Sandy E. Green jr

• ph.d.
• Professor (Associate) at California State University, Northridge

In 1993, Mats Alvesson published ‘Organizations as Rhetoric’. In his paper, Alvesson proposed that knowledge was ambiguous and that rhetoric was therefore critical to the construction and operation of institutions and organizations. Moreover, he argued that in such an ambiguous and thus rhetorical world, knowledge operated as an institutionalized m...

We develop a model of rhetorical legitimation that specifies the communicative and cognitive structure underlying the maintenance and change of institutions. To do so we draw on Toulmin (1958) and his idea that social actors can use two structurally distinct forms of rhetoric: intrafield rhetoric and interfield rhetoric. We use this distinction to...

We integrate a rhetorical perspective with neoinstitutional theory to develop a rhetorical model of institutional decision making. We use this model to describe how the communicative practices of decision makers both enable and constrain how actors manage the risk and uncertainty of their judgments and decisions within an institutional context. We...

Blockchain is one of the most widely debated technologies in recent years. Pundits and scholars have described it as a disruptive technology that will impact many sectors of society. Skeptics argue blockchain's popularity is fueled by the media's obsession for the 'next big thing' rather than the intrinsic potential of the technology. In this paper...

Blockchain is the latest ‘disruptive innovation’ that has caught scholars’ attention. It is the underlying technology for Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Stakeholders like developers, entrepreneurs, and technology enthusiasts claim blockchain has the potential to reconfigure the contemporary economic, legal, political and cultural landscape....

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...

Although scholars increasingly use institutional logics to explain macro-level phenomena, we still know little about the psychological mechanisms by which institutional logics shape individual action. We propose that individuals internalize institutional logics as an associative network of entity schemas (i.e., persons, objects, and places) and eve...

A growing body of research suggests that follower perceptions of ethical leadership are associated with beneficial follower outcomes. However, some empirical researchers have found contradictory results. In this study, we use social learning and social exchange theories to test the relationship between ethical leadership and follower work outcomes....

The ‘student debt bubble’ is an ideograph referring to the growing imbalance between the costs of higher education and the capacity of students to shoulder increasing debt burdens. This unsustainable condition is constructed by numerous stakeholders, who have dramatically resituated risks and rewards in higher education. The resulting debt bubble h...

If the 1990s was all about the information superhighway and the network society, then the first 10 years of the 21st century is perhaps best described as the decade of data. Actors in different enterprises worked feverishly to develop innovative database and data mining technologies for institutional goals such as marketing, social networking, and...

Post-conventional economic theories are assembled to inquire into the contingent, mimetic, symbolic, and material spirals unfolding the dot-com bubble, 1992�-2002. The new technologies bubble is reconstructed as a rhetorical movement across the practices of the hybrid market-industry risk culture of communications. The legacies of the bubble task e...

We develop a discursive understanding of organizational inquiry in order to challenge the status quo characterized by a positivistic approach to organizational inquiry. Specifically, we re-conceptualize organizational science as an inherently rhetorical process. We propose that the language of theories and methods used within a particular paradigm...

In this paper, we take a step towards developing a stakeholder theory of crisis management. We argue that, in the context of crises, adopting the principles of a stakeholder model of corporate governance will lead companies to engage more frequently in proactive and/or accommodating crisis management behaviour even if these crisis management behavi...

This article employs rhetorical theory to reconceptualize institutionalization as change in argument structure. As a state, institutionalization is embodied in the structure of argument used to justify a practice at a given point in time. As a process, institutionalization is modeled as changes in the structure of arguments used to justify a practi...

The authors examine how competing institutional logics shape institutional fields. Specifically, they conceptualize control of the modern corporation as an evolving institutional field. They connect changes in the institutional field to the rhetoric and corresponding logics put forth by various corporate stake-holders vying for control of the firm....

The field of rhetoric provides unique frameworks and tools for under-standing the role of language in moral reasoning and corruption. Drawing on a discursive understand-ing of the self, we focus on how the rhetoric of conversations constructs and shapes our moral reasoning and moral behavior. Using rhetori-cal appeals and a moral develop-ment frame...

The subject matter of this article is the discussions that occurred during the process of conceptualizing and writing a paper on the philosophy of organizational science. These discussions reflect some of the tensions inherent in academic writing and publishing, as well as personal and intellectual tensions, which can make the writing process frust...

I use rhetorical theory to reconceptualize the diffusion of managerial practices. Specifically, I argue that the diffusion of a practice depends on the discursive justifications used to rationalize it. When such justifications are accepted and taken for granted, a practice reaches a state of institutionalization. Furthermore, I propose that changes...

The field of crisis management has been seriously impeded by its failure to develop appropriate frameworks for the study of crises. This state of affairs is due at the very least to two major issues: (1) outmoded and invalid views of the nature of crises, and (2) the widespread use of outmoded and inappropriate concepts of inquiry. It is our conte...

This project is an analysis and exploration of the adoption of takeover defenses in the S&P 1500 from 1975 to 1998. While most managerial studies emphasize the role of economic interests or social networks on takeover defense adoption, this project examines the influence of symbolic forces on takeover defense diffusion. This project uses an institu...

This interdisciplinary project seeks to increase our understanding of communication and corporate governance theory by examining the role of rhetoric in the diffusion of takeover attempts and takeover defenses in the S&P 1500 from 1975 to 1998. While most corporate governance studies emphasize the role of economic interests or social networks on th...