Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing

279 Pages·2000·0.93 MB·English

by  Associate Professor Jim Henry Phd

WRITING WORKPLACE CULTURES

WRITING
WORKPLACE
CULTURES
An Archaeology of Professional Writing
Jim Henry
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
03 02 01 00 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henry, Jim, 1952–
Writing workplace cultures : an archaeology of professional writing / Jim Henry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. English language—
Technical English—Research. 3. English language—Business English—Research.
4. English language—Rhetoric—Research. 5. Technical writing—Research. 6. Business
writing—Research. I. Title.
PE1404 .H398 2000
808'.042'07—dc21 99-088861
ISBN 0-8093-2320-6 (cloth : alk. paper) CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
For Jim and Thelma,
my first teachers

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction: Changing Modes of Composition 1
Part One. Writers in Theories and Practices (Mapping the Dig)
1. RESEARCHING THE DISCURSIVE SELF 15
Reading Writers Narratologically 19
Exploring Discursive Selves Beyond Academic Borders 22
2. WHAT IS A WRITER? 29
Profiles of Professional Writers 34
What Will Writers Be? 43
Part Two. Research on Discursive Work in Organizational Settings (Uncovering Shards)
3. IN FIELDWORKPLACES: RESEARCHERS’ SITES OF STUDY 49
Writers’ Work and Positions in Private Businesses and
Corporations 54
Writers’ Work and Positions in Government Agencies and
Institutions 57
Writers’ Work and Positions in Professional Associations
and Societies 60
Writers’ Work and Positions in Educational and Nonprofit
Institutions 62
Writers’ Work, Fieldwork, and Subjective Work Identities: Syntheses
from Shards 64
4. ORGANIZATIONAL FEATURES OF WORKPLACE WRITING CULTURES 69
Dynamics Between the Individual and the Organization 72
Dynamics of Collective Procedures and Writing 78
Organizational Goals 86
vii
viii CONTENTS
From Organization Charts to Discursive Digs: Imagining New Unities in
Subjective Work Lives 88
5. DISCURSIVE FEATURES OF WORKPLACE WRITING CULTURES 91
Discourse Forms 94
Discourse Effects 102
Taking Inventory 106
Part Three. Implications and Applications (Links to Other Shards, Other Sites)
6. REPRESENTING DISCURSIVE WORK IN THE ACADEMY 111
The Content(s) of Postmodern Composing 114
Melding Composition with Discourse Studies 120
Designing Professional Writing Curricula 127
Pondering Discursive Shards and Imagining New Writing Vessels 136
7. REPRESENTING DISCURSIVE WORK IN THE WORKPLACE 139
Representing Authorship 142
Representing the Domain of Professional Authorship 146
Representing Writers’ Expertise 149
Representing Writing’s Interests 158
8. INTERVENING IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION 161
Discursive Sites of Intervention 165
Organizational Sites of Intervention 172
Reforming Discursive Formations and Recapturing
Intellectual Dominion 179
Appendixes
A. Researchers’ Professional Writing Backgrounds 187
B. Researchers’ Topics in Self-Assessment as Writers, Sites of Research,
and Research Topics and Themes 189
C. Writers’ Work and Positions by Nature of the Organization 211
D. Researchers’ Abstracts of Workplace Ethnographies 221
Works Cited 247
Index 255
ix
PREFACE
In the twentieth-century United States, writing in the workplace and
writing in academic settings coevolved perniciously. In the high-vol-
ume production workplace of the early century, writing requirements
at most levels of organizational pyramids were relatively simple: work-
ers had to interpret executive commands, enact them properly, and
report on this execution. Writing instruction in the academy, at most
institutions, followed the so-called Harvard model: students produced
demonstration essays or research papers, usually on a belletristic topic
(because English departments had staked claim to writing instruction
in a student’s “general education”), elaborated in the hermetic envi-
ronment of a classroom, to be submitted to one instructor as the sole
arbiter of their worth. Because this worth was most often based on
formal qualities of communication, academic writing instruction fur-
nished the workplace with writers adapted to the relatively simple
writing tasks demanded of them by the high-volume economy.
Pernicious was the reduction of writing to something akin to com-
municative packaging, as most students learned it and as most work-
ers exercised it. The educational philosophy driving this model was that
of liberal humanism, which held that writing about belletristic authors
would improve people morally and aesthetically, perhaps endowing
them with the wherewithal to oppose workplace realities found to be
insalubrious. (In theory, graduates of Harvard and similar institutions,
who would occupy the top levels of organizational pyramids, would
thus feel a moral obligation to improve life in the workplace.) The real-
ity for most workers was that the discursive environment of most job
settings offered little possibility for critique, opposition, or even inno-
vation because the very understanding of writing as produced by com-
position epistemology was so thin. The organizational purview of most
people writing in the workplace, moreover, was so restricted by high-
volume structures and practices that they would not have been able
ix