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Journal of Business and Technical Communication
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Rethinking Loci Communes and Burkean Transcendence

Rhetorical Leadership While Contesting Change in the Takeover Struggle Between AirTran and Midwest Airlines

Kathryn M. Olson

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In situations of potential business change, the cooperation of various direct and indirect stakeholders (i.e., employees, customers, shareholders, neighbors) is crucial. The alternative policy courses may all be reasonable, and yet none of them may be clearly best for all stakeholders; support for an option must be cultivated through public rhetoric. Loci communes and Burkean transcendence are two potent rhetorical strategies that can help business leaders publicly weigh and civilly advocate a policy position relative to competing alternatives. This article develops and illustrates that argument by analyzing the public rhetoric involved in AirTran's attempt to build support for its hostile takeover of Midwest Airlines and Midwest's successful resistance to that attempt. Midwest's deft development of the transcendent term value helped it circumvent the initial deadlock between its preferred loci communes (i.e., the existent and quality) and AirTran's (i.e., the possible and quantity). The article advances a rationale and call for rhetorical scholarship to adopt more situated, social practice views of loci communes and transcendence.

Key Words: casuistic stretching • invention • loci communes • rhetorical leadership • transcendence • value hierarchies

This version was published on January 1, 2009

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 23, No. 1, 28-60 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1050651908324378
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