How Institutions Communicate Change: Casuistry and Loosely Coupled Change in China’s Market Transformation

Abstract

How do institutions think about change? Building on Mary Douglas’s famous contention that institutions think by means of analogy, we suggest that institutions think about change by means of irony. Irony is pronounced during times of profound change when the rhetoric and the reality of change can be inconsistent. We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has enacted what we term loosely coupled change—change in which symbolic meanings and material practices are only weakly connected and retain their independence. The CCP employed the rhetorical form of irony, known as casuistry, to legitimize a change to market systems as being incremental while in practice radically adopting market systems and dismantling socialist practices. We contribute to research on institutional messaging by examining the hermeneutic depth of casuistry. We also contribute to research on organizational change by explicating how casuistry reconciles contradictory ideologies and facilitates loosely coupled change.

Keywords

institutional change loosely coupled change rhetorical strategies casuistry legitimacy China’s market reform chinese communist party

Institutions are persistent material structures and practices legitimized by taken-for-granted meanings (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Zucker, 1977). By their very nature, institutions are permanent and communicate stability. Communication researchers employ the concept of institutional messages—collations of thoughts that carry institutional logics—to characterize the enduring, wide-reaching, and unequivocal nature of institutional communication (Lammers, 2011). However, sometimes institutions do want to change. Yet we know little about how institutions “think” about change and communicate change. The renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) postulated that institutions use analogies to naturalize their rules. When it comes to change, organization theorists have turned to irony (Sillince & Barker, 2012) and other rhetorical concepts (Green & Li, 2011). Despite advances in this line of thinking, however, we still have limited knowledge about the nature of institutional messages during profound institutional change.

Some scholars have noted that institutional messages can be equivocal in ways that are helpful to institutional change (e.g., Barley, 2011, p. 202). The strategic ambiguity literature has long emphasized the value of ambiguous messages during change (Eisenberg, 1984). Similarly, the “language convergence, meaning divergence” perspective shows how the same words used by different people can mean different things (Dougherty et al., 2009). Linguistic polysemy exists in several forms and can play an important role in both change and resistance (Ceccarelli, 1998). Indeed, because contradictions and resistance can be prevalent during periods of change, institutions often design messages to manage the contradictions. Further, although researchers agree that institutions are constituted by discourse and rhetoric and some argue that institutions and logics “are the product or outcome, rather than the determinant, of communication practices” (Suddaby, 2011, p. 184), few have contemplated how institutional messages affect institutions during periods of change, especially when the messages are equivocal and the change is likely to trigger deep-seated resistance.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s institutional messages during China’s market-oriented transition exemplify equivocation and are rife with paradoxes (Li et al., 2018; Lu & Simons, 2006). China as a country is analogous to an institutional field, and its economic transition has been championed by the CCP. For nearly four decades, China operated as a centrally planned economy that eliminated private property and rejected market mechanisms. Then, in 1978, Chinese leaders began to adopt free market practices and structures. In 2005, they even began recruiting capitalists into the CCP. However, unlike other post-communist economies, Chinese leaders have always proclaimed allegiance to Marxist and communist ideologies and retained the political structure created by the CCP (Oi, 1995). Faced with this contradiction, observers and scholars of China’s transition have had a hard time characterizing the change to a market-oriented system, using names for the new system ranging from “communist totalitarian regime” to “state capitalism.” Might the problem be that the terms, meanings, and reality in China are only loosely coupled, and intentionally so?

Borrowing from the idea of decoupling in institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), the concept of loose coupling in the sensemaking literature (Weick, 1976), and the notion of talk–action inconsistency in communication (Christensen et al., 2021; Winkler et al., 2017), we propose a specific kind of institutional change as “loosely coupled change.” We define this as change in which symbolic meanings and material practices are only weakly connected and retain their independence. This discrepancy between the messages and the practices of institutional change prompts us to ask: What kind of institutional messages characterize loosely coupled change? How do such messages facilitate loosely coupled change? Based on a rhetorical analysis of major texts produced by the CCP between 1977 and 2017, we argue that China’s official rhetoric frames controversial new practices and structures as incremental adjustments that maintain ideological consistency. Specifically, we identify casuistry as a key rhetorical strategy in this process. Casuistry is a case-based method of reasoning (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988) and a rhetorical strategy based on irony (Burke, 1969a). It accommodates new practices based on old principles, reconciling competing interpretations of reality. We demonstrate that casuistry is key to the loose coupling of meanings and practices during institutional change, creating change that is simultaneously evolutionary and revolutionary, or incremental and transformational.

Theoretical Background

Theories of Change

Change has been a central topic in communication research (Burgers, 2016) and organizational institutionalism (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996). Both research communities categorize change along two dimensions: scope and pace. Regarding scope, change is either incremental (fine-tuning an existing template) or transformational (breaking loose from an existing template). In terms of pace, change is either evolutionary (slow, gradual) or revolutionary (swift, comprehensive).

While typologies can provide analytical clarity, this one unrealistically assumes that change is binary that neatly falls into discrete categories. In reality, processes of stability and change not only co-occur, but it is often only through the process of interpretation that we see them as discrete phenomena. An emerging lens of rhetorical history sees permanence and change as socially constructed through the strategic use of rhetoric (Suddaby et al., 2010). In this perspective, the degree to which an event is characterized as “evolutionary” or “revolutionary,” “incremental” or “transformational,” is of critical political importance to actors who have an interest in how change is portrayed (Suddaby & Foster, 2017). When opposing forces negotiate the terms of change, the institutional messages used to proclaim and legitimize changes can be profoundly equivocal and potentially disconnected to the actual changes in material practices.

Loosely Coupled Change

While research on both organizations (Phillips et al., 2004) and communication (Barbour, 2010; Lammers, 2011; O’Connor et al., 2017) has highlighted how institutional messages can carry institutional logics and reinforce institutionalized practices, few have theorized the complex relationship between what is being communicated (i.e., the symbolic meaning) and what is being done (i.e., the material practices) during times of profound change (Phillips & Malhotra, 2008). Existing studies tend to examine how language and material practices are positively related (e.g., language arguing for or against certain material practices leads to the prevalence or abandonment of those practices, Maguire & Hardy, 2009) or negatively related (e.g., language is used to disguise the deficiency of a material practice, Westphal & Zajac, 2001). However, critics argue that research has largely overlooked changes in which symbolic meanings are loosely coupled with material practices (Li, 2017; Lizardo, 2019).

