This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the...

Corporate discourse examines business communication practices from a discourse perspective, looking in detail at the ways in which corporations around the world communicate with individuals, with other collective entities and with the world at large. It is concerned with understanding how...

This book treats seriously one of the fundamental trends characterizing contemporary institutions--namely, the inability to establish a ground from which purpose and direction can be defined. It questions the core trope of "permanent change" and exposes its emptiness in a thorough and considered...