rhetoric. For Burke, the study of rhetoric always isabout a search to understand the motives behind human action in a particular situation.

Brummett argues that the task of the rhetoricalcritic is “to identify the modes of discourse enjoying currency in a society and tolink discourse to the real situation for which it is its symbolic equipment.”94 In thissense, media can offer guidelines for action in the real world.

rhetorical work can serve as equipment for living in avariety of ways. It can provide a vocabulary of thoughts, actions, emotions, andattitudes for understanding and interpreting a situation.

equipment for living, rhetoric assists the audience incoping with or maneuvering through life.

After retention occurs, organization members face a choice point. They mustdecide first whether to look again at the environment in a new way—to return toissues they chose not to focus on as they proceeded through the enactment-selection-retention process. Here, they address the question, “Should we (or I) attend tosome aspect of the environment th

The third part of the process of organizing is retention, in which certain thingswill be saved for future use. Retained information is integrated into the existingbody of information from which the organization operates.

The second process is selection, in which organizational members accept someinformation as relevant and reject other information. Selection narrows the field,eliminating alternatives with which the participants do not wish to deal at themoment. This process therefore removes even more equivocality from the initialinformation with which you have to

you focused on one issue (which Weick refers toas bracketing), which removed some uncertainty from the field of all possible problems that you could have addressed.

This process of removing equivocality is an evolutionary process with threeparts—enactment, selection, and retention. Enactment is the definition of the situation—registering the presence of equivocal information from outside. In enactment, you pay attention to certain stimuli and eliminate other possible issues; youalso acknowledge that ambiguity