The Burkean pentad has a bad reputation for lending itself to cookie-cutter "this is the agent, this is the scene, etc" pseudo-book reports. But there are at least a couple of interesting ways to do pentadic analysis, one which is to try to emulate Burke by analyzing rhetorical moves from within pentadic ratios. The manipulation of the agent-scene ratio can paint differing pictures of individual agency and fault. Emphasizing the agent side of the ratio puts whatever happens within the horizon of "personal responsibility". Emphasize the scene side replaces "personal responsibility" with an "it's society's fault" frame. A couple of month ago a post appeared on Mind Hacks about how the rhetoric of addiction - "brain disease" vs. "psychological problem" - is deeply bound up in the politics of blame:

If you believe in the primacy of personal responsibility, push the psychological model, because this emphasises the affected person's actions in staying well. At one extreme, it allows us to blame people who get sick through PKU for not being vigilant enough, or wanting other people to pick up the pieces when they fail to control their diets. If you believe in the primacy of social responsibility, push the disease model, because this emphasises the effects of factors outside an individual's control. At the other extreme, it allows us to absolve the person of individual responsibility for the effects of their illness.

This also lines up with work in political communication and framing. On the qualitative side of the field, there's stuff like "to evoke a problem's origin is to assign blame and praise... Blame for recurring wars and militarism depends upon whether they are seen as originating in the plans of aggressors, the authoritarian character structure of some cultures, [etc]" (Edelman). Quantitative political communication is even more on point here, with stuff like "when poverty is framed as a societal outcome, people point to societal or governmental explanations; when poverty is framed in terms of particular victims of poverty, particularly the homeless, people point instead to dispositional explanations" (Iyengar). Of course these social scientific approaches lack the theoretical depth of the Burkean architectonic, but they're up to different things and the pentad is not something that can be definitively falsified (although why that should count against the pentad is a more... nuanced... theoretical debate).

References:
* Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
* Addicted to neurobiology and politics: [Mind Hacks]
* Edelman, Murray. "Excluded Voices: Realities in Law and Law Reform: The Construction of Social Problems as Buttresses of Inequalities." Miami Law Review 42.7 (1987): 7-28.
* Iyengar, Shanto. "Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Affairs." The American Political Science Review 81.3 (1987): 815-32.

Previously:
* What Isn't Argument?
* Prof. Nietzsche Frowns Upon Your Glib Globalized Paradigms
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars