Nothing is Right in Individual and Collective Action: Placing unknowability at the heart of theorizing through rhetoric

Abstract

The world is fuelled by tensions, contradictions and dilemmas that cannot be solved, or where both the solution and the problems are unknown. Organizing in this milieu requires a theory for a world that is unknowable and still needs to be managed. We argue that such a theory can be built by drawing on rhetoric, but not the conventional form of rhetoric that is fascinated with persuasion, cognition, and knowledge construction. We turn instead to the history of rhetoric as it developed into a set of practices capable of informing individual and collective action in the face of an unknowable reality. This alternative perspective leads to theorizing the tensions and contradictions of organizing, not as a gap that must be filled with knowledge to be reified as a ‘thing’, nor as a cognitive ambiguity blurring opposing demands, but as a mystery that cannot ultimately be known (a ‘no-thing’) but can be enacted through ritualized practices of inquiry to inspire imagination and pragmatic action. We illustrate our theoretical argument with anecdotal examples inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals.

Keywords

rhetoric unknowability theorizing collective action pragmatism tensions rituals imagination nothing

Introduction

We are said to live in a world full of tensions, contradictions and opposing demands. Organizations are under pressure to achieve multiple ends at the same time (e.g. Hahn et al., 2010, 2018; J. Joseph et al., 2020; Smith & Lewis, 2011). Saving natural environments and then exploiting them for economic development. Decreasing carbon emissions while building new infrastructures. Pursuing profit and then ensuring social welfare. While it is clear that these tensions cannot be solved, the literature has tried to explore them through, for instance, change, negotiations or trade-offs (Berti & Cunha, 2023; Berti & Simpson, 2021; Hahn et al., 2015), mechanisms for collective action even in extreme contexts (Ferraro et al., 2015; Kornberger et al., 2025), and learning from opposites ends and paradoxes (Cameron, 1986; Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2011, 2022).

In trying to theorize these tensions and paradoxes, one should not forget that some of these ends cannot be known a priori and are, therefore, unknown and even unknowable. For instance, when one says that organizations should balance profit with social welfare, one assumes that both ‘profit’ and ‘social welfare’ are identifiable and knowable, either through positive knowledge or an endless process of construction through politics of calculations (Espeland & Stevens, 2008). In making these assumptions, one commits the sin of ‘ontological gerrymandering’ (Woolgar & Pawluch, 1985), that is, making something problematic (i.e. the dilemma of combining ‘profit’ with ‘welfare’) by making something else unproblematic (i.e. the notions of ‘profit’ and ‘welfare’). This is the trap faced by theories that attempt to address tensions and contradictions by either seeking more knowledge to fill the gaps between opposing demands, or by resorting to processes of social construction that reify the poles of the opposition, particularly when dealing with the disorder and inconsistencies of the world (Quattrone & Zilber, 2025).

The matter at stake is instead one of shifting the theorization effort from one preoccupied with knowing ‘things’, – be these values, aims, purposes, or their tensions, – and making them the ending points for action, with one concerned with informing action while being aware of the unknowability at the heart of such values, aims, purposes and their tensions. This alternative perspective means embedding such unknowability in how action is informed. Operating this shift implies developing a theory no longer concerned with knowing ‘what’ is ‘right’ but one concerned with ‘how’ to understand what is right in a way that recognizes that what is right cannot be known and therefore requires both the theory and action being open to always different, alternative or even opposite, explanations, including other unknown possibilities. This theory, we argue, needs to place unknowability at its heart and, therefore, ‘nothing’ is right when theorizing individual and collective action. The way to do this, we argue, is through rhetoric, as we discuss next.

We conceive of this unknowability as the persistent lack of knowledge that lays at the heart of human cognitive capabilities, regardless of whether they are directed to investigating the ambiguities of the present (e.g. Jarzabkowski et al., 2010), those of the past (e.g. Suddaby & Foster, 2017), or the uncertainties of a future difficult to prefigure (e.g. Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2024). This unknowability is not an ambiguity that can be instrumentally constructed to achieve agreements for social transformation or other strategic purposes (Eisenberg, 2006 [1984]; Jarzabkowski et al. 2010; Sillince et al., 2012; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2017). It is not a moving uncertainty (Carson et al., 2006) that can be treated and solved as a problem of knowledge (Miller, 1990). This unknowability is instead a feature of everyday life and practice as part of our being-in-the world (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011). In other words, it is a quintessential part of the social fabric, and its organizing, including its values, means, ends and demands (Friedland, 2009), with their oppositions and contradictions being a challenge to collective action (Kornberger, 2022; Kornberger et al., 2025). The unknowable does not constitute some empty ‘thing’ to be filled with defined meaning, purpose and values. It is a ‘no-thing’, and like a mystery (Bento da Silva et al., 2022), where meanings, purposes and values are themselves unknowable but can always be interrogated anew to inspire invention and pragmatic action.

But what does it mean to develop a theory that places unknowability at the heart of theorizing, effectively moving away from an epistemological problem of knowledge towards a pragmatic concern with individual and collective action? And what shape and practices would organization theory propose if one put the unknowability of ‘things’, be these values, ends, purpose and the like, as the cornerstone of this action?

This is where the history of rhetoric can help, as the unknowability of the world and its mystery were fully ingrained in the life and culture of Middle Ages (Eco, 1986, 2004). At that time, rhetorical practices were not trying to know the unknowable (e.g. the mystery of God), either with more knowledge or with the cognitive power of the senses (i.e. hearing, seeing, smell, touch), as these were instead used to prompt an inquiry into the unknown (Turner, 1998). Filling this mystery with cognition or the senses was regarded as impeding the spiritual force that had to inspire a continuous and sustained investigation into the social and sociality (Bagnoli, 2016; Newhauser, 2015). And still, actors had to find values that informed their daily lives. Everyday rituals and rhetorical practices provided them with tools to understand how they could live and act morally and socially in collectivities full of mystery, making them ‘civic beings’, that is, part of a collective morality which could itself not be grasped as it was always evolving and therefore in need of continuous inquiry (Carruthers, 1990).

