to a previous speaker,is a highly potent rhetorical practice in epideictic oratory. Its role is not as straightforward as one might suppose, as exemplified by a case study of Native American powwow rhetoric. In this study, epideictic speakers typify and construct reported speech, using both analytic and formulaic modes to elaborate on ceremonial messages. I suggest that the role of reported speech is twofold: to validate authority and to construct value. The formulae in particular are useful rhetorical devices in reifying "equality" in powwow social structure. Epideictic rhetoric employing reported speech does not merely perform the significance of a given society; it constructs and manipulates interaction in order to minimize differential identities. More importantly, reported speech is a particular triadic discourse that parallels the transformation phase of ritual, known as liminality. This essay asserts that liminality is at the heart of all epideictic rhetoric and is thus crucial for understanding ritual discourse such as reported speech. [source]