Rhetorical Strategies of Legitimacy

TLDR

In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm acquired a law firm, sparking a jurisdictional struggle over multidisciplinary partnerships within accounting and law. The study examines how rhetoric legitimates profound institutional change by analyzing the discursive struggle between proponents and opponents of multidisciplinary partnerships. The authors analyze the discursive struggle and identify five types of change theorizations—teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value‑based—describing their characteristics. They find that rhetorical strategies comprise two elements: institutional vocabularies that expose conflicting logics of professionalism, and theorizations of change that contest innovations against broad change templates.

Abstract

This paper describes the role of rhetoric in legitimating profound institutional change. In 1997, a Big Five accounting firm purchased a law firm, triggering a jurisdictional struggle within accounting and law over a new organizational form, multidisciplinary partnerships. We analyze the discursive struggle that ensued between proponents and opponents of the new organizational form. We observe that such rhetorical strategies contain two elements. First are institutional vocabularies, or the use of identifying words and referential texts to expose contradictory institutional logics embedded in historical understandings of professionalism, one based on a trustee model and the other based on a model of expertise. A second element of rhetorical strategies is theorizations of change by which actors contest a proposed innovation against broad templates or scenarios of change. We identify five such theorizations of change (teleological, historical, cosmological, ontological, and value-based) and describe their characteristics.