Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 459
Every explanation assigns a motive
Burke’s pentad reveals how organizational explanations assign motive by privileging acts, scenes, agents, agencies, purposes, and the relationships among them
Premise
Explanations do organizational work before anyone chooses a remedy. A missed target can be attributed to market conditions, a reckless leader, a flawed process, inadequate tools, or a misguided objective. Each account makes a different intervention appear natural because each quietly assigns motive and responsibility in a different way.
Kenneth Burke’s dramatism turns that hidden grammar into an object of analysis. The pentad asks how discourse constructs act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, then examines the ratios among them. Its executive value appears when one explanation has become so familiar that it no longer looks like an interpretation.
What the model is: Dramatism and the Pentad in Knowledge →
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- Risks and limits
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainMeaning & Clarity
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.
- KnowledgeDramatism and the Pentad
- Related briefAttribution Theory: Separate the Event From the Cause You Assign
- Key conceptPentadic ratios
- Key conceptTerministic screens