The concept of loose coupling has a long history in organizational research. Meyer and Rowan (1977) employed the concept of decoupling to describe how organizations display similar rules and structures to conform to societal expectations while engaging in diverse internal practices having little to do with these rules and structures. Weick (1976) described loose coupling as a distinct organizational structure that defies rationality, predictability, and certainty. Loose coupling occurs when elements in a system are “linked and preserve a certain degree of determinancy” but also “retain evidence of separateness and identity” (Orton & Weick, 1990, p. 203–204). Loose coupling has also been characterized as organized hypocrisy (Brunsson, 1991), and talk–action inconsistency (Winkler et al., 2017). Loose coupling has been shown to enable swifter local adaptation, preserve organizational unique and separate identities and cultures (Weick, 1976), and accommodate agentic and resistive interpretations of rules (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). It has also been shown that promises made without action can positively nudge an organization toward more serious implementation of practices (Christensen et al., 2021).

Adopting a semiotic perspective, Li (2017) reinterpreted Meyer and Rowan’s notion of decoupling as a loose relationship between a signifier and its signified. She observed that actors can disregard a sign’s original, denotative signified and instead infuse connotative or surplus signifieds into the emptied signifier, resulting in the loose coupling of the sign’s denotative and connotative signifieds. This suggests that decoupling can occur between what actors say and mean and also between what they do and mean, in addition to the commonly understood inconsistency between what they say and do.

Several streams of communication research have shed light on the loose coupling of language and meaning. For example, the notion of strategic ambiguity highlights the role of ambiguous language in unifying diverse audiences and facilitating change (Eisenberg, 1984). Dougherty and colleagues (2009) extended the notion of ambiguity to situations in which individuals use the same language and assume their meanings are similar, when in fact they mean very different things. Ceccarelli (1998) identified two other forms of polysemy in addition to ambiguity: resistive reading and hermeneutic depth. These scholars highlight that multiple meanings associated with the same language serve important communicative functions.

Loose coupling can be pronounced during the institutional change we label as loosely coupled change. We define loosely coupled changes as changes in which the symbolic meanings and the material practices are weakly connected, with each element preserving its independence. Scholars have noted that symbolic meaning-making and material practices have their own distinct logics (Powell & Colyvas, 2008) and may follow different trajectories (Li, 2017). The symbolic and the material are responsive to one another in the sense that they coevolve, yet they do not stand in a linear or causal relationship. Instead, the symbolic and the material can form a dialectical relationship, tensional yet connected in a continual interplay (Putnam, 2015). However, we still know little about the nature of rhetoric during such loosely coupled change.

Institutions are taken-for-granted social rules and structures (Douglas, 1986) and thus, by definition, are difficult to change (Zucker, 1987). Institutional messaging during change is also challenging because of resistance and pressure from conflicting parties. Such a situation is ripe for loose coupling of symbolic meaning and material practices. In fact, Weick (1976) suggested that under conditions of loose coupling, there is an increased need for social actors to negotiate or construct a social reality that they can live with. Thus, understanding how institutional messages work in loosely coupled change can clarify the very nature of institutional change.

Casuistry and Change

To study institutional messages about change, we draw from research in organizational rhetoric that has long studied the persuasive rhetoric of collectivities, both insurgent and established (Meisenbach & McMillan, 2006). Many rhetorical strategies have been found to facilitate change, including the four master tropes (Sillince & Barker, 2012), enthymemes (Green et al., 2009; Hartelius & Browning, 2008), and Aristotelian proofs (Green, 2004). Tensions between conflicting discourses enable changes in practices (Barbour & Manly, 2016; Jensen, 2020). Particularly relevant to radical change are dissonance tropes such as irony, paradox, sarcasm, parody, and oxymoron (Oswick et al., 2004). In this case study, we argue that rhetorical casuistry best captures the nature of institutional messaging during loosely coupled change.

As a rhetorical technique, casuistry acquired a pejorative reputation in the 18th century: It was perceived as a degenerate form of reasoning entailing moral laxity and an intention to mislead. To Burke (1984), casuistry is a rhetorical method wherein “one introduces new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to old principles” (p. 229). Casuistry uses irony to persuade: “Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms” (Burke, 1969a, p. 512). Burke contended that an aspect of casuistry can be found in all “metaphorical extension” (Burke, 1984, p. 230) and that it is a necessary and inescapable attribute of language (Burke, 1969b). Rhetorical scholars Stephen Toulmin and Albert R. Jonsen rescued casuistry from its historical denigration and proposed viewing it as a useful case-based method of decision-making for solving moral dilemmas. They argued that casuistry lies at the heart of rhetorical reasoning, highlighting the use of practical procedures rather than general abstract principles when dealing with a multitude of particular concrete situations (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988). Contemporary research on casuistry emphasizes its function of reconciling contradictions through the use of ironic strategies to mediate between terms (Carlson, 1992).

Our inductive analysis suggests that the loose coupling between symbolic meaning and material practices facilitated the rapid adoption of capitalist practices by the CCP during China’s economic reform, as these practices were justified as consistent with socialist ideology. The loosely coupling—enabled by casuistry—allowed powerful actors to engineer transformational change without shedding their ideology or sources of legitimacy. We contribute to the research on institutional messaging by examining the hermeneutic depth of casuistry. We also contribute to research on organizational change by identifying and explicating four techniques of casuistry for reconciling contradictory ideologies and facilitating loosely coupled change.

Methods

The Case Study: China’s Economic Transformation

Beginning in the late 1970s, China began a massive program of economic reform. Key institutional elements of the long-standing communist economy, dominated by state ownership and central planning, were profoundly altered by the introduction of institutional elements of a market economy, including the dismantling of large agricultural collectives, legitimizing entrepreneurs, opening the country to foreign investors, privatizing smaller state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and restructuring large SOEs (Nee & Opper, 2012). In 1978, China was one of the world’s poorest countries; four decades later, it is the world’s second largest economy.

China’s economic reform is distinct from the transitions of other communist countries not only by its relative success, but also because China’s adoption of capitalism occurred in a society that “still loudly proclaims its commitment to Marxism” (Kluver, 1996, p. 1). The former Soviet Bloc countries all renounced communism as they adopted the institutions of a capitalist economy. However, China has retained both its Marxist-inspired principles of socialism and the CCP as a dominant political institution. The CCP, as a party organization, is characterized by factional politics, but it has maintained its status as the ruling party in China and has managed to largely communicate with a unitary voice. To be sure, political instability has abounded, but most China observers and scholars would agree that liberal economic reforms have brought transformational changes to China’s economic infrastructure.