Earlier work has viewed rhetoric as a theorizing tool by conceiving of ‘theory as a matter of words, not worlds; of maps, not territories; of representations, not realities’, and where ‘there is no escape from rhetoric’ (Van Maanen, 1995, p. 134). We extend this work by going beyond the idea that organizing could be coded, classified, captured, – be it through metaphors, maps, grids, speeches or artefacts - through knowledge machinations and their reality-constitution process (Cooren, 2008), ultimately leading to persuasion, legitimacy, strategic ambiguity and the like (Erkama & Vaara, 2010; Jarzabkowski & Sillince, 2007; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005). The history of rhetoric shows that a different way of theorizing is possible, one that provides a set of practices which embrace absences, gaps and mystery while still informing social lives. Placing the unknowability of things, in other words no-things, at the core of organization theory will make it a catalyst for inquiry into the nature of action, and provide the conditions for inventing and imagining new forms of social cohabitation (from the Latin inventio, the first canon of rhetoric, and invenio, which means ‘to find’, ‘to classify’, and also ‘to discover’ and ‘to invent’).

The theoretical perspective that we offer here adds to the growing debate on pragmatisms (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011; Tsoukas, 2017; see also Simpson & den Hond, 2021), as a response to complexity, as well as to the call for approaches pointing to practical wisdom (Flyvbjerg et al., 2012), and non-linear, non-rational models of theorizing (Luhmann, 1995, 2018; McCabe, 2016), including in crisis situations and extreme contexts (Kornberger et al., 2025). We contribute to this debate by pointing to the latent, and the nowhere (Cooper, 1986, 2005), the negative, and the mystery of the world (Bento da Silva et al., 2022). Rather than conceiving rhetoric as a means to construct some ‘things’ as real or not real (see Van Maanen, 1995), we draw on notions of rhetoric as a means to embrace and explore the unknowability at the heart of the social. In other words ‘no-things’, that is, the mystery of ends, purposes and values, including those that inform tensions and contradictions.

Unknowability in a Mysterious World

We start our examination of unknowability with an example. We take the case of the US Constitution, which defines how decisions are made but refrains from defining what decisions are to be made (King & Frost, 2002, p. 13). Here, values, purpose and goals are deliberately left under-defined, not because of a strategic use of ambiguity, but because they are unknowable a priori. When stating that the ‘People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity’ (US Constitution, Preamble), the Constitution leaves values like ‘Justice’ or ‘Welfare’ undefined, with their meaning to be explored in contingent situations through procedures followed in the courts of law. Filling such values, purpose and goals with substantive knowledge, also imposed on individuals and collectives to inform their action, would limit the general applicability of the Constitution and its ruling power in case of unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances. By providing instead procedures which interrogate the mysterious traits of values, purpose and goals without trying to define them, the US Constitution offers opportunities for searching for pragmatic solutions and allows possibilities for democracy and organizing. We are in a realm that goes beyond the cognitive, the deliberate, the instrumental and the ‘strategic’, toward the mysterious which reveals itself within everyday practices, remaining always by themselves unknown (Bento da Silva et al., 2022; Quattrone, 2015), but not for this being unable to inform action pragmatically and contingently.

Rational modes of theorizing often fall into the trap of trying to explain values, purposes and objectives by attempting to solve their intrinsic mystery, based on the assumption that they can be revealed through more knowledge, with more analytical and definitional efforts. Similarly, processes of knowledge construction ultimately result in the typification and reification of norms and behaviours (e.g. Berger & Luckmann, 1967). The point is not to neglect the importance of knowledge, whether it is positively sought or socially constructed. It is to shift the attention from seeing organizing as a problem of knowledge to a problem of pragmatic action and its consequences. This is in line with the growing attention for a theory that is relevant to practice (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011), and to grasp complexity through relationality and openendedness (Tsoukas, 2017), as well as to approaches based on problems and practical wisdom (Flyvbjerg et al., 2012), and latent or hidden, and non-rational modes of organizing (Cooper, 2005; Luhmann, 2018; McCabe, 2016), able to grasp uncertainties and disruptions when acting (Kornberger et al., 2025; Wright et al., 2023).

To further develop these approaches, we call for a shift from placing processes and practices at the heart of organization theory to making the unknowable that underpins actions its cornerstone. While pointing to action and pragmatism, these theories have tried to explain organizing by looking for ways to picture the complexity of the world through relationships that could explain such a complexity, conceiving of the unknown as a boundary condition or constraint for actions. In other words, these approaches consider unknowability ‘wrong’. In doing so, they have overlooked the possibility of instead embedding such unknowns into action as a way to theorize the dynamism of the social, inspire new solutions and create an openness to always new possibilities to deal with it. To further develop these approaches, we call for a shift from placing knowledge at the heart of organization theory to making the unknowable its foundation.

This theorizing, we argue, can be achieved through rhetoric, but conceived in a different way than how rhetoric is conventionally understood in organization studies.

Rhetoric in Management and Organization Studies

In exploring tensions, negotiations and compromises, the management and organization literature has broadly recognized the role of rhetoric, with its communicative force, as a tool for claim-making, and thereby persuasion, compromise, resistance or legitimacy (Cheney et al., 2004; Green, 2004; Green et al., 2008), as well as a tool of knowledge construction, and for the constitution of reality more broadly (Benoit-Barné & Chaput, 2024; Charland, 1987; Conrad & Cheney, 2024; Cooren, 2008), also in the context of collective action and conflicting values (Drori et al., 2025). As noted by Van Maanen (1995), rhetoric is a necessary element of organization theory precisely because it helps make impactful arguments, thus igniting a process of reality construction.

