Reconceptualizing rhetorical practices in organizations: The impact of social media on internal communications

Reconceptualizing rhetorical practices in organizations: The impact of social
media on internal communications
Jimmy Huang a,
*, Joa ̃o Baptista a , Robert D. Galliers b
a Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
b Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, USA
1. Introduction
Recent technological advances in intranet systems have shifted
organizational communication from conventional channels, such
as printed media, face-to-face interactions and email to such
company wide web-based platforms as these [7,38]. This shift has
recently been accelerated by the advent of social media which are
defined as ‘‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that
allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’’
[33,61]. While many organizations may only partially and
selectively incorporate certain aspects of the array of applications
and features available, the growing incorporation of social media in
organizations has led to a further significant reshaping of intra-
organizational communication [21,25,45]. While the intranet still
plays a major role as a centrally managed repository of ‘official’
information, various forms of social media, such as blogging and
wikis, have been introduced to allow employees to engage in
conversations across functions, regions and hierarchical levels
[39]. Two issues that emerge from this new trend are clear. First,
when incorporating social media into an organization’s communi-
cation, some adjustment in its usage is often required to fulfill the
organization’s communication needs and to comply with its
governance principles [6]. Such adjustments can potentially
provide a rich setting to extend our understanding of how social
media are used in different contexts. Second, social media
stimulate engagement, participation and exchange of information
[33,53] in a manner that can challenge established central control
of internal communication channels [14], thereby providing
another fertile research opportunity. Balmer [3] describes such
shifts as these by contrasting univocality with multivocality [4,64].
Balmer [3] refers to univocality as the control of what is often a
single source of voice that is legitimized by an organization to
present the organization and avoid ambiguity in the communicat-
ed messages and their intended meanings. Multivocality suggests
the fostering of a communication culture within which alternative
and multiple views can be freely voiced and contested. Even
though embracing multivocality through social media is not the
only way to enhance the strategic values of internal communica-
tion, multivocality, facilitated by social media, is believed to be
more beneficial than univocality in stimulating employees’
engagement and facilitating cross-functional innovation by
providing a means by which different ideas, viewpoints and
concerns are freely expressed, effectively exchanged, consulted
and consolidated [3,64]. One of the most important questions for
senior management raised by Balmer [3] is whether they should
retain control by pursuing univocality or loosen their grip on
discourse by embracing social media and multivocality.
Information & Management 50 (2013) 112–124
A R T I C L E I N F O
Article history:
Received 23 May 2012
Received in revised form 10 September 2012
Accepted 4 November 2012
Available online 11 November 2012
Keywords:
Rhetorical practices
Intra-organizational communication
Social media
Interpretive
Multiple case study research
A B S T R A C T
While intranets have become a central information hub for employees in different parts of an
organization, they have also played a key role as a rhetorical tool for senior managers. With the advent of
social media, this is increasingly so. How such technologies as these are incorporated into organizations’
‘rhetorical practices’ is an important, yet under-researched topic. To explore this research agenda, we
examine the effects of social media on established and emerging flows of rhetorical practices in
organizations, focusing in particular on the expanding, and in some cases switching, roles played by
senior management and employees. We conceptualize organizational rhetorical practices as the
combination of strategic intent, message and media, and discuss the interplay between rhetors and their
audience. Adopting an interpretive, multiple case study approach, we study the use of social media in
three multi-national organizations in the telecommunications industry. Our findings reveal that social
media enable and facilitate the shaping of organizational rhetorical practices by (i) adding multivocality;
(ii) increasing reach and richness in communication, and (iii) enabling simultaneous consumption and
co-production of rhetorical content.
ß 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: [phone].
E-mail address: [e-mail] (J. Huang).
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2012.11.003

Cheney et al. [11] highlight the importance of research in this
general topic area and argue that the tension between univocality
and multivocality has had an impact on various aspects of
organizational communication. They see this impact as being
particularly apparent in the rhetorical practices in organizations.
To establish the conceptual grounding for our research, we
incorporate two of the prior accounts [11,48] and define rhetorical
practices as ‘‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human
activity’’ [48, p. 2] of using persuasive language for the purposes of
negotiating, obtaining and sustaining support and consensus [11].
