Rhetoric and Authority in a Polarized Transition: The Development of China’s Stock Market

SMC Author

Yuan Li

SMC Affiliated Work

1

Status

Faculty

School

School of Economics and Business Administration

Department

Organizations and Responsible Business

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

Publication / Conference / Sponsorship

Journal of Management Inquiry

Description/Abstract

How do actors in positions of authority attempt to justify their right to rule while introducing controversial institutional practices that potentially delegitimate their authority? China’s reform leaders have found themselves in a legitimacy conundrum when they established and developed the stock market, yet have been able to assert a central role for the party-state in managing the stock market. Using a critical rhetorical perspective, we analyze how actors use “rhetorical genres,” that is, argumentation and narration with differing content and style, to construct new roles of the speaker and speaker–audience relationships that imply new bases of authority, and how these rhetorical genres can be conceptualized as “discursive spaces” that could accommodate contradictions in the rhetorical situations characterized by polarization in ideologies and interests.

Keywords

institutional theory, legitimacy, communication, content analysis, qualitative research

Scholarly

yes

Peer Reviewed

1

DOI

10.1177/1056492616682620

Volume

27

Issue

1

First Page

69

Last Page

95

Disciplines

Business | Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics | Economics | Organizational Behavior and Theory

Original Citation

Li, Y., Green, S., & Hirsch, P. (2018). Rhetoric and authority in a polarized transition: The development of China’s stock market. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(1), 69-95.

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