The case of China’s economic reform presents an empirical challenge to the typologies of change. Economists typically characterize China’s change as incremental, in contrast to the “shock therapy” model of former Soviet Bloc communist economies (Stiglitz, 1994). However, many economists and political scientists have credited China with building a more comprehensive market-oriented economy than countries that abandoned socialism altogether, and they view China as being de facto capitalist (Shirk, 1993). The terms China scholars use to describe China’s transition often sound like oxymorons: “deliberative authoritarianism,” “consultative Leninism,” and “hybrid regimes.” The case of China defies neat typologies and presents a unique opportunity to explore the messiness of change as words, meaning, and practices coevolve. This coevolution unfolded over a long period of time, making it feasible to trace the discursive process along with the changes in material practices.

Data Sources

Our data consist of formal communications from the National Congresses and plenary sessions of the CCP, as well as annual government work reports delivered by the Premier of China’s State Council at the National People’s Congress. We chose 1977 as the starting point for our data collection because it is the year of the first National Congress of the CCP after the Cultural Revolution. Eight National Congresses were held between 1977 and 2017, and 60 plenary sessions took place during the same period. Each conference generated a set of important documents that supplemented the CCP National Congress Reports, variously labelled as resolutions, decisions, communiques, speeches, proposals, and so on. We collected these documents along with editorial coverage of the conferences in the People’s Daily. Taken together, our data set consists of 243 documents comprising over 2.2 million words.

Analysis

Our analysis proceeded in three stages. In the first stage, we identified 36 linguistic formulations that appear frequently in these official documents, enjoy broad popularity in the official media, and are ironic. We determined these linguistic formulations as forms of casuistry by comparing them to existing rhetorical strategies. In the second stage, we inductively arrived at four distinct techniques of casuistry. We then selected one example from each type for in-depth rhetorical analysis, juxtaposing the rhetoric with material changes that occurred to illustrate the loosely coupled nature of the words, meaning, and practices. In the final stage, we used quantitative analysis to visually present the webs of meaning that embed the four examples at the paragraph level. Specifically, we applied the bibliometric mapping software Visualization of Similarities (VOS), which employs techniques similar to multidimensional scaling to represent the frequency and proximity of co-occurrences of terms within paragraphs in the form of cluster maps that represent semantic networks (Waltman et al., 2010). These maps provide additional insights into how casuistry mediates contradictory meanings.

Findings: Constructing Change Through Casuistic Strategies

Casuistic Dislodging

The first casuistic strategy that emerged from our analysis is “casuistic dislodging,” which refers to dislodging a concept from its taken-for-granted, literal interpretation. The dislodging introduces a clear alternative interpretation to the established meaning without inventing a completely new concept. Burke (1984, p. 308) used the analogy “verbal ‘atom cracking’“—wrenching loose a word that customarily belongs to one category and applying it metaphorically to a different category. In casuistic dislodging, the original meaning of a concept is detached but the connotation connected to its original use remains. Figure 1 presents the casuistic dislodging of a central CCP slogan: “Mao Zedong Thought.”

Figure 1.

Casuistic dislodging.

“Mao Zedong Thought”

In China’s official political discourse, “Mao Zedong Thought” is one of three theoretical sources for the CCP, along with Marxism and Leninism. Because the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death and the prosecution of the “Gang of Four,” the CCP faced pressure to offer an official discourse on how the Party viewed Mao. One approach is exemplified by the Soviet Communist Party’s denunciation of Stalin 3 years after his death (in a 1956 “secret report” to the Communist Party’s 20th Congress) which completely overturned Stalin’s status. Another approach would be to avoid talking about Mao’s role in the Cultural Revolution and continue enshrining him as the flawless founder and savior of communist China. However, the CCP took a third approach.

In 1980, Deng Xiaoping instructed a team of more than 20 writers to work on a resolution that would generate a revised consensus about how the CCP viewed Mao Zedong. Deng closely guided the writing of this critical document. He frequently met with the team leaders and emphasized that the most central point of the resolution was to establish the historical status of Mao and his thoughts. Deng acknowledged the confusion about Mao’s legacy because of the Cultural Revolution and envisioned the document as an authoritative interpretation of Mao’s historical record. He told the writers that mistakes during the Cultural Revolution should not be solely attributed to Mao Zedong. Instead, the Central Committee should take collective responsibility for the mistakes: “We should not exaggerate comrade Mao Zedong’s mistakes … If we exaggerate, we will smear the reputation of comrade Mao Zedong, which is to smear the reputation of our Party and our country” (Office, 1983, p. 455). Given the difficulty of the rhetorical situation, CCP theoretician Hu Qiaomu devised an ingenious idea: to define “Mao Zedong Thought” as an abstract philosophy collectively invented by Party members, instead of the thoughts of Mao the individual. This effort resulted in the publication of an important document, Resolution on some historical issues regarding the CCP after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1981.

When “Mao Zedong Thought” was first used in 1943 by Party theorist Liu Jiaxiang and then in 1945 by top Party official Liu Shaoqi, it meant the thoughts of Mao Zedong himself. Now, however, the Resolution claimed that not all of Mao Zedong’s thoughts were Marxist:

The history of the Cultural Revolution has shown that Comrade Mao Zedong’s principal theses for initiating his revolution conformed neither to Marxism-Leninism nor to Chinese Reality. … Comrade Mao Zedong’s wrong leftist-leaning arguments to initiate the Cultural Revolution apparently derailed from the track of Mao Zedong Thought.

Instead, the Resolution defined “Mao Zedong Thought” as the collective thoughts of members of the CCP:

The Chinese Communists, with Comrade Mao Zedong as their chief representative, created Mao Zedong Thought by integrating the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution. Mao Zedong Thought is Marxism-Leninism applied and developed in China; it consists of a body of theoretical principles concerning the revolution and construction in China and a summary of experience therein, both of which have been proved correct by practice; and it represents the crystallized, collective wisdom of the Communist Party of China.

The redefinition of “Mao Zedong Thought” was initially received with harsh criticism by the Party’s senior cadres, but the mix of loyalties to Mao and the obvious need for economic reform heightened their dilemma. As one scholar adroitly summarized, “Mao and Mao's Thought can and must be criticized but cannot and must not be abandoned … Indeed, it is far too early to let Mao’s reputation die with him” (Weng, 1983, p. viii). Since the publication of the Resolution in 1981, the phrase “Mao Zedong Thought” has appeared in all subsequent Reports of the CCP National Congresses and has been retained in the CCP Constitution.

To visualize the dislodging, we used VOS cluster maps. We extracted 395 paragraphs from our dataset that mention Mao in various forms, such as “Chairman Mao,” “Comrade Mao,” and “Mao Zedong,” between 1977 and 2016. We identified 38 unique terms that co-occurred with “Mao Zedong Thought.” The cluster map for the co-occurrences of these terms (presented in Online Appendix 1) shows that “Mao” the individual was semantically dislodged from “Mao Zedong Thought.”