Rhetorical practices represent a key aspect of management and
leadership in any organization [11]. Notwithstanding the growing
importance of rhetorical practices and associated communication
technologies – in this case social media – for organizations, Huang
and Galliers [27] suggest that our understanding of this
phenomenon is still lacking and call for more research in this
arena. The rationale underpinning the examination of organiza-
tional rhetorical practices and social media in conjunction is
twofold. First, the potential of social media to revolutionize the
very basis of communication has rapidly become a reality
[22,33,39]. Without taking into account the influence of social
media, we run the risk of under-theorizing their influence on
organizational rhetorical practices. Second, while the need for
adjustment when adopting social media in organizational contexts
has been recognized [6], how such adjustments may facilitate
rhetorical practices, and how rhetorical practices may influence
the use made of social media, are yet to be explored. The current
research is therefore an attempt to improve our understanding of
the influence of social media on rhetorical practices within
organizational contexts.
The structure of the paper is as follows. We first conceptualize
rhetorical practices in the context of organizational communica-
tion. With this as background, we review the use of social media in
corporate intranets. Having explained the methods underpinning
our research, we provide empirical details of the three cases
depicting the dynamic interplay amongst the various conceptual
components of rhetorical practices in the organizations studied.
We then compare and contrast our findings with the current
literature to establish our theoretical contribution – in particular a
reconceptualization of existing models of rhetoric with a view to
incorporating the effects of social media on internal communica-
tions in organizations. We conclude by identifying theoretical and
practical implications of our research.
2. Conceptual foundations
Rhetoric represents ‘‘the humanistic tradition for the study of
persuasion’’ [11, p. 79]. While rhetoric is common to all types of
communication, in an organizational context, rhetoric is used with
specific intent, often to negotiate, generate and reinforce consen-
sus in situations of uncertainty and emerging possibilities
[23,50,51,56]. Organizational rhetorical practices are not merely
the mechanism that helps to establish and maintain consensus in
times of uncertainty and ambiguity [12,50,62], they also symbolize
the ‘‘logics of human relations’’ [11], serving a constitutive function
in shaping institutional change [19,56]. With these underlying
theoretical concepts in mind, it should be noted that, while rhetoric
and rhetoric practices are essentially a distinctive form of
communication, not all communications are deployed for rhetori-
cal purposes [12]. This distinction serves as a crucial conceptual
boundary in the way in which we frame our research and establish
our theoretical foundation.
For rhetorical practices to be persuasive, several distinctive yet
interrelated components are required: (i) the rhetor; (ii) the
rhetor’s strategic intent; (iii) the message; (iv) the media deployed,
and (v) the intended audiences [11,12,15,23,31,50,59]. Fig. 1
groups three of these elements: (i) strategic intent, (ii) message
and (iii) media, to represent the key conceptual components of
‘‘rhetorical resource’’ [31]. Rhetorical resource ‘‘serves the interests
and actions of multiple constituents within ambiguous contexts’’
[31, p. 240]. This is because, once rhetorics are displayed within the
public domain (e.g., through meetings, newsletters, strategy plan
and/or intranet), they become available for all organizational
members to draw on with a view to making sense of ambiguity and
to achieving consensus. While strategic intent reflects why the
rhetor initiates the rhetoric, the message represents what the
rhetor wants to communicate. The media is an indication of how
organizational rhetorical practices are carried out. We use the term
‘media’ in an encompassing sense to include all types of
communication channels because multiple types of media are
often available and are used by actors, in combination, for effective
communication [33].
In order to convince their audiences, rhetors develop messages
to convey intent, which is often strategic in nature. The type of
message will depend on the intended purpose [11], as illustrated
by a study by Vaara and Tienari [59], where the CEO’s rhetorical
intent was to overcome resistance during the restructuring of his
organization by emphasizing that redundancies were for the
greater and long-term well-being of the company. As suggested by
Hirsch [26] and Alvesson and Ka ̈ rreman [1], even though content
and strategic intent matter greatly, the selection and deployment
of media to promote the rhetoric can significantly impact the
outcome. The result is reflected in audiences’ cognitive and/or
behavioral changes, or in many cases, their resistance to change
[19]. It should be noted, however, that not all organizational
rhetorical practices come equipped with an adequate feedback
mechanism [10]. The dotted line in Fig. 1 is included to indicate the
different possible ways for rhetors to receive feedback–feedback
that can be made available via certain media to certain audiences.
Feedback is represented using a dotted line because it is not always
available in the context of organizational rhetorical practices.
Drawing on the existing literature, we further conceptualize these
elements of organizational rhetorical practices below.