As such, rhetoric can also within organizations be drawn upon instrumentally to achieve specific intents (Cheney et al., 2004; Erkama & Vaara, 2010), for example, regulating identity (Alvesson & Willmott 2002; Symon, 2005) or identification processes (Chaput et al., 2011, drawing on Burke, 1950), or provoking agitation and control (Brimeyer et al., 2004). It can also be used to inform institutionalization processes (Jarzabkowski & Sillince, 2007; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005; Zbaracki, 1998), overcoming contestation and triggering social transformation through the strategic use of ambiguity (Alvesson, 1993; Jarzabkowski et al., 2010; Stone & Bush, 1996), or the construction of different scientific or social realities (Besel, 2011).

Overall, rhetoric has been conceived of as powerful in making things happen instrumentally and in constituting ‘reality’ (Charland, 1987; Cooren, 2008; Hartelius & Browning, 2008), through its teleological or cosmological appeals (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), shaping action through cognition, processes of communication and the construction of evidence, claims, discourses, arguments or even ambiguity (e.g. Drori et al., 2025). This way of conceiving of rhetoric implies the possibility for managing tensions by filling gaps between opposing demands with meaning, and cognition, leaving the poles of the tensions unquestioned, or leaving those who strategically and instrumentally use ambiguity resort to opacity, equivocality and even absurdity to advance their goals and remain protected from external scrutiny (see e.g. Cappellaro et al. 2021 on the Sicilian Mafia).

But what if the ‘substances’ (Friedland, 2009) we wish to theorize, be these values, ends, purpose and the like, are inevitably unknowable, and cannot be captured through processes of reality construction ignited by words and discourses? Our point here is that dominant views of rhetoric in management and organization studies are not equipped for exploring such unknowability and the consequent dynamism of the social world because they still implicitly adopt and resort to processes of knowledge construction. We should reconsider what rhetoric was never supposed to be: a practice for socially constructing a reified reality. Instead, going back in history, it was originally a pragmatic practice of inquiry into the unknown and the unknowable; a view that we resurface and develop here.

Insights from the History of Rhetoric

For Aristotle, rhetoric was about all the available means of persuasion, coming from ethos, pathos, and logos, conceived as the constitutive parts of an argument based on reason and evidence. Along these lines, for Cicero and Quintilian, rhetorical tools were used not only to solve controversies (see Murphy, 1974), but also to enable them, place elements in opposing positions and draw on the opposition to compose arguments.

However, the history of rhetoric also shows that rhetoric developed not only as a practice for persuasion and knowledge construction. It was also an instrument of inquiry. In ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, rhetoric was fully infused with the mystery of the divine, the supernatural and the magical, which underpinned not only words and speech but also all aspects of everyday life and practices (Covino, 1992; De Romilly, 1975; Fournier, 2013; Ward, 1988; Wardy, 1996). Indeed, the

Medieval man [sic] firmly believed that everything in the universe had a supernatural significance, and that the world was like a book written by the finger of God. Every animal had a moral or mystical significance, as did every stone and every plant (and this is recounted in the bestiaries, lapidaries and the herbals). (Eco, 2004, p. 121)

The unknown and the supernatural were left unknown and could not be grasped through cognition, but required practices and rituals. Following St. Augustine’s cognitive philosophy (Bagnoli, 2016), the senses were viewed as an impediment to spirituality and had to be disciplined through spiritual practices, including rhetoric. Take, for example, the rhetorical implant of the Jesuit spiritual exercises. They invited an unfolding interrogation of the mystery of God by creating a system of inquiry through rhetorical practices such as an inventory of sins, punctuated paths and the creation of opposites (e.g. hell vs. heaven) leading to an election where each item of the exercises (i.e. the book, the Master and the notes of the exercitant) pointed to the other in an incomplete mechanism of reference (Bento da Silva et al., 2022), which signified the impossibility of grasping the mystery of God. Indeed, late medieval theology was infused with mysticism grounded on the idea of the impossibility of grasping God and defining it in positive terms (Bagnoli, 2016; Newhauser, 2015; Turner, 1998). As noted by Tertullian, it is the incapacity of fully grasping the mystery of God that affords us the idea of what God is.¹ Not by chance, the name of God used most often in the Hebrew is an unutterable tetragrammaton (YHWH, Assmann, 2008), and it symbolizes the infinite irreducibility of God and its mystery. Pronouncing God’s name would operate a reductionism as the one we make when we reduce values (e.g. love) to a measurable value (e.g. the number of unreturned calls between two lovers, Latour, 2013), sentiments to tweets, research quality to rankings and metrics (Espeland & Stevens, 2008). In the medieval age, rhetorical practices and spiritual exercises served instead as a means to interrogate the mystery of God without attempting to define or reduce it to a specific value, thereby shifting the focus away from knowledge and cognition by placing emphasis instead to procedures of inquiry which took the shape of rituals that informed moral action. Now, substitute the religious mystery of God with the unknowability of lay organizational values, ends, purpose, future, past and the like. You would then begin to see the parallels we would like to explore further.

Rhetoric as a practice of disciplined inquiry to inform individual and collective action

Tensions and divisions

The history of medieval rhetoric shows that rhetoric had a ‘taste for tensions’ (Carruthers, 2013, p. 22). Opposing elements were an excuse to frame the unknown and create a generative void, as well as to leave these elements undefined. Oppositions were part of an aesthetic of symmetry, division, and balance that framed a pragmatic inquiry into the order of the cosmos and life. For example, even monsters or the ugly had ‘a reason and dignity’ in the order of the world precisely through their opposition, division and symmetry with beauty (Eco, 2004, p. 85). It was such opposition that created a space of inquiry into the morality of things. Given the impossibility of knowing what was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, creating such a space afforded an inquiry into the contingent nature of these opposites by exploring their mystery symbolized by the space in between them. The symmetry and tensions between opposites were utilized to keep their opposition productive (controversia, Carruthers, 2015, p. 3), ensuring that one element could not overpower the other.

