Vocabularies of motives in a crisis of academic leadership

Abstract

This study applies a model about discourse of divorcing individuals to the disintegration of a relationship between a formal organization and one of its employees. The authors recount a set of events in which university administrators and faculty tried to force the institution's president out of her job, but she refused to leave. To interpret the narrative, the authors employ a sociologist's application of Burke's symbolic notion of motives to studies of discursive practices of persons engaged in divorce. The authors argue that vocabularies of motives offered in marriage break‐ups parallel those provided by organizational actors involved in initiating and resisting termination.