Petitions and Persuasive Appeals: A Study of Official-Client Relations

In an exploratory study of the rhetoric of persuasive appeals, four hypothetical situations in which a client seeks services from an official were presented to a heterogeneous group of Israeli army reservists. Respondents were asked to tell what should be said in each case in order to convince the official to grant the request. The arguments or persuasive appeals suggested were found to vary with respondents' personal background and with the type of organization involved. Conflicting evidence made it difficult to interpret the nature of the socializing effect of contact with Israeli organizations, though it seems clear that initial differences between Eastern and Western immigrants decrease over time.