A rhetor is an institutionally authorized speaker who represents
the voice of an organization or part thereof [12,15]. In understand-
ing rhetoric in organizations, while it is important to recognize
who the rhetors are, it is also necessary to take into account who
and what they represent. According to Crable [12, p. 119],
‘‘organizational affiliation is not merely an attribute or character-
istic of rhetors; it is the sine qua non of rhetor identification.’’
Typically, the number of rhetors is kept limited to avoid disrupting
an organization’s univocality [11]; in particular, when dealing withRhetorAudienceMessageStrategicintentMediaFeedbackOrganisational culture &Institutional normsRhetoricalresource
Fig. 1. Conceptual components in traditional models of organizational rhetorical
practices.
J. Huang et al. / Information & Management 50 (2013) 112–124 113

external audiences, such as in branding [24] and crisis manage-
ment [2]. Organizations limit the number of rhetors to enable
senior management to retain control of communication and avoid
alternative voices challenging and undermining authority [10,51].
However, by limiting the number of voices, organizations hinder
the exchange of different perspectives [50] and wider representa-
tion of diverse interests, especially in the context of innovation and
change [23,41,50] and empowerment [14].
As Balmer [3] and Cheney et al. [11] argue, the tension between
univocality and multivocality can be a trade-off for many
organizations. This is because the two represent an ‘either-or’
decision to which management has to commit. Maintaining both is
traditionally viewed as not being viable because, once organiza-
tions allow multiple voices to be heard, they immediately lose
control over the dominant discourse within the organization.
However, ultimately, the flow and variety of communication is
influenced by the institutional norms and culture of the
organization in which they are embedded [5,31,62]. While this
point is raised by Balmer [3] and Cheney et al. [11], they do not
account for the effects resulting from the alternative approaches
which management might consider in managing the trade-off. For
instance, can organizations simultaneously benefit from univo-
cality and multivocality? If so, what are the factors and
mechanisms which allow organizations to do so? Our study
addresses both of these questions.
A message with strategic intent refers to a rhetor’s representation
of a rhetorical situation by which (s)he aims to persuade an
audience. According to Crable [12, p. 120], ‘‘rhetors who actually
represent purely their own views may be extinct, if they ever
existed. Instead, rhetors speak for, or represent, certain—some-
times multiple, overlapping, or complementary—‘organized inter-
ests’.’’ One of the key functions of the message is to achieve
consensus by providing the intended audience with a ‘‘transcen-
dental big picture’’ or a ‘‘simplified and understandable official
view’’ to guide the way by which they can make sense of
circumstances and take action as a result [50]. Hence, what
underpins the message construction process is not just the
strategic intent of the rhetor and the selection of suitable media,
but also the cultural assumptions and institutionalized norms on
which he/she draws. As noted by Cheney et al. [11], rhetoric
‘‘reproduces and reinforces the cultural assumption on which it is
based’’.
Sillince [50] suggests that different messages, and in many
cases their effective blending and ordering, are required to
leverage different strategic intents. Cheney et al. [11] categorize
strategic intent in four areas: (i) responding to the contingencies/
uncertainties that the organization is encountering; (ii) anticipat-
ing future situations and emphasizing the need to address them
(e.g., [59]); (iii) changing or modifying the audiences’ ‘framing’ to
make sense of what is going on (e.g., [32]), and (iv) shaping and
sustaining an organization’s identity (e.g., [52]). Due to the
intertwining of the message and the strategic intent embedded
in it, each cannot be examined in isolation.
Media is the vehicle by which a message is delivered to certain
audiences, and through which feedback may be provided back to
the rhetor. Different media have the potential to be more or less
useful in particular rhetorical situations [11]. The selection of
suitable media depends on the content of the message and the
rhetor’s strategic intent, as well as on the relationship and extent to
which there is shared understanding between rhetor and intended
audience [59]. Specifically, the rhetor needs to take into account
the media’s ability to reach target audiences, and the degree of
richness that the media can provide. According to Evans and
Wurster [20], reach refers to the number of potential audiences to
be targeted at any one point in time, while the level of richness is
viewed as three interrelated elements, namely: (i) the ability to
accommodate the bandwidth of the message; (ii) the ability to
customize the message, and (iii) the level of interactivity that can
be mobilized during the communication. They propose that the
relationship between reach and richness is a trade-off that the
rhetor has to consider. In other words, when the message is
developed for broader reach, its richness may be compromised,
and vice versa.
