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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how organizational orators cope with situations where they must simultaneously address several audiences with clashing interests, conflicting identities and contradictory interpretations of crucial issues.

The paper draws on both the classical rhetorical tradition and various contemporary disciplines to delineate, conceptualize and critically discuss a repertoire of rhetorical strategies for dealing with composite audiences.

There are at least nine distinct strategies for dealing with the problem. Most of them make problematic assumptions about audiences. The most promising strategy involves shifting and blending frames.

Most managers will stand in situations where they have to cope with multiple and mutually antagonistic audiences. This paper provides practical suggestions for how to go about it.

The paper isolates and investigates a problem that was largely overlooked by classical rhetoricians, and contemporary scholars still underestimate its ubiquity, its complexity and its urgency. Apart from improving our grasp of the problem, the paper provides a comprehensive overview of potential solutions, and shows their shortcomings.

Drawing on the principal-principal conflict and identity literatures, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the Agency Problem Type II-bis in the context of family business. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that the size of the family owner group is related to firm growth and that this relationship is moderated by the extent to which the family identifies with the firm.

The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 265 medium and large German family firms (FFs) via moderated hierarchical regression analysis.

The main findings suggest that business family identity moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship between the size of the family owner group and firm growth in such a way that FFs with medium-sized family owner groups and high levels of business family identity reach higher firm growth.

In the context of FFs fully owned by one family, family owners might have different strategic preferences, goals, and identities, thus potentially making them subject to the conflict that could arise among the different family owners in relation to growth expectations. Recognizing this problem could help family owners find potential solutions to ensure the well-being of both the family and the business.

The combination of family ownership structure and family ownership dynamics affects firm growth. Challenging the homogeneity of the family owner group, the authors highlight the role of Agency Problem Type II-bis in hindering growth of FFs. A finer-grained view of principal-principal conflicts in FFs is thus discussed.

The idea of ‘identity politics’ has become quite prominent in news commentary. It has been referred to in explaining the 2016 US Presidential election result, the 2016 Brexit vote and a variety of other events in contemporary social life. The idea emerged under that title in the late twentieth century, and refers to political conflicts where groups unite and act on the basis of some shared identity. While the term initially referred to action by groups seeking to remedy past oppression, ‘identity politics’ may now refer to a wider range of cases where there is contestation based on recognition of some shared identity. Individuals’ identity is central to resurgent modern virtue ethics, but it has been suggested that virtue ethics is less relevant to political conflict than utilitarian views or theories of justice. However, an important distinction can be made between narrative identity, on the one hand, and social identity that emerges from individuals’ self-perceived group membership, on the other hand. It is narrative identity that figures in major accounts of virtue ethics. In many situations, narrative identity is importantly affected by group identity, but it is still only narrative identity that has intrinsic ethical weight. This suggests that virtue ethics has relevance to identity politics just because it urges attention to individuals’ narrative identity rather than to group identity.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties, and opportunities of individuals and categories of individuals as citizens. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze how “economic citizenship” is articulated and negotiated in the intersection of (Nordic) welfare state ideals and shareholder-oriented market discourses. The paper further elaborates on how different identity markers, especially gender and class, intersect in these articulations and contribute to exclusionary practices.

The paper approaches the articulation of economic citizenship through an empirical study that focusses on business media representations and online discussions of a major factory shutdown in Finland. Drawing from discourse theory and the notions of representational intersectionality and translocational positionality, the paper analyzes how gender and class intersect in the construction of economic citizenship in the business media.

The study illustrates how financialist market discourses render citizenship intelligible in exceedingly economic terms, overriding social and political dimensions of citizenship. The business media construct hierarchies of economic citizens where two categories of actors claim full economic citizenship: the transnational corporation and the transnational investor. Within these categories, particular systems of privilege intersect in similar ways, rendering them masculine and upper middleclass. Whether interpreted as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, the financialist discourses rearticulate the social hierarchies and moral landscape in Finnish society.

The paper contributes to critical/feminist management studies by elaborating on the role of the business media as an important site of political identity work, positioning, and moral regulation, where neoliberal ideas, based upon and reproducing masculine and elitist systems of privilege, appear as normalized and self-evidently valued.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Connolly’s (2003) concept of agonistic respect to develop a typology of agonistic/antagonistic discourses on Twitter. To develop the typology, this study examines 2,236 Tweets containing the hashtag #guncontrol and uses NodeXL (Smith et al., 2010) to create a network map from which the 75 most influential accounts are derived. Using constant-comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the authors identify seven categories of discourse style based on Connoly’s (2001) notion of ressentiment and “good faith presentations” of opposing arguments: furtive/secretive, cravenly opportunistic, willfully ignorant, irrational sentimental, misunderstanding/misguided, contingently wrong and reciprocal inquiry. The typology provides a useful and unique way to operationalize agonistic democratic theory and serves as the possible basis for training a machine learning classifier to detect antagonistic discourses on social media platforms.

To determine the level of agonism on Twitter, the authors examine tweets that employed the hashtag #guncontrol on March 12, 2018, one month after the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. The authors used the NodeXL excel add-on to collect and map 2,236 tweets. Using grounded theory/constant-comparative analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), the authors develop a typology of seven types of discourses ordered from most antagonistic to most agonistic using Connolly’s (1993) concept of agonistic respect.

After examining the top 75 most shared tweets and using constant-comparative analysis to look for patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, the authors identified seven different ways in which individuals present their opponents’ value positions on Twitter on the issue of gun control. The authors were guided by agonistic theory in the authors’ inquiry. The authors looked at how Twitter users expressed their opponent’s faith/value positions, how pluralistic the discourse space was in the comment threads and how much the “talk” was likely to elicit ressentiment from adversaries.

