Rhetorical Legitimacy

This paper will seek to explore the organizational legitimacy of the Dove: Men + Care campaign that was released by Unilever during the Super Bowl of 2010. Metzer (2001) argues that legitimacy has become a “fundamental issue for many organizations as they try to manage problems which range from questions regarding daily business practices (e.g., racism at Texaco) and operations (e.g., service outages at AT&T) to crisis events such as plane crashes (e.g., Valujet, Alaska Air) or running an oil tanker onto a reef (Exxon)” (p. 368). This paper explores the legitimacy questions that arise when exploring the gendered communication within Dove’s Men + Care campaign. To gather data, this study utilized Blasio’s (2006) concept of rhetorical legitimacy as a means to explain the rhetorical tactics organizations use to convince the publics that they are useful, responsible and deserve their support. The results of this paper illustrate that while the campaign did not violate societal norms, it does present troubling ideals of hegemonic masculinity and male homosociability.

This article examines how dynasties applied the Five Elements theory in their respective legitimation discourses throughout the history of imperial China. Drawing on both documentary and visual sources, I reveal that the Liao, Jin, and Yuan rulers constructed different dynastic lineages that challenged the “orthodox” dynastic succession pattern formulated by Han Chinese dynasties. In particular, I will show that the Yuan tacitly invoked Metal as its dynastic element and white as its imperial color. I argue that the Yuan choice of dynastic element essentially claimed succession to the Jurchen Jin, another non-Han conquest dynasty, rather than to the Song as scholars have previously assumed. However, these constructions were later negated by the Ming dynasty, which restored a purely Han Chinese dynastic lineage that excluded the Liao, Jin, and Yuan. These ideological conflicts, which were ultimately grounded in ethnic tensions between Han and non-Han peoples, eventually led to the disappearance of the Five Element theory in the Qing political rhetoric. This article sheds new light on understanding how a dynasty engaged its cultural heritage and ethnic background in its political ideology and how it perceived its own place in the Chinese dynastic lineage.

Although autoethnography has been used in other fields, rhetorical scholars have been slow to embrace this methodology. However, a handful of examples of rhetorical criticism demonstrate how embracing the personal experiences of the critic and writing about those experiences can provide the reader with a great-er understanding of rhetorical processes. This essay proposes some potential ways to connect rhetorical criticism and autoethnography by focusing on the role of emotion in rhetorical discourse and the role of the critic. The essay concludes with some broad guidelines for writing rhetorical autoethnography.

Why and how do nations turn to religion to justify claims for statehood? This article addresses this question in both theory and practice, showing that religion plays multiple legitimating roles that shift dynamically according to the success they yield for national movements. I posit four legitimating models: (1) nationalism instead of religion (“secular nationalism”), (2) nationalism as a religion (“civil religion”), (3) religion as a resource for nationalism (“auxiliary religion”), and (4) religion as a source of nationalism (“chosen people”). Empirically, I analyze the roles of religion in Zionist efforts to legitimate a Jewish state in Palestine. I argue that Zionism has responded to persistent delegitimation by expanding the role of religion in its political legitimation. The right of self-determination, which stands at the core of the “secular Zionism” legitimation, has given way to leveraging Judaism, which in turn has been eclipsed by constructing a Zionist civil religion and a “chosen people” justification.

In this article, which focuses on different concepts of state-building and legitimacy as used in the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature, I suggest that recent debates may be categorized in a two-by-two matrix. The axes concern the choice between a normative or a sociological perspective on the one hand, and a focus on state institutions or on society on the other. The article identifies an empiricist-sociological approach. Still, the almost exclusive reliance on an ontology of entities and their attributes hampers foci on relations as constituting both “insides” and “outsides” in state-building, and on legitimacy as important in its own right as ongoing public contestations. In a concluding section, I explore the purchase of a relational sociology for future studies of legitimacy in state-building.

Standing at the edge of life's abyss, we seek meaningful order. We commonly find this 'symbolic immortality' in religion, civilization, state and nation. What happens, however, when the nation itself appears mortal? The Mortality and Morality of Nations seeks to answer this question, theoretically and empirically. It argues that mortality makes morality, and right makes might; the nation's sense of a looming abyss informs its quest for a higher moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality. The book investigates nationalism's promise of moral immortality and its limitations via three case studies: French Canadians, Israeli Jews, and Afrikaners. All three have been insecure about the validity of their identity or the viability of their polity, or both. They have sought partial redress in existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation and for the nation's very existence.