Even though conventional channels, such as via paper, email,
and face-to-face communication, remain important for communi-
cating in organizations, intranets have gradually been adding to
such channels as these. Intranets are often used for strategic
purposes – to reinforce key corporate values; policies; strategy and
culture, for example – through text; sound; images and video, as
well as through page layouts; designs; branding, and navigations
[7]. Intranets also enable wider reach across organizations and
facilitate knowledge sharing and the building of communities of
practice (e.g., [8,54,60]). They can in some cases, however, be
developed with insufficient capacity to permit customization and
facilitate interactivity. They can also lead to unintended con-
sequences [46], such as the creation of ‘‘electronic fences’’ –
barriers to communication in other words [42]. Organizations have
recently started to incorporate social media as additional services
on their intranets, capitalizing on the participative and interactive
nature of these new tools [9,34]. One of the opportunities sought
by organizations is to use social media to increase reach, without
compromising on richness, as had been the case with traditional
media.
Audiences and their feedback is one of the key challenges in
managing internal communication in organizations because of the
complex, inconsistent and potentially conflicting nature of
feedback. As noted by Crable [12, p. 118], ‘‘just as rhetors’ realities
are inseparable from their organizational affiliation, the same may
be said of their audiences: Any ‘one’ audience member may have
several or many organizational identifications which, while
sometimes overlapping or conflicting in interests, all help define
that individual’’. Organizational rhetorical practices may therefore
have contradictory effects, such as in fostering behavioral and
cognitive change [51], while at the same time encouraging
resistance to change and dissent [19,56].
The role of feedback depends on the media used to carry the
rhetorical message. For instance, such media as corporate reports
and mission statements do not have an intrinsic feedback
mechanism. Indeed, it is often the case that organizations do
not provide formalized feedback mechanisms for their audiences.
Cheney and McMillan [10, pp. 98–99] comment on the legitimacy
of informal responses by suggesting that ‘‘the rhetorical predica-
ment of organizational members who rely largely on informal
messages to respond to the formal pronouncements of a
hierarchical organization: because their efforts are not authorized
by the organization, the members lack organizational legitimacy in
their attempts to persuade.’’
Feedback is valuable for rhetors because they can sense how
effective their rhetoric has been, but at the same time it is difficult
to manage and can at times generate unintended consequences
and potentially undermine the strategic intent of the message.
Ultimately it can destabilize institutionalized beliefs by allowing
alternative voices to compete for domination with the official view
[31,56]. Hence, the selection and design of the feedback mecha-
nism represents two choices commonly available to a rhetor [57].
The first choice is to create the rhetoric for the audiences’ passive
consumption. To do so, it is crucial for the rhetor to insert control
hoping that the audiences will understand and interpret the
rhetoric as intended. The second choice is a more participative
approach than the first one by engaging audiences in real debate
and the co-construction of the rhetoric. Often, the choice made by
the rhetor also reflects an organization’s rhetorical culture [6] and
J. Huang et al. / Information & Management 50 (2013) 112–124114

its institutionalized norms [5], which are there to be used as
references but more importantly to be contested [31].
While prior studies review the effects of social media in
organizations, there is as yet little understanding concerning its
effects on internal communication, specifically on its effects on the
ability of senior executives to persuade and manage staff. We
contend that existing conceptualizations of rhetorical practices in
organizations do not fully capture the dynamic role that social
media can play in organizational communication, nor – more
specifically – the role of feedback in this context. Summarizing, the
literature suggests that organizations face three key trade-offs
when deciding how to enact rhetorical practices by using different
and often mixed channels; they need to consider a choice between
(i) ‘univocality’ and ‘multivocality’; (ii) ‘reach’ and ‘richness’, and
(iii) controlled ‘consumption’ and more participative modes of
rhetoric ‘development’. However, some literature also suggests
that the use of social media offers the possibility to break with
these trade-offs, allowing for greater reach and richness, while
being both a passive consumer and a contributor. While we are
interested in exploring how the incorporation of social media in an
organization’s intranet influences different components of rhetor-
ical practices, individually and collectively, we also seek to learn
how social media can potentially alter the decisions made about
the trade-offs identified above. With the overarching aim of
exploring ‘how the incorporation of social media in an organiza-
tion’s intranet influences the different components of organiza-
tional rhetorical practices’ in mind, the following section depicts
our methodological design and considerations to unravel this
question.
