COM 610 Issue Management

This week our readings were focused on the field of organizational rhetoric. The most important takeaway I personally experienced was the characteristics of organizational rhetoric. Many of these were mentioned in the Cheney (1991) article, such as managing multiple identities, de-centering, personification, strategic use of passive voice, and so forth. In class we added to this list with ideas such as the corporate "we", slogans and catchphrases, and strategic ambiguity. It may seem like this multiple takeaways, but to me, it is one. I can now conceptualize the practical ways in which organizations use rhetoric. Before this week, I thought that there was just a certain professional language that corporations use, such as the tense and vocabulary we use on resumés. I did not recognize that it was rhetoric at work. A single example of this is the use of strategic ambiguity. This was explored in depth in the Eisenberg (1984) article. I would like to focus on the idea of strat...

The concept from the readings this first week that stood out to me the most was from the Crable & Vibbert article (1985). It is called "the catalytic strategy." The authors explain that the past approaches used by public relations strategists (reactive, adaptive, dynamic) were mostly defensive. The premise of the catalytic strategy is to make active, intentional moves regardless of what stage your issue is in. I found this strategy to be pretty modern. This is because issues nowadays can be commented on by anybody due to the democratic features of the internet. Organizations and companies need to adopt the catalytic strategy in order to be prepared for how the public will publicly react to an issue, and how they should respond to people's statements. However, some organizations have used the catalytic strategy long before this modern time period. One example that comes to mind is how my mother, a real estate agent, manages the issue of generating clientele. Real est...