How should we study the language of political legitimation? Incipient scholarship increasingly seeks to bridge the conceptual schism between the sociological is and the philosophical ought in the study of legitimacy, looking at public legitimating discourses to uncover the actual social attitudes toward prescriptive principles. And while this research agenda has recently gained traction, its methodology remains opaque. This paper suggests that normative concepts, central to the argumentations that hold common basic beliefs and discourse together, can allow us to tap into the language of legitimation. Normative concepts can be traced via mixed methods research, incorporating the quantitative method of corpus linguistics and the qualitative method of discourse-tracing – two techniques that mutually enrich and complement each other. By illuminating changes in the sort, scale, and scope of normative concepts, this mode of inquiry can explicate the language of legitimation and advance our understanding of sociopolitical legitimacy.

The paper summarizes the research the author conducted under the individually targetable mass surveillance systems of the P. R. China dictatorial regime with cyber sovereignty claims. In the complexities of cyber security and mass surveillance, the author adopted natural epistemology in counteracting dictatorial power influences for the resilience for democratic formation and for scientific research security from being utilized by autocratic power ambitions. The research generated some qualitative aspects of evidence and analysis on the dictatorial and autocratic power imposition via market incrementalism that impacts on international relations. The document also serves as a supplement to the author's astronomical researches. Even though the astronomical researches primarily served for the author's mental and psychological health, the a posteriori confirmation and analysis with empirical researches in white hole and black hole gradually becomes of the author's scientific priority. Both the astronomical and social science researches suggest, even with the growing emphasis on data in the STEM and social sciences, without proper values and scientific rigor, the growing popularity in big data may risk of a bubble economy in modern science.

During the last decades of Russian politics, President Vladimir Putin has consistently enjoyed markedly high approval rates and seemingly benefitted from charismatic legitimacy, whereas systemic legal-rational legitimacy has remained on a low level. This paper discusses in general terms the dilemmas tied to political succession in non-democratic settings where legitimacy is built on grounds that are not legal-rational in the Weberian sense. Can such legitimacy be transferred from an incumbent to his/her successor? Against the backdrop of these general perspectives, the paper addresses prospects for the succession process that lies ahead once Russian politics enter the post-Putin era.

This article proposes to analyze the socio-linguistic practices documented in inscriptions from South and Southeast Asia between the fourth and sixteenth centuries as a type of “functional diglossia” characteristic of legal discourse in states influenced by the transregional Dharmaśāstra tradition in Sanskrit.  This diglossia can take two forms. Sanskrit itself may be used as an acrolect, either alone or in bilingual records, where it has primarily expressive or ceremonial functions. But the focus in this article is on the other form: the use of a highly Sanskritized, formal and formulaic register of the local vernaculars. Starting with some observations about the impact of Sanskrit legal discourse on Old Khmer and Old Javanese legal records, comparable inscriptions in Old Tamil are examined in detail, noting the influence of first Prakrit and then Sanskrit on legal idiom. It is concluded that use of this Sanskritized register reflects not simply the prestige of Brahmanical high culture but also the perceived value and utility of an imported specialized conceptual system of law and administration. This study further suggests that the introduction of written legal documentation, simultaneous with the spread of Brahmanical legal ideas, led in turn to the formal recognition of local customary norms as law, in keeping with the Dharmaśāstric principle that customary norms constitute Dharma.

This paper takes a critical perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and examines the ways in which an industry organization discursively manages the relationship between the industry and its stakeholders in a situation where the legitimacy of the industry is called into question. Drawing on the literature on organizational narcissism and sensemaking the paper develops the construct of narcissist CSR orientation and empirically elaborates on three defensive rhetorical strategies through which the organization makes sense of the accountability and responsibility of the industry for the negative societal effects of their business. The paper advances knowledge in the field of critical CSR by proposing a new framework for critically examining organization-stakeholder relationships and organizational responses to stakeholder demands in contexts where the interests of organizations are in conflict with the public good.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-014-2298-1

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760