In this cluster map, Chairman Mao is represented by the red cluster of terms (primarily from texts produced before 1981). “Mao Zedong Thought” and its associated concepts are represented in the blue and primarily come from texts after 1981. Mao the individual is closely associated with highly problematic historical events such as the Cultural Revolution and labels used in his radical ideological campaigns. In contrast, “Mao Zedong Thought” is noticeably cleaved away from “Chairman Mao” and is also comfortably close to “Socialism” and “Marxism” and becoming close to “Modernization.” Most critically, “Mao Zedong Thought” is cozily proximate to the “CCP,” represented by the green cluster, whereas “Chairman Mao,” while still connected, is not close. Remarkably, the green cluster for the CCP is also associated with emerging new characterizations of the party captured in terms like “Spiritual Civilization” and, most notably, “Material Civilization.”

Although the separation of Mao Zedong Thought from Mao is almost linguistic trickery, it unleashed significant changes in material structures and practices. The explicit and firm evaluation of Mao’s mistake was accompanied by the end of Hua Guofeng’s central leadership in the CCP. Because Hua was handpicked by Mao as his successor, his removal was made legitimate with the criticism of Mao’s mistakes. The Resolution concludes: “It is apparent that it is impossible to have him lead the correction of the leftist-leaning mistakes inside the Party and revive the fine tradition of the Party.” Hua’s removal meant that the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping became the de facto leader. Another immediate material effect of the rhetorical shift was the systematic removal of Mao’s statues from numerous public squares and work units across the country.

The CCP’s rhetorical dislodging introduced a differentiation within the original concept. The Party used this differentiation to create some degree of consistency within its orientation: The Party officially denounced the Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao, and therefore no longer considered his thoughts to be the absolute truth. In the meantime, the dislodging allowed the Party to retain Mao Zedong in its Constitution. Mao’s name serves important symbolic functions and its removal would have generated doubts about the changes in Party orientations. The irony of severing Mao from the Thought named after him is apparent, and has generated resistance, confusion, and cynicism within the Party and in the society. However, dislodging allowed the Party to maintain Mao Zedong Thought as its guiding principle while significantly changing what is included and what is excluded by Mao Zedong Thought.

Casuistic Merging

The second casuistic strategy we identified is “casuistic merging,” which refers to the creation of a new concept by combining existing concepts not customarily used together. This practice created concepts that were both deeply rooted in the past and profoundly new. Figure 2 represents the merging terms to create one of the most central phrases in the reform era: “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”

Figure 2.

Casuistic merging.

“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”

This slogan first appeared as formal language in a speech that Deng Xiaoping delivered to open the Party’s 12th National Congress in September 1982. In this speech, Deng proposed that China should not simply copy the modernization programs from the West. Specifically:

In carrying out our modernization program we must proceed from Chinese realities. Both in revolution and in construction we should also learn from foreign countries and draw on their experience, but mechanical copying and application of foreign experience models will get us nowhere. We have had many lessons in this respect. We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path of our own and build a Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—that’s the basic conclusion we have reached after reviewing our long historical experience.

In a frank conversation, Deng told Gorbachev that although China had debated with the Soviet Union for a long time about what socialism is, neither had really grasped the concept (Deng, 1993). Deng intended to adopt economic practices that had proved to be effective in the West; yet he was also adamant about adhering to socialism.

The slogan was popular with the media and re-appeared as formalized language in the Party Report of the 13th National Congress of the CCP, delivered in 1987 by the Party General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang. The report added important theorizations to this slogan by inventing another new concept through casuistic merging. Specifically, Zhao Ziyang redefined China’s current stage of socialist development as the “Primary Stage of Socialism,” a phase the Report estimated would last for over a hundred years. The report also theorized that economic reform was consistent with the tenets of Marxist historical materialism. Zhao criticized extreme leftist beliefs that assumed that China could achieve socialism without achieving advanced modes of economic production. Instead, he argued, the CCP’s roadmap for building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics would be the pursuit of economic development, which was entirely consistent with dialectical materialism:

This stage is different from the transitioning period when the economic foundation of socialism is still not built; it is also different from the stage where socialist modernization has been realized. The principal contradiction facing our current stage is the contradiction between people’s growing material and cultural needs and the backward social production. Class struggle will still exist for a long time to some degree, but it is no longer the principal contradiction. In order to resolve the contradiction of the current stage, we must strongly develop a commodity economy, … and we must reform those parts of production relations and the superstructure that do not fit the development of the production force.

By introducing the idea that China was on a fairly long road of building “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” Zhao planted the seed of the idea that the institutions of capitalism could be successfully adopted and transformed into a superior form of Chinese socialism. Over the span of the next 30 years, the slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” appeared in the title of every National Congress’s Party Report, a frequency unprecedented in the history of the CCP.

Appendix 2 depicts our VOS analysis, which was constructed by identifying and extracting 944 paragraphs containing the term “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” from 180 documents in our dataset. We identified and calculated the frequency and proximity of the co-occurrence of 46 terms. The cluster map demonstrates the central location of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” in the CCP’s rhetoric of change. The green cluster includes important CCP events and reflects the CCP’s efforts to construct a coherent historical rationale for China’s economic reform. The red cluster highlights two terms with which “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has become most strongly associated: “Reform” and “Scientific,” reflecting the Party’s self-conception of its mandate and nature. The blue cluster is directly related to the economic domain, reflecting Deng’s key slogans, such as “Three Benefits,” emphasizing the importance of focusing on developing the production force, and key agents of change including the “Peasant” and “Worker” and their “Creativity” and “Positivity.” The yellow cluster includes more recent efforts by CCP leaders to articulate ideals for China’s economic institutions: “Democratic,” “Legal System,” “Rule of Law,” “Governed” by a Party that is “People-oriented,” “Vanguard,” and committed to “Anticorruption.”

The umbrella phrase “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” contained a negation—that the socialism China practiced in the past was inadequate. The irony lies in using “Chinese characteristics” to denote deviation from standard “socialism” when the CCP had always regarded China as the model of a socialist country. As Carlson (1992) observed, “The contradictions may then be juxtaposed so that an ironic synthesis of terms will clear the way for a change in consciousness” (p. 22). Public acknowledgement of the backward economy and the need for change shifted people’s understanding of China’s identity and priorities, as well as the nature of market. This shift in consciousness enabled transformational and revolutionary changes in material structures and practices. Market mechanisms replaced central planning in core areas such as factor markets and labor markets, numerous small and medium SOEs were privatized, stock markets became some of the largest in the world, private enterprises surpassed SOEs as the main employers and contributor the GDP, and private entrepreneurs were allowed to join the Communist Party. China’s economic outlook became astonishingly capitalist (Nee & Opper, 2012). However, by characterizing it as “Socialism” and “with Chinese Characteristics,” it was to be understood and experienced accordingly.