3. Research method
This particular study is part of an on-going research initiative
aimed at examining the development, usage and governance of
intranets in large multi-national organizations in high velocity
industries [17,18], such as financial services and telecommunica-
tions [5–7]. It focuses on three organizations in the telecommu-
nications industry, and explores the impacts of social media on the
rhetorical practices in these organizations.
3.1. Research design
We adopted an interpretive, multiple case study approach
because of its strengths in exploring research phenomena that
are relational in their construction and subjective in their sense-
making [61]. Our aim was to enrich the existing theoretical
landscape of organizational rhetorical practices by incorporating
the effects of social media into our inquiry. With this objective
in mind, the set of conceptual components, critically reviewed
and synthesized in Fig. 1, served as the ‘‘sensitizing device’’ [35]
to frame our research, guide our data collection, and facilitate its
analysis and interpretation [44].
The three organizations were selected given their extensive use
of digital media as a platform for internal communication and
collaboration. Although all three organizations used social media
to some extent, there were distinctive features regarding their use
in each organization. While one case organization allowed open
participation through blogs, wikis and other social media tools, the
other two organizations restricted publishing rights and main-
tained central control. Such variations not only permit us to
challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about how social
media might be used in an organizational context, but also enable a
comparison of different approaches in the adoption and incorpo-
ration of social media, and of the impacts arising from its use on
each organization’s rhetorical practices.
3.2. Data collection and analysis
Data collection was divided into two distinctive yet connected
phases. The first consisted of exploring the functionalities, general
usage and governance of the intranet in the three organizations.
The initial emphasis was placed on understanding the structure,
rationale and control that each organization used to manage its
intranet environment, and aimed at establishing an overall
understanding of the context of each case organization with a
specific emphasis on its intranet usage. As a result of the data
collected from the initial phase, we were able to narrow down our
foci onto: (i) organizational rhetorical practices, instead of general
usage of intranet, and (ii) the impacts of the social media being
used. These newly revised foci were helpful to assist us in framing
our research in a more focused manner. Specifically, the diverse
landscape of organizational rhetorical practices characterized by
each case forced us to identify common conceptual elements
across all cases, so that meaningful comparison amongst them
could be generated. For instance, different roles enacted by
organizational members engaged in the rhetorical practices,
intents behind their engagements and approaches that they
deployed to actualize their intents were identified as some of these
key conceptual elements. These conceptual elements formed the
basis for us to examine and make sense of the impacts of social
media that we have already observed. Also, these conceptual
elements were useful pointers in informing us as to what further
empirical evidence would be required in our later phase of data
collection. The iterative process, in particular between our revised
foci, data collection and emerging findings [16,44], also enabled us
to refine our conceptual framework.
Based on the refined conceptual framework, we examined, in
the second phase, the flows and landscape of organizational
rhetorical practices within each case organization. Specifically, we
investigated the ways in which the use of social media were
organized, encouraged – and in one case, implicitly discouraged –
governed and embedded into the day-to-day functioning of the
organizations, thereby shaping and reshaping the social reality of
rhetorical practices. To do so, we emphasized the articulation of
individuals’ insights and experiences toward the use of social
media, their direct and indirect involvements in organizational
rhetorical practices and the changes arising from their social media
usage. The focus of the second phase was to collect sufficient
empirical evidence to depict the emerging conceptual framework
and use this framework to interpret, in a highly iterative manner,
the data we had collected [44]. During the second phase, we
conducted a total of 30 semi-structured interviews with different
stakeholders in the three organizations, including a sample of
employees who were users of the intranet and social media tools,
as well as managers. Appendix 1 provides a list of the roles and
positions of the people interviewed in each organization.
Each interview normally lasted between 1 and 2 h, and
consisted of two parts. Initially, discussion was fairly open, and
dealt with the evolution of, and services available for, internal
communication. This was followed by a second, more structured
part, which focused on key themes related to organizational
rhetorical practices, as conceptualized in Fig. 1. While the first part
of the interview was geared toward capturing insights related to
intranet usage and the trajectory of change, the second aimed to
encourage interviewees to reflect on their personal experiences
and observations about the impacts of social media on organiza-
tional communication and organizational rhetorical practices.
Screenshots, such as webpages and blog posts from each
organization’s intranet, were collected. For each organization, an
average of approximately 100 screenshots was collected. More-
over, documentation, including governance and strategy docu-
ments and steering group meeting minutes, were reviewed and
J. Huang et al. / Information & Management 50 (2013) 112–124 115