COM 610 Issue Management

The readings from this week made me think that we had already read about organizational identification before. However, I think it was simply referenced a few times in the concepts of past weeks, such as with values advocacy or general organization rhetoric techniques. That being said, it is a relevant and recurring concept in regards to organizational issue management. I appreciated how Cheney (1983) detailed the concept of organizational identification. After studying this reading, I understand organizational identification as the process or action by which someone identifies with a target (e.g. organization, group, person) whose characteristics, values, goals, and so on they agree with or support. Because of how there are hierarchies and divisions in society, there are many choices of targets with which to identify. Identifying with an organization can give individuals a sense of belonging. Additionally, it will influence how they respond to messages from that organization, particul...

The most salient idea from this week's readings is the concept of metaphors as explicated by Waymer (2018). I appreciated how he detailed the history and various theories contributing to metaphors, especially breakdown of a metaphor into the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject of the metaphor, and the vehicle is the object from which a rhetor takes attributes in order to describe the tenor. One example Waymer cited was Lakoff and Johnson's time as money example; he described how the perception of time (the tenor) as a valuable resource that we must "spend" wisely changes how we as cultural members perceive time. One recent example of a metaphor I can recall is from the Netflix film Miss Americana, which is a documentary about Taylor Swift. It was released in January of this year. There were various media references included throughout the documentary (both positive and negative). One example stated that "Taylor Swift is the music industry" (Wil...