Take, for instance, the images at the edge of the pages of medieval manuscripts (Camille, 1992). They were hypertexts pointing to the supernatural (or the irrational as we would call it nowadays), while the rational and terrestrial were placed at the centre of the page. One could not understand which one was beautiful or ugly, whether the margin or the core of the page, if not in comparing one with the other. But both the margins and the core of the page were essential to explore these very notions as the space on the page between these two opposite images became a space of inquiry to discern what was ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’. In this space, the margin of the page could become the centre of the enquiry and the centre could become the edge. The point was not one of defining beauty or ugliness, real or surreal, rational or irrational, good or evil, centre or edge. It was one of understanding their multiple, emergent and dynamic manifestations, where what was ‘beautiful’ could become ‘ugly’ and vice versa, depending on circumstances and context. Their meaning, therefore, was transcendental and always undefined. It was always open to the possibility of becoming other and different.

This tension between opposites was created through a symmetrical ‘division’, the etymology of which is interesting to explore. Already writing it with a hyphen is revelatory: ‘di-vision’, that is, a division is about ‘seeing’. The word ‘division’ is made of two components. The prefix ‘di-‘ (from the Latin de, ‘to be about’, dis, ‘to clive’ and to be ‘apart’, and duo, i.e. ‘two’) and ‘vision’ (from videor, which meant ‘to see’ what is out there but also ‘to imagine’ what is not there). Therefore, to explore notions such as beauty or ugliness, real or surreal, rational or irrational, good and evil, meant to create a tension between them; therefore to see their meaning but also to imagine new possible ones, as the meaning that one can see could change and become different. It could not, and should not, be taken for granted, as otherwise it would be reified. It was such division and symmetry that made the opposites a pretext to explore what they framed in the middle and create their own meaning. This middle was an empty space for virtus: ‘the mean towards which the virtuous should strive in their actions’ (Weyl, 1989/1952, pp. 3–4). It was this gap that ensured a practical search for balance and ‘just’ proportions between the opposite coordinates, a balance that was difficult to strike and was never achieved, making the lack of it, and of the opposing elements, generative of imagination and action. It is here, in this middle space, that unknowability (of the opposing elements and of the empty space in medio) becomes a source for practical inquiry. It becomes a resource, especially when organizational actors face the difficulty of reconciling different purposes, multiple objectives and any related confusion (March, 1979).

Imagination and invention

Along the lines of Cicero, the work of Quintilian on the rhetor’s education distinguished rhetoric from grammar, with the former defined as the art of speech based on composition and invention, and the latter as the art of correct discourses, based on rules and order, and interpretation working through imitation (see Murphy, 1974). However, ‘grammar’ did not point only to correctness and order. The word ‘grammar’ shares the same etymology with the word grimoire, which was a book of spells (De Romilly, 1975), as much as the word ‘spelling’, relates to an action of speaking, but also to a ‘spell’, as an enchantment. And indeed, rhetoric was not only an art of composition and invention, for constructing ‘reality’ through language. It was also a set of practices for imagination, creativity and invention, pointing to what could not be fully seen or sensed, following the divine power of logos (Fournier, 2013).

Consider an orator who was asked to prepare a speech about something that he or she did not know, or to ‘invent’ an answer to an unexpected question from the audience. The orator was given a series of rhetorical machines (Bolzoni, 1995) that took various forms and shapes. One of these was the grid. The orator was asked to draw lines vertically and horizontally on a piece of paper (or in her or his mind) and label them according to grammatical dimensions (such as ‘who’, ‘what’, why’ ‘how’ and so on, or temporal ones). He was then asked to make this unknown ‘something’ fluctuate above this grid in order to interrogate it (e.g. ‘what’ is it?, ‘who’ made it? and so on). The grid therefore created a space of interrogation of the ‘thing’ to be discussed (i.e. the topic of the conversation, from topos, ‘place’, ‘space’ in Greek) and for imagination. The trick used by the medieval orator was never to let the object of inquiry fall into the empty spaces of the grid, as this would have made the object become a ‘common place’, thus ending the imaginatory power of the grid, which pointed instead to what the object was not and could therefore become (Bolzoni, 1995).

Take, in this context, the example of Apple’s iPhone. When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone, Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, was asked whether he was worried by this launch. He said: ‘No! Why should I be worried about a phone that costs $500?’ What he did not understand was that this was not a phone. In trying to make sense of Apple’s innovation, Ballmer very likely used a mental grid to ask questions such as ‘when is the phone used?’ ‘why is it used?’ ‘how is it used?’. These questions would have already made him immediately realize that the iPhone was in fact not a phone. But he made a fundamental and fatal mistake: letting the iPhone fall into the grid, making it a ‘common place’ (Bolzoni, 1995), that is, taking for granted that the iPhone was a phone. He understood the iPhone in terms of what was known and not using how it could be known (the grammatical dimensions of the grid) to explore what was not known and it could become. His thinking in positive (the iPhone is a phone) rather than negative terms (the iPhone is best understood in terms of what it is not) limited both his understanding and the possibility of inventing new uses for it, as it happens when software developers add another app to the platform. As for medieval rhetorical practices, to sustain learning and composition, the contents never had to be specified or specifiable, offering possibilities for discovery and imagination, rather than epistemic closure.

Moral scrutiny and rituals of ‘de-finition’

