Theory,Practice,and Pedagogy: Interweaving Business Communication and Rhetoric

In 2019, Getchell and Lentz (2019) published their remarkable collection Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in the Business Communication Classroom, which explores the connections between rhetorical theory and business communication in depth. The essays in the volume took what the editors described as “the first step toward establishing our own perspective on rhetoric in business communication” (p. 4). In the years since the book was published, the need for a clearly articulated discipline of rhetoric in business communication has become even more important. The global COVID-19 pandemic, along with technological innovations and rapidly evolving cultural and social norms, changed the definitions of both “business” and “communication,” and introduced new challenges for teaching business communication. Rhetorical principles, however, can provide a solid foundation that will allow students to nimbly adjust to changing situations while using time-tested techniques to write, speak, and communicate more effectively.

Rhetoric, of course, was not designed for business communication. While the foundations of rhetoric pre-date the discipline of business communication by centuries, modern rhetoric draws on millennia of theory and tradition not only as they apply to the discipline of rhetoric but also to be usefully applied to every other academic discipline and public discourse. The mantra in many rhetoric graduate programs is “everything is rhetoric, and rhetoric is everything.” This is very much in line with Aristotle’s view that the art of rhetoric stood apart from other disciplines: “Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever. This is the function of no other of the arts, each of which is able to instruct and persuade in its own special subject” (Rhetoric 2:1). The result of this approach is rhetoricians studying and practicing while embedded in colleges, departments, and classrooms outside of traditional rhetoric programs. These embedded rhetoricians are often viewed with suspicion; as Cicero wrote, rhetoric represents “a certain extraneous art . . ., adopted from another department of knowledge” (Book 1:188).

The suspicion of embedded rhetoricians has been raised numerous times in my career. In one of my early job interviews, a member of the faculty asked me pointedly, “Are you a colonizer?” In response to my stunned expression, he went on to explain that in his past work with rhetoricians, he had found them eager to claim other disciplines as their own. Because the department where I was applying did not have a rhetoric program, he was concerned that I would try to plant the flag of rhetoric to claim territory that rightfully belonged to his discipline. It wasn’t simply a question of academic territoriality; it was a fundamental question about what I saw as my role—and the role of rhetoric—in his department and in my classes. In his view, I was an interloper who had wandered from my academic home and was seeking to settle in a foreign department.

Business communication researchers and instructors face a similar challenge, since they too “find themselves lacking a disciplinary identity and home” (Lentz & Getchell, 3). Business communication incorporates theories from several other disciplines, and its practitioners are housed in various departments: business, management, communications, English, and technical or professional communication, to name the most common. While most of these departments are more or less related, none are directly connected to business communication. Thus, business communication instructors, like rhetoricians, can find themselves wandering in strange lands, negotiating research and teaching in the language of a different discipline.

Getchell and Lentz’s collection of essays is part of a growing movement to carve out an academic discipline of business communication that, while drawing on other theoretical foundations, is unique and focused. Their approach is continued in this special issue of Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, which examines the connections between rhetorical theory and business communication pedagogy. This is not simply a marriage of convenience between two lonely disciplines looking for an academic home; it is a natural pairing that reflects the work already being done in business communication classrooms throughout the world. At its heart, business communication is more explicitly rhetorical than many other disciplines. Effective writing and speaking in the workplace requires a sensitivity to the situation and context of the communication, and a nuanced understanding of the audience. In turn, rhetorical theory finds fruitful application in business communication, which has overt goals to persuade.

If this pairing of rhetoric and business communication is already happening in classrooms and in research, why the increased focus on it in published volumes and special issues? Aristotle answered this in the opening texts of his Rhetoric:

Now, the majority of people do this either at random or with a familiarity arising from habit. But since both these ways are possible, it is clear that matters can be reduced to a system, for it is possible to examine the reason why some attain their end by familiarity and others by chance; and such an examination all would at once admit to be the function of an art. (Rhetoric 1:1)

In other words, teaching rhetoric and using rhetorical theory in business communication pedagogy and practice is not enough. We need to be actively discussing business communication theory, practice, and pedagogy from the perspective of rhetoric to develop a discourse that goes beyond “familiarity arising from habit” to make explicit the disciplinary identity revealed in the symbiotic relationship between business communication and rhetoric.

This special issue of BPCQ continues and expands the disciplinary discourse connecting rhetoric and business communication. The seven articles included here illustrate the different ways experienced business communication instructors are weaving rhetorical theory into classroom instruction, assignments, and assessments. More importantly, these articles are heeding the call for “reflection on practice [which] provides an invaluable opportunity for growth and development in our individual classrooms and for developing our collective identity as an academic discipline” (Lentz & Getchell, 8). The hope is that with continued study, the connections between rhetoric and business communication will yield a richer, more effective approach to pedagogy and a more concrete disciplinary identity.