Rhetorical Ethic

The Rhetorical Ethic is a pattern, named by the scholar Marimba Ani, in which a culture states ideals it does not enact — holding values for how they present rather than for what they ask. In organizational life it is the distance between the values an organization professes and what actually happens when holding to them would ask something real.

The Rhetorical Ethic is the intellectual root of the gap CultureROOTS takes seriously everywhere — the space between what is espoused and what is enacted. When a workplace runs on it, the words stay pristine while the lived experience quietly drifts.

From Marimba Ani's Yurugu (1994); see the Library page on the asili and the worldview seed.