Like spiritual exercises, medieval rhetorical practices were drawn upon to sustain an ongoing interrogation of the unknown, be it God, value or values, without ever trying to positively define it, or make sense of it, as the senses impeded spirituality. This interrogation had to happen in practice, according to a ritualized path marked by puncti, that is, points where specific activities, reflections and actions had to be performed and repeated (Carruthers, 1998). This ritualization was a means for always reinventing the object of the meditation, whether it be God or the nature of moral conduct. There were no absolute truths, but a pragmatic input into action was found in the ritual, knowing that such action would not be perfect and therefore needed to be left open to other possibilities. Take the example of the medieval trivium (i.e. the combination of logic, grammar and rhetoric; S. M. Joseph & McGlinn, 2002), which also forms the basis of contemporary education systems, such as the Oxford tutorial system, where students enter into a debate with the tutor. Following the principles of medieval trivium, the ‘mortal sin’ of that debate that a student could commit is to make an argument that is ‘right’, but can be proved wrong by a knowledgeable tutor by the same principles. The winning strategy is to draw on the trivium to make a ‘right’ argument that is compatible with other, even unforeseen, arguments made by the knowledgeable tutor. However, some notable Oxford students, such as Prime Minister Cameron, betrayed that learning: by calling the Brexit referendum, he could unmistakably prove himself wrong. Good politicians never put themselves in that corner. A good argument needs to acknowledge the possibility of other explanations, it needs to embrace the mystery of the notion of ‘right’, while providing a pragmatic tool for informing action. That teaching was valid in medieval Oxford as it is now in contemporary Harvard, as recalled by Anteby (2013, p. 64), when reproducing a vignette of a faculty member kicked out from the faculty club because he gave an answer to a question about a case study raised in class by a student.

Making a rhetorical argument implies a ‘de-finition’(from the Latin finis, ‘boundary’, putting boundaries around messy realities) able to inform action but aware of the fact that definitions are always precarious (as the Latin prefix ‘de-’, ‘to be about’ but also ‘to deprive’, reminds us) and therefore it has to be made open, keeping in mind the mystery of the world around us and which escape clear boundaries.

Participating in these rituals of interrogation reinforces a commitment towards embracing what is uncertain, not visible and not sensed and make it part of both the argument and the action informed by it. A ritual of this kind is prompted by gaps and lacks and never achieves closure (as opposed to the ritual of quantification in Mazmanian & Beckman, 2018). Thus, in medieval rhetoric the ritual was a necessary condition for individuals to relate themselves to the community by questioning their morality not as an ultimate truth, as the benchmark was unknowable, but by constantly interrogating it through assessing their position in relation to other members of society, and leaving an openness towards the other, thus becoming a civic being (Carruthers, 1998; Puyou & Quattrone, 2018). This unknowability was not some distant, external dogma ‘out there’ but it was embedded in reasoning and action. It revealed itself as a mystery and yet informed action through ritualized practices that related individuals in a collectivity and provided for a shared infrastructure of procedures for the interrogation of what could not be known.

From the History of Rhetoric to Placing Nothing at the Heart of Organization Theory

Overall, the history of rhetoric outlined above suggests a novel pathway for theorizing organizing (from theōría in ancient Greek, a speculation and contemplation of what cannot be seen, such as theós, ‘God’, Carruthers, 1998). This pathway entails that, whereas the world has always been infused by tensions and contradictions in between opposing elements – including multiple ends, values, purposes – these elements and their tension are themselves unknowable and this unknowability has to be embedded in any form of theorization. This unknowability has to be preserved, and still, theory has to inform actions. If the oppositions and their tensions (be these values, purposes or ends) are unknown, therefore solutions have always to be open to further possibilities and never to be considered an ending point. They are ends with the unknowable at its core. This entails that ‘no-things’ should lieg at the heart of theorizing.

This shift in attitude is possible by drawing on a historically informed approach to rhetoric that reveals new possibilities for pragmatic action and invention. A method of theorizing, we argue, grounded on three key features of rhetorical devices (tensions and di-visions; imagination and invention; moral scrutiny and rituals of de-finition), as the history of rhetoric reveals, and that we exemplify in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Rhetoric as a way of placing nothing at the heart of organizing.

The first feature, that is tensions and ‘di-vision’, entails searching for opposites (controversia – as explained above) in organizing, not to reveal them but for interrogating the vanishing point in between. This interrogation is a source of imagination and invention, which provides for the second feature in Figure 1. Here, inventio does not come from interrogating what opposing elements (be these values, ends or purposes) are or are supposed to be, as this would take the focus back to the problem of knowledge. Rather, inventio comes from interrogating what these elements are not, that is, what is left out of cognition and therefore triggers pragmatic actions and ongoing practices of search and discovery. This search leads to the third feature of Figure 1: moral scrutiny and rituals of ‘de-finition’. This element implies a key shift: from organization theory as one preoccupied with an epistemological or social concern with action to one preoccupied with the ethical and political implications of acknowledging alternative views, thus allowing for social cohabitation and for action.

Overall, this innovative pathway places unknowability and nothing at the heart of organization theory, rebalancing the asymmetry between the use of rhetoric to construct knowledge, and the use of rhetoric to inform pragmatic action. This is in line with the practice-based approaches that have pointed to a practice perspective for enhancing theorizing efforts (see, Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011), but it also extends it by suggesting how action and pragmatism, and their innovative power (inventio), can be sustained by placing mystery at the heart of such theorizing. This dynamic entails a perspective for designing theory where the focus is on nothing, as the vanishing point in between the ordering categories is more important than the categories themselves.

Next, we offer an example of such theorizing through the three features of rhetoric explained above. We have chosen the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations as our example, given their relevance for policy, society and organizations, and for collective intervention, as well as the multiplicity of ends and values entailed by these goals, ranging from ending poverty and hunger, building infrastructures and secure economic growth, to protecting biodiversity and sustaining climate action, with inherent tensions and dilemmas for achieving what is ‘right’. We show how the three features of rhetoric enable placing the unknowability of the goals at the heart of theorizing the actions around them, opening up ‘what is right’ to multiple, even unknown, possibilities – therefore inspiring an ongoing search for solutions and innovation which never achieves an ‘end’. This approach enables not only a shift from cognition and knowledge to action and pragmatism, as for practice-based approaches, but also to complexify theories (see Tsoukas, 2017), by leaving their conceptual categories and orders always undefined, while still providing guidance to action and inspiring novel possibilities.

