Journal of Argumentation in Context - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract

The present contribution systematically explores the argumentative dimension of activist investor campaigns, which constitute a very important and underexplored argumentative activity type in the domain of financial communication. Using the controversy between an activist investor (AltaFox) and Hasbro company as a case in point, we adapt the stock issue model to identity strategically relevant argumentative patterns. To do so, each issue is connected to key contextual features and characterised for the type of standpoint and argumentation advanced by the two contending institutional arguers. The findings reveal, in particular, the strategic role of some loci in relation to specific sub-issues of an investor activist’s proposal (e.g., analogy to discuss the alleged underperformance; efficient cause to attribute managerial responsibility, authority to legitimise the intervention of proxy advisory firms). Furthermore, we found trust to be one of the main points at issue, marking an important difference between these corporate controversies and the context of political policy debates out of which the stock issue model originated. We suggest that the proposed analytic approach to the analysis argumentative patterns represents a crucial starting point for the formulation of possible explanations for the outcome of a campaign. We conclude the paper by drawing implications from these findings for the study of argumentation in context and for strategic communication research.

Abstract

Despite pledging to engage in two-sided dialogues during resource consultations with Indigenous Peoples (Haida Nation 2004, para 44), the administrative Canadian state often defaults to one-sided reasoning, emphasizing the project’s necessity and managing evidential gaps in the project’s assessments by giving the benefits of doubt to the industry while promising Indigenous communities adaptive management programs to mitigate all potential adversaries. Such reasoning strategies raise doubts about Canada’s genuine commitment to administering the promised meaningful dialogue in Indigenous consultations. The lack of normative criteria for assessing the meaningfulness of dialogue within the Canadian administrative system further complicates the evaluation of government officials’ commitment.

This article applies Walton’s dialogue system to evaluate how government agencies engage in consultative exchanges with Indigenous Peoples, focusing on their reasoning as commitments. It differentiates between dialogical and procedural elements in controlled exchanges across three contentious projects — the Mackenzie Valley, Trans Mountain, and Site C projects — theorizing the differences between one-sided, two-sided, and collapsed dialogues in Indigenous consultations. The article reveals that officials’ actions in these dialogues often leveraged their institutional authority and statutory discretion to impose compliance costs on epistemically diverse communities (Pimenova 2025). This strategy sometimes weakens these communities’ capacity to challenge project developments by subordinating their diverse testimonial credibility to the dominant argumentative discourse centered on consumption, mitigation, and epistemic ignorance.

Abstract

Evidence-based policy often involves a kind of reasoning by analogy, which starts from the established success of an intervention on a given occasion (= source domain S). Policy makers infer that the same intervention is likely to be successful on another occasion (= target domain T). The practical goal of this paper is to develop, defend and illustrate a model detailing the reasoning steps that policy makers should go through in order to perform this type of analogical reasoning properly. Our model also offers tools for diagnosing flaws in the reasoning process for past cases where this kind of analogical reasoning went wrong. We illustrate the practical utility and diagnostic power of the model by means of two well-known failed evidence transfers. The theoretical goal of this paper is to investigate the ramifications of our model for general theorising on analogical reasoning.

This article reviews Political Communication in Japan: Democratic Affairs and the Abe Years1

This article reviews Vagueness as an implicitating persuasive strategy