This new slogan served important rhetorical functions. Use of the phrase “Chinese characteristics” to modify socialism connoted for many that it was no longer the socialism they knew, and the idea that China was only in a primary stage of socialist evolution justified the urgency to adopt greater economic reforms. Moreover, by inventing and inserting a historical period—the “Primary Stage of Socialism”—into a teleological narrative, the CCP’s rhetoric “naturalized” the massive ideological disjuncture of incorporating capitalist institutions and practices into a communist political system. By placing this ideological rupture within a long-run narrative of evolution to a higher order of socialism, the CCP successfully emphasized the disruptive and revolutionary nature of the change while at the same time presenting it as stable, continuous, and natural.

Casuistic Substituting

The third casuistic strategy is “casuistic substitution,” which refers to the process of replacing elements of a linguistic formulation with new ones that seem identical but are different in subtle yet important ways. This rhetorical technique is illustrated by an allegory offered by the well-known Chinese economist Zhang Weiying. The allegory is the story of a village in which horses were considered to be virtuous despite being lazy and unproductive, while zebras were considered to be vicious even though they are hardworking and efficient. The village chiefs hoped to replace horses with zebras, but feared resistance. So, instead, they started painting horses with black stripes to make them look like zebras and reassured the people in the village that these animals were still horses. Gradually, the chiefs began replacing some of the painted horses with real zebras, still claiming that these were painted horses. Only after many years did the chiefs reveal—and the villagers accept—that these animals were indeed virtuous zebras (Zhang, 2012).

The strategy of casuistic substitution is seen in the role played by the “painted horses”: their black stripes represented shockingly radical change (i.e., the horses no longer looked like horses), yet the animals also conveyed reassurance that no important principles were compromised (i.e., despite the stripes, they were still horses). Figure 3 maps the casuistic move from the system of central planning to that of the market with concepts representing contradictory ideologies combined through casuistic merging. Eventually, elements of the new concepts are replaced by bolder vocabularies to create more radical shifts in the meaning of the original concept.

Figure 3.

Casuistic substituting.

From “Planned Economy” to “Socialist Market Economy”

It took 14 years for the CCP to officially use the slogan “market economy” in formalized language. The phrase was first proposed in 1978 at a conference held by the State Council to discuss economic reform in China. The proposal was denied because the term was considered synonymous with capitalism. The term “market economy” was considered to be “spiritual pollution” and was therefore sanctioned in formalized language. Faced with forceful resistance, economic reformers in the CCP engaged in a gradual strategy of casuistic substitution that would ultimately culminate in the term “Socialist Market Economy,” which debuted in the 1992 Party Report delivered by Jiang Zemin, the General Secretary of the CCP.

The first “painted horse” used to bridge China’s transition from a planned to a market economy was the somewhat clunky phrase “planned economy as primary, market adjustment as auxiliary,” introduced in the Party’s 12th National Congress in 1982. The phrase was drafted by Chen Yun, an influential economist and elder member of the Party, whose framing connotes his theory of China’s “bird cage economy” in which the market (represented as a bird) could be permitted only within the established institutional constraints of the State (the cage). Chen Yun’s formulation was soon seen as too constraining because it placed absolute primacy on central planning.

In 1984, at the 3rd Plenary of the 12th Central Committee of the Party Congress, a new term—“planned commodity economy”—was introduced in a Decision on Economic Reform by Premier Zhao Ziyang. This phrase more directly signaled the intended direction of economic reformers within the Party. The Decision states that the “full-blown” development of a commodity economy was a period that could not be skipped and was a necessary condition for economic modernization. In 1987, Zhao Ziyang introduced a new substitute term: “the state mediates the market, the market guides the enterprises.” The new phrase fundamentally changed the relative status of plan and market, relegating the role of the state from planning to mediating, shrinking the scope of commodities under a mandatory plan, elevating the market to a more central role in relation to enterprises, and explicitly expanding the boundaries of the market to the scope of the entire society. In the meantime, the Report once again reassured Party members that although “commodity economy relies on the growth and perfection of market, using market adjustments absolutely does not equate to adopting capitalism.”

The economic retrenchment between 1989 and 1992 saw the strengthening of the bird cage theory and systematic suppression of market mechanisms. However, a wave of new theorizations for adopting the phrase “market economy” also emerged. For example, economists such as Wu Jinglian published lengthy articles arguing that a “commodity economy” is indeed the same as a “market economy.” Deng Xiaoping took a firm position during his 1992 tour in southern China, arguing that “plan” and “market” are both economic means; therefore, socialism could use the “market” as long as it would achieve socialist ends (Deng, 1993). Deng’s tour and the national debate it triggered between those who upheld the primacy of central planning and those who espoused the primacy of the market led to a shift in the CCP’s policy orientation (Fewsmith, 2001).

The 1992 Party Report that Jiang Zemin delivered at the 14th Party Congress finally adopted the phrase “market economy.” Since then, this slogan has been firmly ensconced in the official linguistic formulation of China’s economic system. The 1992 Report defined the “Socialist Market Economy” as one in which “the market plays a fundamental role in allocating resources under the macro adjustment of the socialist state.” Here “market economy” is not only discussed explicitly in reference to price mechanisms and supply and demand, but also in reference to higher returns, incentives, competition, and survival of the fittest—notions pointing to a more full-fledged market system. Once “market economy” was adopted, the previous phrase “commodity economy” disappeared from official language.

Intense debate occurred behind the scenes as old terms were disbanded and new phrases were brought into play. Reformers and conservatives fought about the elimination of each word and negotiated intensely on the selection of substitutes. These contentious struggles demonstrate that Party officials were highly sensitive to the fact that a sudden shift in the language of economic reform would run the risk of intensifying contradictions and diminishing the legitimacy of the CCP.

To construct VOS maps, we extracted 2491 paragraphs from 1977 to 2017 that contain at least one of the three terms: “plan,” “commodity,” and “market.” We identified 56 key terms from these paragraphs and assessed the frequency and proximity of their co-occurrence. We further divided the data into two periods, 1977–1992 and 1992–2017, due to the complexity of the maps. Appendix 3 shows the relatedness of the top 40 terms between 1977 and 1992, when the official discourse moved from “Planned Economy” to “Commodity Economy.” Appendix 4 shows the relatedness of the top 40 terms after 1992, when “Market Economy” was made official.