An example of theorizing: Organizing for the SDGs through rhetoric

The SDGs are seventeen global goals set in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations (UN, 2015). They followed from the failure in achieving the eight Millenium Development Goals that preceded them, and pointed to a renewed commitment from global leaders, institutions and organizations for reinforcing the effort towards sustainable development by 2030. Although it is already clear that they are too ambitious and complex to be achieved by 2030 (see the SDGs Progress Chart [UN], 2023a, 2023b, 2023c), they continue to inform political agendas and programmes for sustainable development within and across countries (see e.g. IPA, 2021). While recognizing that these goals are ‘right’, they also imply tensions and contradictions as countries attempt to achieve them in practice and through organized action. Theorizing the goals, and the organizing around them, requires understanding that ‘nothing is right’ in dealing with them and therefore unknowability needs to be placed at the heart of what is ‘right’. We draw on rhetoric to do so and start from the first feature of Figure 1.

Tensions and di-visions

One of the greatest preoccupations with the SDGs has been the limited signalling power about their synergies, but also oppositions, as they speak to different orders of worth (Bebbington & Unerman, 2020), that are all deemed ‘right’. For example, the actions for achieving decent work and economic growth (SDG 8) may oppose restoring and promoting terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15). Rather than theorizing this opposition as some ‘thing’ than can lead to more knowledge for informing action towards those ‘ends’, or pointing to their supposed ambiguity and opacity to define practical solutions and achieve closure, one could instead draw on tensions and di-visions (Figure 1), to recognize the unknowability at the heart of the goals. This implies using the symmetry and opposition of the goals to frame a space for inquiry of what is right about them, keeping their opposition productive and always open to new and even unknown possibilities. Here, the point is not to define what is right or wrong about, for instance, preserving biodiversity, or ensuring sustainable infrastructures. It is one of leaving what is right or wrong always de-fined, that is, a combination of defined features, which prompts action, that are at the same time undefined, as these definitions and actions have to be left open to other definitions and future possibilities. This distinction may be explored by seeing what is out there (e.g. infrastructures that may destroy biodiversity) and imagine what is not out there (e.g. poverty enhanced by lack of infrastructures), always playing with the idea that what is right could be wrong and vice versa, leveraging on their di-vision.

Take, for example, the SDGs trade-offs and synergy matrix in the 2019 Global SD report of the UN, highlighting a variety of spaces for positive or negative interactions at the intersection between the 17 SDGs, which are on both dimensions of the matrix (see UN Global SD report (UN, 2019, p. 6). The matrix provides a grid where the SDGs serve as coordinates (on both dimensions of the matrix). At the intersection of the different coordinates, trade-offs and co-benefits are indicated, where present. However, some of these intersections are empty. These empty spaces have been interrogated again in the latest Global SD report in 2023 in a similar matrix (UN Global SD report (UN, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, p. 34), bringing up yet more tensions, and areas that are difficult to classify compared to the 2019 matrix. For example, as noted in the 2023 report, if ‘trade-offs are not carefully managed, clean energy transitions could undermine progress on several Goals, including Goals 8 (decent work and economic growth), 14 (life below water), and 15 (life on land)’ (UN, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c Global SD report, p. 33). The matrix could, in this sense, be used as a rhetorical device (Carruthers, 2013, 2015) for seeing the goals ‘there’, with their opposition and symmetry, while imagining what is not there, as a way to imagine possibilities and a search for innovative pathways.

Another example is offered by the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2023), highlighting the complexity of the SDGs, in terms of possible conflicts and opposition, from the perspective of ‘climate action’ (SDG 13), in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (see the SDGs trade-offs matrix in the IPCC Report (IPCC, 2023, p. 109, taking the SDGs and the climate change mitigation/adaptation options as the coordinates of the grid in the two dimensions of the matrix). Here, the SDGs could be drawn upon as a grid of opposing elements for opening up ‘the portfolio of available mitigation and adaptation responses’ (IPCC, 2023, p. 89) in relation to climate precisely by searching for integrated responses for harnessing synergies and reducing trade-offs of sustainable development in the spaces in between the SDGs and climate, some of which are not filled yet.

Imagination and invention

In its 2021 policy paper on ‘Transforming infrastructure performance. Roadmap to 2030’, the UK Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) articulated its own roadmap into five focus areas according to their link with different, selected, combinations of SDGs. In this roadmap, the SDGs provide an inventory for classifying ‘societal outcomes’, offering ‘an explicit rationale’ for policies and organized actions by linking them to various aspects of sustainable development through the aid of the SDGs (IPA, 2021, p. 7), with different combinations of SDGs being related to different focus areas. As this example reveals, the SDGs can certainly be mobilized as a rhetorical device to legitimize the policy and programmes of IPA, linking each initiative to the ultimate intention of contributing to specific aspects of sustainable development, defined by means of the SDGs. This would imply relying on them to construct knowledge for legitimating and shaping action without the need to interrogate them further. Also, this would lead to theorize the SDGs, their tensions and ambiguities, as a means to construct knowledge towards a definite solution (however imperfect). However, this approach would overlook the unknowability of the goals and the impossibility of providing a definitively right solution. Or, alternatively, they could be mobilized differently: the SDGs, with their indicators and targets, could be drawn upon, in the same way as the ordering categories, or coordinates, of a rhetorical grid, to inspire the search for possible solutions and organized action for sustainable development by combining the coordinates always differently, while leaving the spaces of the grid always empty. What is visible in the grid, that is, the SDGs, offer a spatial ordering device for the five focus areas of the IPA Roadmap, to explore possibilities for what is not visible or known, or is even unknowable, in the grid – that is the problem of sustainable development. As for the medieval orator, the trick would be never to let the problem (e.g. the five focus areas for the IPA roadmap) fall into the grid, as a necessary condition for invention and for opening up to novel possibilities.

Take, for example, the initiatives for retrofitting existing buildings (Focus area 4 – IPA, 2021). Rather than drawing on rhetoric to construct them in positive terms of what they are – that is, a new building ‘archetype’ for saving carbon emissions linked to SDGs 1, 11, 8 and 13 (IPA, 2021, p. 28), it is more productive to think of them in negative terms of what they are not (yet), or cannot be known precisely, in the space in between the combination of those SDGs, without ever falling into this space. So, the ‘retrofitted’ building can be thought of in terms of what it is not (and it is not visible in the grid of the SDGs 1, 8, 11 and 13), opening up probes and further possibilities (e.g. new apprenticeships and jobs, new skills and accreditations, a research and development lab, a consortium of actors, health and wellbeing).

