The rational bureaucracy beloved by organization theorists, like the perfect market, emphasizes rational communication, logos alone, nothing but the facts M'am. Many interested in managerial rhetoric presume 'media richness' is necessary to motivate employees and customers - for virtues and emotion come into play when real people are involved (so calling for ethos and pathos perhaps). The focus here is on the rhetorical gap between the language of real life and the arid abstractions of organization theory - or, from the managerialist point of view, on getting real people to behave organizationally, aligned to the organization's chosen rationality and norms. But behind 'real' lurk strange axiomatic puzzles; who is this 'real' extra-rational person and how might s/he be 'organized'? All we know is that the 'real' organizations or markets that managers must engage cannot be theorized as purely rational systems - as Simon's bounded rationality or the incomprehensibility of the idea of knowledge or a quick dip into economic and political history makes clear.

Pursuing a post-Simon theory of organizing, one that axiomatizes uncertainty, I argue 'real' organizations survive only because, as in the stone, scissors and paper game, managers succeed in harnessing the imagination and agency of others to resolve the specific uncertainties arising in the organizational functioning they initiate. But to position rhetoric as the means to engage others' agency is to junk Rational Man (logos alone) - along with the organizational and economic theorizing that stands on his shoulders - and adopt a very different MoI (Model of Individual), the rhetorically persuadable Isocratean individual perhaps. Such individuals can 'associate' - in De Tocqueville's terms - and this reframes the managerial task.

This is interesting as far as it goes and connects to advertising, politics, negotiation, leadership, exhortation and so forth, fields foreign to Rational Man. But organization implies something more complex than lock-step agreement among the persuaded; indeed, given a realistic division of labor and learning, the popular talk of trust, shared knowledge, common purpose or cognitive and normative consensus is at best problematic and at worst irrelevant. What can managers then manage? Is rhetoric more than propaganda?

The technical question is whether managerial rhetoric reaches beyond informing into persuading, transforming or even re-constructing individuals as the organization's agents rather than as its dumb computer-like decision-makers. Taking a methodological individualist position, I sketch a rhetoric-based theory of organization with embedded notions of leadership and strategy, enriched with some rhetoric about the history of organization in the West.