Management Rhetoric as Performance, Perspective and Persuasion: A Scriptive Reading of Management Theory Texts

Abstract

The texts of management theory are extensively cited and paraphrased in academic research and teaching, and in business practice. They have only occasionally been subjected to critical interpretation. My inquiry signals this space in management research and then enters into it. I ask how critical reading can effectively explore text-making in management theory, and whether text analysis might discover previously unrecognised meaning in management theory. Having established that critical management scholarship has not accessed the literary theory that would support explorations of text-making in management, I transport relevant theory across the disciplinary divide. Drawing on a wide range of literary theories, I develop an approach to critical reading, a method of text analysis, that I have called ‘scriptive reading’. Scriptive reading is a form of rhetorical analysis that acknowledges the role of dominant (standard) readings in textual interpretation; moves on to a critical reading that explores aspects of performance (author-reader relationships), perspective (worldviews) and persuasion (persuasive rhetorical strategies) in the text; and, in a final reflexive reading, considers the potential impacts of a particular reading experience on reading outcomes. In keeping with reader-response theory the shift is from the writer to the reader of the text. For analysis I select six influential management theory texts – authored by Frederick Taylor, Mary Follett, Peter Drucker, Henry Mintzberg, Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Charles Handy. Reading scriptively, I identify ten variously shared performance characteristics in these texts; isolate ten precepts that are common to the perspective generally shared by them, and demonstrate that all six texts employ similarly persuasive rhetorical strategies. My findings focus on the narratives of management theory exposed in the six readings. I discover that five of the six texts have built a narrative around a utopian root metaphor. The sixth text, authored by Mary Follett, does not construct a utopian worldview, but it does share common performance attributes and persuasive strategies. Although widely acknowledged to be theoretically profound and relevant, Follett’s text has not historically enjoyed the status of the other five. I conclude that reader identification with the subtexts of management theory may have more influence on scholarly recognition of them than do the performance attributes and the persuasive rhetorical strategies of the texts. The significance of my conclusions suggests that scriptive reading provides readers of management theory with a useful method of text analysis.