This special issue of Management Communication Quarterly mines the rhetorical heritage to explore the challenges facing those who engage in and critique external organizational rhetoric, setting its sights on helping organizations make society a better place to live. Toward this end, rhetoric focuses on strategic communication influences that at their best result from or foster collaborative decisions and cocreated meaning that align stakeholder interests. This special issue demonstrates the eclectic and complex theories, applied contexts, and ongoing arguments needed to weave the fabric of external organizational communication. Over the years, Robert Heath and others have been advocates for drawing judiciously on the rhetorical heritage as guiding foundation for issues management and public relations activities. Rather than merely acknowledge the pragmatic or utilitarian role of discourse, this analysis also aspires to understand and champion its application to socially relevant ends. In that quest, several themes stand out: (a) In theory and practice external organizational rhetoric weighs self-interest against others’ enlightened interests and choices; (b) organizations as modern rhetors engage in discourse that is context relevant and judged by the quality of engagement and the ends achieved thereby; and (c) in theory and practice external organizational rhetoric weighs relationship between language that is never neutral and the power advanced for narrow or shared interests.