This counterfactual suggests a shift in focus from what the SDGs make visible (e.g. the need for retrofitting buildings) to what instead they leave out: for example, the possibility for the retrofitting building to be already something else (e.g. new jobs, research and development labs, and so on). It follows that, rather than drawing on the SDGs as a means for legitimizing action and persuading about what sustainable development ought to be (or is), they could be drawn upon also to point towards what it is not (yet), as a means for exploring the problem further, allowing for invention and opening up new possibilities for action.

Moral scrutiny and rituals of de-finition

Another problem associated with SDGs’ tensions is the multiple orders of worth (see Demers & Gond, 2020, drawing on Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006 [1991]), and moral judgement that they mobilize. These criteria, or values, suggest what is ‘right’; but, from our perspective, what is right cannot be defined in absolute terms. Their definition is a de-finition: it is precarious, and therefore needs to be conceived of, and remain open to different, even alternative or unknown, possibilities. For example, decarbonizing energy systems can achieve climate goals but also destroy jobs and livelihoods in extractive fossil-energy industries. ‘This underscores the importance of considering “just transitions” that leave no one behind and ensure a fair distribution of benefits’ (UN, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c Global SD report, p. 68, emphasis added). Here, what is right for a ‘just transition’ requires to define the SDGs, and their values, in a way that admits different possibilities, such as increasing poverty, while sustaining climate, but also the other way around. For example, carbon offset practices can harm local livelihoods (UN, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c Global SD report, p. 33), with different moral implications in different time-space contexts. Therefore, whereas it may be acceptable to sacrifice local livelihoods to reduce carbon emissions in a specific time and space, the same sacrifice may not be deemed acceptable in a different context or at a different time. As for medieval rhetoric, this moral inquiry can never achieve epistemic closure, and given the intrinsic unknowability of the values that frame the problem, it needs a precise ritual to allow the scrutiny it demands while remaining a ‘collective’, so that the different actors involved (e.g. those actors where it is acceptable to sacrifice infrastructures to the benefit of biodiversity) interrogate values (of preserving biodiversity and economic growth), always in relation to others (e.g. those actors where it is less acceptable to sacrifice infrastructures). In medieval rhetoric, the ritual of de-finition, where the values were interrogated collectively, was marked by puncti, as moments for specific individual and collective reflection.

Take, for example, the annual summit of the UN where achievements and challenges on the SDGs are revised and discussed, providing for ‘a moment of unity’ and ‘renewed impetus and accelerated actions for reaching the SDGs’ (António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations, referring to the 2023 summit).² In the history of rhetoric, these recurrent moments of interrogation provided for a ritualization that was necessary to reinforce motivation, and commitment, of a group making it, as an acting ‘collective’ (e.g. with the participations of member states and the representatives of different components of societies, including businesses and organization), precisely through the collective participation in the ritual, which never ended, as definite ‘answers’ could never be found.

Discussion

The illustrations above reveal that, in a world fuelled by tensions and opposing demands such as those fuelled by the SDGs and the collective organizing around them, values, aims, purposes and their tensions can be theorized by placing their unknowability at the heart of such theorizing. This is not as if their unknowability was ‘wrong’, and needs to be repaired, as if the SDGs were some ‘things’ that have to be filled with knowledge or be constructed as ambiguous categories (to be filled with more knowledge). Placing unknowability at the heart of theorizing means recognizing that ‘what is right’ (e.g. about the SDGs and their tensions) is inherently unknowable and therefore collective action requires a theory that is intentionally precarious and designed to be open to always other theoretical and practical possibilities (it is indeed a de-finition). Placing such unknowability at the heart of a theory (e.g. concerning sustainable development) requires an ongoing interrogation of what is right, always questioning what is left out and always pointing to further possibilities for imagination and invention.

This animating process can be sustained by drawing on rhetoric, not as a tool of persuasion and knowledge construction, which would close solutions, stop search and lead to premature ‘ends’ (e.g. persuading that certain actions for sustainable development are ‘right’ simply because they meet the SDGs) and rather as a pragmatic tool to interrogate those ends, recognizing their unknowability, and embedding it into actions (e.g. sustaining infrastructures to reduce poverty). In this sense, an organizational end, goal or purpose is not to be conceived in substantial terms but as a procedure that frames their absence and unknowability in always a precarious way.

This approach can be extended beyond the SDGs, to other grand challenges and to extreme contexts. For example, it adds to the theorizing of sustainability as process that unfolds through innovations and the ongoing search for solutions (see Keskin et al., 2013; Whiteman & Kennedy, 2016), by leveraging rhetoric as a source for the unknowable underpinnings of sustainable practices, pragmatic actions and inventions. This is also in line with the idea that the sources of organizational dynamism have to be searched not so much in tensions and rivalry, or in external ordering mechanisms, but within modes of action and processes that are always unfolding because of their intrinsic lacks (Quattrone, 2015).

This theoretical approach extends studies that have pointed to rhetoric as a means for theorizing (Van Maanen, 1995), going beyond a view of rhetoric as a knowledge construction (Drori et al., 2025; Erkama & Vaara, 2010; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005) towards a view of rhetoric as a practice for doubt and enquiry into the negative. This is in line with the call for nuanced forms of theorizing based on different types of voids and lacunae (Agamben, 1988; Lacan, 2013[1986]), such as silence (Blackman & Sadler-Smith, 2009), ignorance (Schwarzkopf, 2020), the negative (De Vaujany, 2025), the latent (Cooper, 1986, 2005) and the not yet, or the neglected (Crane, 2020). This ongoing debate has also pointed to negative ontologies, looking at the intrinsic role of lacks in the constitution and differing of identities and ‘things’ (Knorr Cetina, 1999; Lacan, 2013[1986]). We add to this growing debate by drawing on rhetoric as a means for inquiring how ‘no-thing’ matters to organizing, and recognizing the unknowability of ‘things’, embedding it into theorizing practices and as the basis for action.