In both cluster maps, the central terms are “Enterprise,” “Manage,” “Operate,” and “Product,” indicating the topic of enterprise reform. The red clusters capture the drastic change of vocabulary between the two periods. The 1977-1992 cluster map shows the historical migration from “Mandatory Plan” to “Commodity Economy,” with the term “Market Economy” very small. The 1992-2017 cluster map shows “Market Economy” as the largest term in the red cluster, “Planned Economy” barely exists, and “Commodity Economy,” like the painted horses, completely vanished.

The blue cluster also reflects changes between the two periods. In Appendix 3, “Change” means “Competition” and giving managers “Responsibility” and “Accountability.” In Appendix 4, “Property Right” becomes central, and SOEs have been restructured into shareholding companies that issue “Stock.” The green cluster represents the macroeconomic domain, with the 1992–2017 cluster map featuring more recent phenomena, such as “Exchange Rate” and “Futures,” representing continuing effort of the CCP to integrate into the global economic system.

A comparison of the two cluster maps suggests that mechanisms of a market economy—the price mechanism, the law of value, supply and demand, and competition—were all introduced in the early years of the reform. Yet the Party took pains to create strange terms such as the euphemism “commodity economy.” This reflects clashing ideas and compromise at the top of the Party leadership.

Casuistic substitution accompanied some of the most innovative, but also controversial, organizational and economic arrangements during the reform era. These “painted horses” are neither horses nor zebras, but can be seen as both. New organizational forms such as town-and-village enterprises (TVEs) and new pricing systems such as the double-track system best exemplify the duplicity of these arrangements. TVEs grew out of small enterprises in villages and towns and were neither SOEs nor private enterprise, but resembled both. TVEs allow entrepreneurs to build ventures based on market demands while being ultimately controlled by local governments. The double-track system is an institutional innovation in pricing. It allows goods to be traded on the market based on demand and supply while still being distributed based on the prices set by the central planning system. It nurtures the growth of a market outside of the plan and then allows the market to replace the plan. At first, the market track only existed for a few production factors, but, as price reforms deepened, it grew to include almost everything, leading to the ultimate elimination of the plan track. Innovations such as TVEs and the double-track system allowed China to operate simultaneously following two different principles—a socialist planned economy and a capitalist market economy. Unlike the shock therapy model, which completely privatized SOEs and abandoned central control of pricing, China’s hybrid organizational forms and pricing systems straddled opposing principles.

TVE and the double-track system were legitimized through the ironic synthesis of contradictory institutional arrangements. Here casuistic substitution serves important cognitive and symbolic functions. The “painted horses” were a bridge that nurtured cognitive acceptance crucial for institutional change. As Zhang Weiying later noted, the beginning of the reform had no real zebras, only horses. Therefore, making horses look like zebras began to subtly and gradually familiarize people with the look of zebras. This strategy effected institutional change despite intense confrontation, and it warded off strong resistance. In response to accusations by hardline socialists, reformers could always say that these animals were simply decorated horses. A sudden shift of official language, although facilitative for the introduction of market practices, could disrupt the system, intensify contradiction, and diminish leaders’ legitimacy. The casuistic strategy of substitution was able to gradually undercut the symbolic power of one ideology and strengthen the symbolic power of the other. Words, phrases, and arguments that mildly deviated from the established ideology were introduced first, while those that were closely related to the opposite ideology were adopted last. Step by step, the change agent could carefully orchestrate the co-evolution of the material and the symbolic, thus transforming the official language into a new system of meaning.

Casuistic Stretching

The fourth casuistic strategy is “casuistic stretching.” This refers to a rhetorical technique that expands the boundary conditions of a concept to accommodate new elements while keeping the linguistic formulation intact. Figure 4 elucidates casuistic stretching in which a concept representing one ideology is stretched in its scope to the extent that it almost means the opposite ideology.

Figure 4.

Casuistic stretching.

The “Public Ownership System”

The CCP’s use of casuistic stretching is perhaps most apparent in their efforts to alter the meaning of the final pillar of the socialist ideology—the “Public Ownership System” (公有制). Public ownership is the defining element of socialism, just as private property rights are the foundation for capitalism. Many China scholars have documented real changes in the institution of property rights and ownership in China (Naughton, 1995). Yet few have noted that the core linguistic formulation describing the nature of the system of property rights and ownership in China never changed.

Even today, the terms “private ownership system” and “privatization” are rejected in the official discourse. Although China has passed laws protecting private property rights, it does not consider the new economic order to be anything close to a capitalist ideology. For example, the 1982 Party Report claims that the concept “Public Ownership System” is the “fundamental system of our country’s economy and cannot be undermined in any circumstances.” The term appears regularly in Reports of the National Congresses across 40 years of reform, always featured as the basis of the socialist economic system and the mainstay of the economy.

However, the intension (i.e., the internal content or meaning of a term) and extension (i.e., the corresponding set of objects and things in the real world) of “Public Ownership System” have been stretched to accommodate content and practices that are antithetical to the original meaning. In the 1987 Party Report, the CCP explicitly encouraged development of a variety of property ownership types, such as individual enterprises and private enterprises, and declared that financial markets are not unique to capitalism. The 1987 Report also extended the forms of the public ownership system from SOEs directly owned by the state to enterprises jointly established by many public ownership types (e.g., owned by local government and government agencies).

The 1997 Party Report further changed the intension and extension of the “public ownership” concept. First, the Report defined the superiority of public assets as being about the quality, not quantity, of SOEs. This means the CCP only needs to control the most strategic sectors and industries and helped justify the fast pace of privatization in many non-strategic sectors and regions. Second, the CCP broadened the extension of the “Public Ownership System” to accommodate new cases. Specifically, the “Public Ownership System” included not just purely state-owned and collectively-owned enterprises but also SOEs that were restructured into shareholding companies.

The 2002 Party Report further developed what it meant to belong to the public ownership system. For the first time, the concept “state-owned capital” appeared in the Report, suggesting that the Party realized that to claim public ownership, the state need not even own material assets such as factories and machines. Instead, the state only needed to own the capital by being a company’s shareholder. Through casuistic stretching, the substantive meaning of “Public Ownership System” changed from emphasizing direct control of operations to ownership of material assets such as factories, machines, and land. It then shifted to the ownership of capital assets, such as stocks. As a result, any shareholding company with shares owned by the state or collectives is part of the “Public Ownership System.”

