Media Unions’ Online Resistance Rhetoric: Reproducing Social Movement Genres of Organizational Communication

Abstract

This paper examines the resistance rhetoric that media workers use to publicly organize trade unions online in a social movement genre of strategic communication activism: the critical manifesto. The paper provides a genre analysis of the rhetorical strategy, form, and devices of 30 online Why We’ve Organized statements of the Writers Guild of America, East as a case study of a labor movement organization’s resistance rhetoric. Through a promulgation strategy, the statements reproduce and modify the critical manifesto, using resistance rhetoric to strategically negotiate power relations. The statements outline a selective history of workers’ grievances, a solution to them, and proposals to resist them. This rhetorical form and key rhetorical devices inform the content of the organizing statements, revealing important issues affecting work, workers, and employers. This paper contributes a novel framework to understand resistance rhetoric within this genre, better positioning researchers to analyze social movement genres of organizational communication.