The approach that we offer here also augments prior understanding of ambiguity and uncertainty to theorize practices and actions in the face of complexity and pluralism (e.g. Carson et al., 2006; Jarzabkowski et al. 2010; Sillince et al., 2012; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2017). Instead of pointing to ambiguity as a strategic solution that can be leveraged or socially constructed to enable action in the face of multiple goals, we point to an unknowability, which is not ambiguous at all: this unknowability is the only certainty in theorizing individual and collective action and also for organizing and social orders. It is a mystery that is inherently revealed as mystery, and as such constitutes a means to inspire pragmatic action precisely because it recognizes that opposing elements, be these ends, values, meanings, or the like, are unknowable beyond any social construction. In so doing, we add to those perspectives that have theorized complexity and multiplicity through tensions, oppositions and paradoxes (Berti & Cunha, 2023; Berti & Simpson, 2021; Smith & Lewis, 2011, 2022), pointing to the dialectics and learning potential in between opposite ‘things’, triggering knowledge construction through their opposition (and in mediating between them). We show that as much as the opposites should not necessarily be reconciled, the opposites are themselves unknown, as no-things, and this unknowability inspires opportunities for action.

This theoretical approach has implications. Consider if academics and practitioners were to act as medieval rhetors. The former would no longer be enchanted by the illusion that more knowledge is always the solution to a theoretical problem. In relating themselves with reality, more data, more proofs, more causality and correlations would no longer be the benchmark for the validity of an argument and instead the sustained inquiry into an open-ended and evolving ontology suffused with mysticism would redefine their pursuit. The latter would find their actions more coherent with their understanding of organizational realities, always infused with ambiguity, unknowability and mystery, which instead conventional management theories and consulting advice seek to eliminate. Of course, both practitioners and academics alike would have to find a supporting institutional context, made of policies, practices and publication outlets open to such continuous inquiry. For us, academics, this would mean that our ‘products’ (from research articles to impact actions passing through our teaching in class) would have to be open-ended (i.e. not formalized as discrete models, frameworks, propositions, mechanisms and the like) and embed the possibility of being proved ‘wrong’. And, of course, the institutional environment, comprising editors, reviewers and readers, would have to support and accept the integrity and fruitfulness of such efforts (rather than asking for them to be reframed in specific substantial terms, i.e. as ‘thing’).

Finally, our approach to rhetoric adds to studies that have suggested ways for ‘complexifying’ theories to capture the uniqueness and richness of the world, instead of trying to simplify it through theory (Tsoukas, 2017). These studies have suggested ways for both academics and practitioners to get closer to the complexity of the world through, for example, practical rationality (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011), phenomenology (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2020), or relational and dialectic approaches, as a way to preserve the ‘open-endedness’ of ideas, concepts and interpretation (Tsoukas, 2017). We extend these approaches by highlighting the relevance of going beyond knowledge-based underpinnings, and what makes ‘sense’ to the senses or cognition, recognizing instead the unknowability of things, and no-things, at the heart of theorizing organizing.

Conclusions

This paper has provided a historically informed perspective on rhetoric as a resource to theorize ongoing processes of organizing. By drawing on the history of rhetoric, we show how this approach can overcome the closure of knowledge construction that limits and forecloses theorizing efforts, pointing instead to what is not known as a means to inspire unprecedented invention. It also enables a shift from a focus on rhetoric for knowledge construction, persuasion and sense-making, to what does not make sense – that is, our world. It calls for a study of those oscillations between rhetoric as rationality and logics, which we see in most organization literature, and rhetoric as irrationality and non-logic, which seems to characterize these times populated by truth-bending autocrats and populism, where nothing makes sense and has no apparent logic. This study does not look at an ambiguity that can be strategically used to achieve multiple ‘ends’. It is a call for a study that makes the mystery of the social the cornerstone of a pragmatic inquiry into what makes sense and what does not.

Placing unknowability at the heart of theorizing values, aims, or purposes, like the SDGs, is not without limitation, given the risk of falling into the trap of constructing them as ‘ends’, shifting again to focus mainly on filling voids and gaps with more knowledge rather than also exploring their unfolding and potential. This limitation points to the need for more methodological reflection for exploring absences and the absent, without trying to fill it, or frame it, or make it present, but placing it at the heart of such methodologies. This paper opens a space for theorizing how studying nothing, paradoxically, ‘makes sense’, even to understand how it does not make sense and still matters. In a world that is currently incomprehensible (Quattrone & Zilber, 2025), ‘nothing’ needs to be at the core of the future of organization theory.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable points and the Organization Theory editor Joep Cornelissen for invaluable guidance through the publication process. The usual disclaimers apply.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Paolo Quattrone

Notes

Author biographies

Elena Giovannoni is professor of accounting at Birmingham Business School, UK, where she is the head of the Accounting Department. Before joining Birmingham Business School, she was the founder and director of CHRONOS (Critical and Historical Research on Organization and Society) Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. She also holds a position of researcher at the University of Siena, Italy. Elena’s research bridges critical and historical perspectives in accounting and organization studies, at the intersection between space, time, materiality and absences. She is interested in exploring this intersection in diverse settings (recently, outer space, the food industry, knowledge-intensive organizations, and the arts). She has led a number of projects funded by international bodies and organizations, leading to publications in top academic journals as well as in professional journals.

Paolo Quattrone is professor of accounting, governance and society at the Alliance Manchester Business School, associate fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and MISUM Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is interested in how the visible and the invisible, absences, no-things, ambiguity, mystery and the unknowable affect decision making, organizing, data visualizations, governance and the persistence of institutions. He is the 5th recipient of the EIASM Interdisciplinary Leader Award and has been co-editor-in-chief of Organization Studies.

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