Appendix 5 depicts the VOS map of terms for the “Public Ownership System.” We extracted 342 paragraphs mentioning “public ownership system” between 1977 and 2017. We identified 45 key terms and calculated frequencies and proximity of their co-occurrence. The green cluster contains Marxist reasons for the centrality of the term “Public Ownership System.” The adjacent blue cluster reflects the vocabulary that accommodates new forms of organizations and management innovations. The small yellow cluster contains several controversial concepts such as the “Individual Economy,” defined as an enterprise employing no more than five people that does not constitute exploitation, the “Private Economy,” an entity that employs more than six, and the “Collective Economy,” with vaguely defined property rights. The red cluster represents more recent developments in property rights reform. At the furthest points, we observe “Marketization,” “Mixed-Ownership System,” and “State Capital,” indicating the more recent vocabulary that the CCP employed in describing the “Public Ownership System.”

The symbolic stretching of the “Public Ownership System” concept is most clearly reflected in the changing material practice and structure of SOEs. At the beginning of the economic reform, SOEs were under the direct administrative supervision of the various state departments. Early reform focused on decreasing the direct control and management of SOEs by government administrators and increasing the accountability and autonomy of general managers. Laws and rules were established to delineate the legal status, property rights, and behaviors of SOEs; performance-based incentive systems, boards of directors, and professional managers were adopted. The reform also encouraged SOEs to issue public shares and get listed on stock markets. By the early 2000s, the vast majority of the two thousand listed companies were SOEs, and the state controlled the majority of the shares of these SOEs.

Interestingly, the stretching of the concept of the “Public Ownership System” has not led to a linear market liberalization of SOEs. During the late 1990s, the poor performance of SOEs (especially compared to the vitality of the private sector) led the government to let go of numerous small and medium SOEs through bankruptcy, management buyouts, and restructuring. However, many China observers agree that while the first two decades of the reform saw the retreat of the state in the economic realm, the later period of the reform has witnessed the strengthening of the SOEs reflected in the proliferation of state assets in central SOEs (i.e., about 100 SOEs supervised by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council). The ambiguity in the stretched concept accommodates both the “retreat” and “advancement” of state ownership in the overall economy.

Casuistic stretching serves important symbolic and cognitive functions. Phrases like “Public Ownership System” act as “floating signifiers.” The wide and repeated use of these signifiers in official discourse provides a sense of continuity and stability, indicating fidelity to the original ideology. Stretching the intension and extension of a floating signifier allows it to stand for new things. In a sense, it reverses the adage of placing “old wine in new bottles” with the semantic twist of placing “new wine in old bottles.” Substantial material changes can be said to take place within the boundaries of the permanent linguistic formulation. Because casuistic language has two contradictory elements—the persistent presence of the old bottle and the infusion of the new wine—it can accommodate and sustain contradictions. The irony created through the stretching allowed people to develop broader understandings of the original concept.

Conclusions and Implications

In her famous work “How Institutions Think,” Douglas (1986) postulated that institutions have a mind of their own that works through analogy. Communication scholars have advanced the idea that institutions are constituted communicatively. However, we still know little about how institutions communicate change or how messages of change constitute institutions. This study contributes to research on institutional messaging by suggesting that when institutions communicate change their minds work through irony and their message involves rhetorical casuistry.

We argue that casuistry is uniquely suited for institutional messaging during times of profound changes because it retains enduring features of institutional messages while creating critical spaces for novel concepts and different interpretations. The casuistic techniques we have identified all preserve important elements that embody the established institutional order: the name of Mao Zedong in Mao Zedong Thought (through casuistic dislodging), the concept of socialism (through casuistic merging and substitution), and the concept of a public ownership system (through casuistic stretching). However, in each of these casuistries, the retained elements are “wrenched loose” from their established meaning and infused with new meaning. The new meaning is often opposite to the established meaning, such as denying that Mao’s own thought is part of Mao Zedong Thought, replacing central planning with the market economy as the defining feature of socialism, and broadening public ownership to mean any stocks held by the state, regardless of the company’s ownership.

Casuistry is similar to strategic ambiguity in that both allow stakeholders to concur with a message while harboring different understandings of the message (Barley, 2011), thus promoting unified diversity (Eisenberg, 1984). Keeping “Mao Zedong Thought” in the CCP’s Constitution made it easier for hardline leftists to tolerate the denunciation of Mao’s failings. Insisting that some of Mao’s own thoughts were not “Mao Zedong Thought” provided reformists with hope that the CCP would have the courage to formally acknowledge and excoriate Mao’s grave mistakes.

However, casuistry and strategic ambiguity differ in that although strategically ambiguous language is abstract and intentionally lacks clarity, concreteness, and specifics, casuistic language can be very clear, concrete, and specific. For example, the CCP judged that Mao got things right 70% of the time and was wrong the remaining 30%. The percentages given are exact. The ambiguity lies, instead, in the lack of direct correspondence with a correct course of action. What should we do knowing that Mao was wrong 30% of the time? Casuistry gives a general sense of change in attitude but does not provide a roadmap for action. In fact, a wide range of action, ranging from radical change to incremental adjustment, can be legitimized by casuistic formulations. In every case of its casuistry, the CCP provided detailed theorizing to explain and reconcile the contradictions in terms. Casuistry shows that clear, concrete, and specific language can also be strategically ambiguous. This is consistent with Eisenberg’s (1984) contention that clarity or ambiguity arise from relational and contextual dynamics between the source, the message, and its receivers.

Throughout the reform era, the CCP used clear and concrete language communicating an unambiguous intention: the need for market-oriented change. That message was clearly understood by its receivers. However, the ambiguity lay in the profound irony embedded in the CCP’s intentions and message and the audiences’ ironic interpretations. Compared to stable ironies, whose meaning can be reconstructed with confidence by an audience, the CCP’s ironies were “unstable” in that the receiver could never be sure about the intended meaning of the ironies and where exactly the meaning was negated or undercut (Booth, 1974). Risk-taking entrepreneurs could read the slogan “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and embark on leveraged buyouts of SOEs but then be indicted and put in jail for embezzling state assets. Hardline leftists could read the same slogan thinking that SOEs would be privatized or become outdated but later find out that SOEs grow phenomenally and some even made it to the Fortune Global 500.

The instability of ironies makes casuistry polysemic. As Dougherty et al. (2009) explained, “Language convergence is the use of common labels to engage in meaning-making activities” (p. 38). The authors observed that common language can be used with drastically different meanings, and that “language convergence, meaning divergence,” indicates that there is an illusion of shared meaning or agreement. What is unique in the case of China’s economic reform is that the audiences of the CCP’s casuistry knew their interpretations were different from the interpretations of others, especially their ideological opponents. Those who participated in formulating the language fought hard to shape how the concepts were worded and elaborated. Furthermore, there is an abundance of resistant readings of these linguistic formulations (Ceccarelli, 1998). Rather than a shared illusion, the common language represents a temporary political and strategic reconciliation. Moreover, interpretations of these linguistic formulations are an ongoing endeavor, so the meaning divergence is not only synchronic but also diachronic.

