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As a business executive and philanthropist, Mary Kay Ash is legendary as a glass-ceiling breaker. With the belief that Mary Kay Ash is both modern and relevant, while simultaneously legendary, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Mary Kay Ash as an influential entrepreneur. This research responds to the call by Cogliser and Brigham (2004) for an increased understanding of how entrepreneurial leaders influence, challenge, inspire and develop followers.

Following on research by Hoppe (2013), this objective was accomplished via a pentadic analysis of Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric aimed to influence the mental mindset of readers (followers) over the course of generations. Burke’s pentad was the sense-making tool used for examining Ash’s rhetoric of influence as an entrepreneurial leader. The data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

Based on the analysis of her written work, Mary Kay Ash resided at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship and, in so doing, was an influencer. Her primary rhetorical approach to influencing was idealism. Interwoven in her writings, she also exhibited both pragmatism and realism. She knew that she had to start the business to have the future she desired and that she needed to train her team appropriately for success to be forthcoming. The motivation in Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric was that of influencing people so they would be the best that they could be.

Qualitative research brings with it an array of inevitable research problems. Pentadic analysis cannot be judged by the basic objective standards of reliability and validity because objective reality does not exist in personal interpretation. That is, one person as a critic cannot be impartial because the interpretation is only one personal way of viewing the data and another critic might view the same pentads and come up with different ratios. With this subjectivity in mind, however, the data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via LIWC and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

The findings from this research denote clearly that Mary Kay Ash was a forerunner of the modern day influencer. As a primogenitor of the influencer marketing phenomenon, Mary Kay Ash’s entrepreneurial legacy is expected to continue through generations of followers. This finding speaks to the importance of today’s entrepreneurs using the spoken and written word to influence others and create a lasting organizational legacy.

Countless scholars have used pentadic analysis, with a variety of artifacts, to examine the motives behind the rhetoric. However, rhetoric as a means of persuasion and influence has received little attention within the context of the written works by management gurus (Jones et al., 2009), and, aside from the exploration by Berglund and Wigren (2012), the narrative of entrepreneurial influence has not benefitted from close examination.

Uses Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic pentad” as an analytical framework to analyse a company event that in New Zealand became symbolic of social responsibility in action. Presents the event in which the staff of an Auckland food processing operation was flown to Western Samoa for a weekend “picnic”. Explores the act – what happened; the scene the physical, geographic and cultural milieu of the action; the agent – managing director Dick Hubbard’s individual identity and the role he played out in terms of the action; the agency – the means by which Hubbard was enabled to accomplish this action, and his role in initiating, approving and funding the staff picnic; and finally, the purpose – the intended effect of the action and a consideration of perceived outcomes. Considers the usefulness of the dramatistic pentad to other organisational contexts. Concludes that it provides a useful model to guide the analysis of diverse organisational texts.

The purpose of this research is to examine stories of and by employees as they implemented a transformative organizational change, involving outsourcing, off‐shoring, and the make‐over induced by technology.

Three types of data were analyzed – organizational documents, responses to oral and written questions, and observational field notes. Two interpretive approaches were used – qualitative content analysis and “grounded theory”. Additionally, the Burkean pentad was applied to examine how the change was perceived and characterized by the change participants.

During technological change, planned storytelling may provide a platform for understanding the perceived and real people costs and benefits of the change. The organizational opportunity to tell stories was enabled by three mechanisms: visual representation, distillation and documentation, and innovative ways to learn. The Burkean pentad tool indicated highly knowledgeable and engaged individuals. Thus, while the participants know what to do, there is a sense of uncertainty about their “agency” and the change results. What also emerged is a sense of collegiality and interpersonal support.

The stories for this study were collected during the change process. One could expect to hear different stories after the change is implemented, after the participants have gained more agency or attained a better sense of their agency. One may also expect to have different results by including more participants.

Stories capture the interpretation and analysis of information by people – by revealing how the new technology has affected work‐design, employee's functioning in new partnerships and work‐flows, and other people‐centered needs such as the sense of “agency”.

This paper outlines the potential of learning from planned storytelling during technological change to steer technological change processes in a people‐centered way.

