Rhetoric as a mean of the competition among institutional logics in organizational fields: The case of corporate social responsibility

In management and organization literature, approach of institutional logic is frequently used to examine the institutional change of certain organizational fields. The institutional logic approach focuses on the conflicting institutional logics in the organizational fields. The spread of thoughts about institutional logics in organizational fields provided by the interaction of institutional actors. Institutional actors use different rhetorical strategies in their statements to ensure that practitioners adopt new management practices and to convince them accordingly. In this context, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the competition between the multiple institutional logics that exist in a particular organizational field through rhetorical strategies. The findings of the research conducted for this purpose showed that the defending CSR logic has become a dominant position in the field and revealed that institutional actors apply different weights to rhetorical strategies to convince their listeners.