Institutions’ casuistic messaging is different from deliberate lying or deception. During China’s economic reform, Chinese citizens were not being deceived or lied to by these linguistic formulations; they were aware of the rhetoric being used and were, in fact, willing agents in the change. The casuistic rhetoric certainly triggered shock, confusion, cynicism, and dissent in the audience. However, their sense of what was legitimate was stretched and ultimately shifted to something radically different. Casuistic messaging reconciles ironies, which may characterize how institutions “think” about change.

Our study’s second contribution is explicating the role of casuistry in “loosely coupled change” in which symbolic and the material aspects are not tightly synchronized and preserve some independence. Scholars have long recognized that planned change involves dualities and tensions (Seo et al., 2004). Faced with these dualities, actors typically separate the two poles, ignoring or downplaying one of them, or take a middle road by reaching compromises (Poole & Van de Ven, 1989). But separation and compromise may not work or be conducive to change, and an alternative is to hold both poles of the tensions in play. The irony inherent in casuistry makes these tensions and contradictions almost “natural” to the audience. Actors use irony to produce multiple meanings, thus creating symbolic distance for coping with normative control (Oswick et al., 2004). The relatively stable ideology provides a cushion and comfort for people facing rapidly shifting practices. Transformational change can be constructed and experienced as less pathbreaking and more consistent with deeply ingrained principles. Casuistry justifies the contradictions and the loose coupling between the symbolic and the material.

Leaders’ deliberate maintenance of tensions between the symbolic and material reality can help maintain political stability and social order during times of profound change. Sillince and Barker (2012) used Jack Welch’s tenure at General Electric as an example of institutionalization as a tropological process moving from metaphor to metonymy to synecdoche, and then to deinstitutionalization characterized by irony. Irony arises when contradictions between past promises and present realities become evident and effort is put into delegitimizing practices (Sillince & Barker, 2012). Such irony was present in the early years of China’s transition, as people recognized the gap between the promises of communism and the country’s economic conditions after the Cultural Revolution. What is unique about the case of China is that the CCP deliberately built irony into its institutional messages. The deinstitutionalization that followed did not completely negate the principles and legacies of the past; rather, it preserved valuable connections and continuities. Importantly, the proclaimed faithfulness reaffirmed the socialist ideology and reasserted the CCP’s authority and renewal. Our analysis reveals that the four techniques of casuistry served a dual purpose: to justify economic reform in the country while simultaneously legitimizing the CCP’s leadership during this process of change. Our findings suggest that loosely coupled change involves powerful actors with vested interests in characterizing change as continuous, thus circumscribing the ideological contradictions embodied by the material change.

Casuistry as a form of reasoning relies on cases rather than abstract principles (Jonsen & Toulmin, 1988). This allows change agents to make and act on difficult decisions without being paralyzed by irreconcilable differences between diametrically opposed ideologies. Loosely coupled change is full of inconsistencies between rules and actual practices, but casuistry pressures everyone to look at the rules differently because the vocabulary underlying the rules becomes ambiguous and uncertain (Sillince et al., 2012). Some concepts are “chameleon-like,” producing strategic ambiguity and lending themselves to wide diffusion (Meyer & Höllerer, 2016). Similarly, casuistic concepts are purposefully created to sustain contradictions and create possibilities for controversial and innovative practices.

Practical Implications

Our study has important practical implications for communication about change. The concept of “loosely coupled change” highlights the inherent ambiguities and contradictions in change. We suggest that change agents use novel linguistic formulations to drive a wedge between words and their taken-for-granted meanings. This can lead to shock, confusion, and dissent, but it also creates space for more profound and polysemic interpretations of tensions and contradictions. These interpretations can give a sense of irony to materiality not conforming to existing ideologies or categories. Contrary to typical practitioner calls for unequivocal communication, we suggest that, in difficult situations such as the possible collapse of an ideology that has been holding a collectivity, casuistic rhetoric can be a functional alternative.

However, casuistry has inherent risks. It can lead to demoralization (Burke, 1984, p. 229) as well as nostalgia and guilt (Carlson, 1992), and it can invite charges of hypocrisy. Leaders may find it difficult to create and sustain casuistries and may eventually lose legitimacy. The ambiguity of casuistic concepts can lead to conflicting policies and practices based on how local actors interpret messages. Fluctuations of policies have been common during China’s periods of change: Yesterday’s illegal practices may be lauded today, and today’s heroes can become tomorrow’s prisoners. The ambiguity also creates grounds for relentless infighting among party factions vying for advantage and power. Finally, new practices developed under the umbrella of casuistic concepts can be reversed, mutated, or transformed, creating perpetual uncertainty during the course of change.

Despite these risks, we believe casuistry and loosely coupled change are applicable beyond our empirical setting. While the need to construct radical change as stability may be obvious in the context of a socialist country promoting capitalist practices, it may also apply when a firm or an industry needs to transform its core technology while maintaining symbolic coherence with the past to preserve legitimacy and status (Suddaby et al., 2020). The transformation of Procter & Gamble (Maclean et al., 2018) and the oil industry’s investments in renewable energies (Patala et al., 2019) illustrate corporate examples in which casuistry can be important. More generally, any organizational change that potentially provokes strong resistance rooted in a desire for status quo, such as efforts to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, or adoption of controversial goals can benefit from casuistic communication and loose coupling.

Casuistry embeds conflicting messages in familiar expressions and produces powerful ironies in a seemingly coherent rhetorical history. Although numerous China scholars regard China as being a de facto capitalist system, others decry China as remaining an imperial empire. The CCP’s indigenous rhetoric is often ignored in analyses because of its enigmatic qualities and appearance as unimportant compared to the material changes that have actually taken place. However, our study suggests that China’s change cannot be understood without understanding the CCP’s rhetoric.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - How Institutions Communicate Change: Casuistry and Loosely Coupled Change in China’s Market Transformation

Supplemental Material for Casuistry and Loosely Coupled Change in China’s Market Transformation by Yuan Li, and Roy Suddaby in Management Communication Quarterly

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Yuan Li

Roy Suddaby

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Yuan Li (PhD, University of Southern California) is an associate professor in the School of Economics and Business Administration at Saint Mary’s College of California, USA. Her research interests include the rhetoric and semiotics of change, organizational stigma, and workplace diversity and inclusion.

Roy Suddaby (PhD, University of Alberta) is the Winspear Chair of Management, Peter B. Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada and Professor of Entrepreneurship, Carson College of Business, Washington State University, USA. His research focuses on the role of rhetoric and history in the construction of social value judgments such as legitimacy, authenticity, and identity.

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