Pentad City proposes a new environ‐ment of urban structure in the wake of recent upheavals in crystallography, materials science, mathematics and structural morphology.

Presents a method for analysing statements (e.g. theories) about service quality. Uses a method, the Pentad, based on the work of the American literary and social critic Kenneth Burke′s work A Grammar of Motives. The Pentad′s five key terms Act, Agent, Scene, Agency and Purpose – which corresponds to five questions: What? Who? When and Where? How? Why? – are strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise, when one makes statements about what people do and why they are doing it. A central thesis of Burke′s is that the meaning of an act or event is based on the five key terms (on the answers to the five questions) in toto. If some of the key terms remain unspecified (i.e. the corresponding questions unanswered) the meaning of the event or action in question is correspondingly ambiguous. The method operates to assist (half‐formed) theories to become self‐conscious and articulate.

Heard the one about the company which took its staff thousands of miles for a picnic? It is not a joke; it really happened in New Zealand when Dick Hubbard, owner and managing director of breakfast cereal manufacturer Hubbard Foods Ltd flew his entire 102‐man workforce to Western Samoa for a tenth birthday picnic during the Queen’s Birthday Week. In this article, Walker and Monin use Burke’s “dramatistic pentad” as a framework to analyze the event in terms of action, location, the star (Hubbard himself), his part in the action and the purpose, and argue that it might be used to analyze other organizational events.

This study extends work from home (WFH) literature by recasting WFH performances that emphasise agents’ manipulation of scene. Drawing on the dramatist paradigm, the study uses Burke’s pentadic criticism to code the social media application Pinterest’s ‘work from home’ and ‘home office’ pinboards for act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Pinterest is a social media application that users post pins (images with verbal tags and link to external sites, especially blog sites) and collect pins by subject on an electronic pinboard, which other users can like, follow, and share. Analysis of WFH pins reveals that the agent–scene ratio saturates pins emphasising the agency of WFH agents to control their scenes or home office spaces. The idealism of the agent–scene ratio in pins further demonstrates an unrealistic approach to popular culture’s shift to WFH and a romanticisation of WFH as idyllic working conditions. Scripts for employees and employers are explored to equip them with the rhetorical resources to more closely align their agent–scene ideals with the scene–agent realities.

The purpose of this paper is to recall the influential role of Professor John Rose in stimulating development of sustainable cybernetic frameworks designed to contend with the daunting challenges obtaining in the domain of urban habitat generation.

Objectives are realized via discrimination of invaluable opinion (information/data), case study analyses of experiments (projects), differentiation of distinguished effects (phenomena), and intervention in the evolution of urban planning theory.

It is found that the disposition of geometrical forms of quasi‐crystal type – “Penrose Tiling” or “Shechtmanites” – realizes extensive economies in urban space allocations (land use), escalation of population indices (density), substantial contraction of time and distance in movement patterns (energy conservation): a triplet (encompassing quantity, quality and economy) are surely applicable in a world confronted by the unceasing demand for urban shelter and threat of a global economic meltdown.

Transformation of the manually derived models (for town design) is dependent on significant investment in the phase involving development of complex algorithms for enabling combinatorial computing and modeling; the sine qua non for testing applications at various scale levels prior to development of a universally viable computer software. The implications for urban habitat policies generally would be phenomenal if not revolutionary should the envisaged software ever be realized.

Exposure of original work in progress enhances the potential for obtaining valuable feedback from intrigued professionals as well as potential consumers, particularly those from public sector housing agencies experiencing acute budgetary agendas.

Michael Holquist (1990), one of the commentators on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monumental work, stated flatly that “human existence is dialogue,” and Ivana Markova (2003) declared that “dialogism is the ontology of humanity.” Bakhtin (1985;1986) himself said that such dialogues are conducted by using “speech genres.” From another angle Kenneth Burke asked, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” and claimed – and showed – that this question can be best answered by using what he called the “grammar of motives,” which consisted of a hexad of terms: act, attitude, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In this chapter, I examine, by using various examples, how the Burkean grammar is used in the construction of one speech genre or the other to achieve rhetorically effective dialogic communication.