Because the authors intended to engage in theory building, the authors limited the analysis to a selected number of tweets on one particularly salient topic, on one day. The intent of this was to allow for a close reading of the tweets in that specific network for the purposes of creating a useful typology that can be applied to a broader range of cases/issues/platforms.

The authors hope that typology could serve as a potential starting point for Twitter to think about how it could design its algorithms toward agonistic talk. The typology could be used as a classification scheme to differentiate agonistic from antagonistic threads. An algorithm could be trained to spot threads overwhelmingly populated by antagonistic discourse and instructed to insert posts from other threads that represent agonistic responses like “contingently wrong” or “reciprocal inquiry.” While generous presentations or deeper, more nuanced presentations of the opponent’s value position are not a panacea, they could serve to change the orientation by which users engage with policy issues.

Social media platforms like Twitter have up to now been left alone to make markets and establish profitability off of public sphere conversations. The result has been a lack of attention to how discourse on these platforms affects users mental well-being, community health and democratic viability. Recently, Twitter’s CEO has indicated a need to rethink the ways in which it promotes “healthy discourse.” The utilitarian presumption that, left to our own devices, we will trial and error our way to the collective good does not account for the importance of others in refining one’s preferences, arguments and world views. Without an “other” to vet ideas and lead us toward becoming wiser, we are left with a Wyly antagonism that moves discourse further and further away from agonistic respect and toward antagonistic virtual struggle. Platforms that allow antagonistic talk that breeds ressentiment run the risk of irrevocably damaging democracy through poisoning its public sphere.

This paper is unique in providing a typology/framework for thinking about the types of “political talk” that exists on Twitter. By using agonistic political theory as a framework, the authors are able to establish some guiding principles for “good political talk” that acknowledges the incommensurability of value positions on issues like gun control. The typology’s emphasis on agonistic respect, ressentiment and generosity in the presentation of alternative value positions provides a starting point from which to map and catalog discourse on Twitter more generally and offers a normative model for changing algorithmic design.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors underlying residents’ lack of involvement and engagement with their city brand. This paper addresses the gap in understanding residents’ disengagement from their city brand.

In-depth interviews with 14 residents of Dunedin City, New Zealand, were conducted to identify and understand the factors that underlie residents’ disengagement from their city brand. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis.

Four major themes or factors that influence residents’ disengagement were identified: lack of brand awareness/knowledge; lack of brand identification; disapproval of local government actions; and cynical attitudes towards involvement.

This paper focuses on one city brand, with its unique history and institutional context, and the thoughts and experiences of a limited group of residents, thus limiting the applicability of the findings. A longitudinal study would be helpful to identify if residents’ engagement with their place brand change over time and the underlying reasons for such changes.

Extant research highlights the importance of a participatory, co-creative process between citizens and local governments for building city brands. Despite this, this study’s findings demonstrate that there might be several formidable barriers to resident participation in their city’s branding process.

This paper represents a first step in understanding what might trigger or contribute to residents becoming disengaged from their city’s brand. Therefore, this paper considers the “hidden voices” of residents who have become largely disconnected from the city brand.

This chapter describes a theory of intergroup leadership. Research on reducing prejudice and intergroup conflict identifies a number of conditions, such as empathy, shared goals, crossed categorization, recategorization, and intergroup contact, which can be beneficial. It also identifies social identity threat as a stumbling block – processes intended to reduce conflict often threaten people’s sense of having a unique and distinctive social identity and thus provoke a defensive reaction that sustains conflict. But social psychology says little about the role of group leadership in conflict resolution.

I summarize what we know from social psychology about conditions that attenuate intergroup conflict; then focus on social identity and influence processes to present a new theory of leadership across conflicting groups.

Prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction rests on effective messaging and influence, which is often a matter of intergroup leadership where a leader must bridge and integrate warring factions within a superordinate entity. The challenge of intergroup leadership is to construct an intergroup relational identity that focuses on collaboration and avoids identity threat. I describe a model of intergroup leadership and discuss strategies, such as identity rhetoric, boundary spanning and leadership coalition-building, that such leadership should adopt to effectively reconstruct social identity to reduce conflict and prejudice between groups.

This is a development and extension of a more narrowly focused theory of intergroup leadership in organizational contexts. It will be of value to social psychology, the behavioral and social sciences, and those seeking to reduce prejudice and intergroup conflict through leadership.

This study aims to examine the effects of ethnic and social identities on negotiation decision making in the context of the Cyprus conflict.

The author conducts a theory‐driven case study of the 1959 Zurich‐London agreements on Cyprus, analyzing the positions of Turkey, Greece, Britain, and the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities during the negotiation process. The analytical method is the applied decision analysis procedure.

The analysis of the Zurich‐London negotiations over Cyprus suggests that even in the presence of adversarial ethnic ties, decision makers who have a shared (and salient) social identity are more likely to employ collective‐serving decision strategies and seek even‐handed solutions that will not jeopardize their mutual interests. Here, Turkey and Greece – both NATO members – decided to settle on a commonly agreed negotiation outcome despite their ethnicity‐driven, clashing interests over Cyprus. In contrast, decision makers with severe ethnic fragmentation with no shared social identity (as with the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities) are more prone to employ self‐serving decision strategies and seek zero‐sum negotiation outcomes that will exclusively benefit them.

Regarding the applied decision analysis procedure employed in this study, it is necessary to acknowledge the subjective nature of the construction of the decision matrices with respective values/ratings, even though such procedure is based on empirical and situational evidence.

The study introduces a novel theoretical and analytical framework to the literature on negotiation decision making in identity‐based conflicts by combining the social contextualist perspective with the polyheuristic decision model and using applied decision analysis. By anchoring the analysis in the historical context of the Cyprus conflict, the study also contributes to the relatively underdeveloped literature on conflict management in the Middle East.