Workplace Writing

Beyond the Text

Stephen Bremner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351599047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Workplace Writing: Beyond the Text draws together a wealth of research into different aspects of writing in workplace settings, creating a comprehensive picture of workplace writing and covering factors and activities that go far beyond the text. In a full analysis of the challenges facing the student writer transitioning from the academy to the workplace, this book:

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• covers topics ranging from intertextuality and collaborative writing practices to considerations of power and politeness, and the impact of organisational culture and processes of socialisation
• brings together the multiple, often interlinked factors that surround and impact on the process of workplace writing and the texts produced in professional settings
• takes a close look at the pedagogical implications of the various issues relating to workplace writing
• serves as a resource for teachers who want to go beyond potentially simplistic accounts of writing in the workplace and to provide students with a richer picture of what happens there

Workplace Writing will be essential reading for any students, pre- and in-service teachers and researchers with an interest in professional and business discourse and language teaching for specific purposes.

1

THE WORKPLACE AND THE ACADEMY

Introduction

This book is founded on two premises. The first of these, as the title implies, is that in attempting to understand the nature of writing in workplace contexts, we need to look beyond the text: workplace writing is a complex business, requiring writers to consider a wide range of factors as they construct texts. The second is that despite the huge amount of related research that has been carried out in recent decades, much of this has failed to make its way into practical considerations of how workplace writing can be taught.

The complexity of workplace writing can be seen in the wealth of research that has been conducted over the last thirty years or so. There have, for example, been several important collections of papers that examine the socially constructed nature of workplace texts; in-depth studies of collaborative practices in specific organisations; investigations of organisational culture and its influence on communication practices; longitudinal studies of novice writers being socialised into different workplaces; genre analyses of sets of texts in specific professional contexts; examinations of the rich intertextual relations that characterise workplace writing, as well as studies of a number of other practices and phenomena relating to writing in professional settings. In combination, the complexities of writing addressed in this body of research add up to a substantial challenge for the student writer attempting to make the transition from the academy to the workplace, as well as for the teacher helping prepare students for this transition.

However, this rich trove of research is to a considerable degree fragmented, and has thus far not been pulled together to give a comprehensive picture of the challenges of workplace writing, as researchers have tended to focus on individual areas such as genre analysis, collaborative practices or socialisation processes, to name a few examples. This is perhaps an understandable consequence of the need on the part of researchers to investigate manageable elements of this highly involved ­process, but it can have the effect of implying that these are discrete phenomena, when in fact they are to a large extent interconnected. The presence of intertextuality found in most workplace writing, for example, is very much linked to collaboration in that so much writing involves the appropriation of other people’s texts, while an understanding of discourse community and organisational culture can be seen as an integral part of the socialisation process. There is, then, a need to bring together in one volume an account of the multiple factors that surround and impact on the process of workplace writing and the resulting textual products, and to give a sense of how these are interrelated.

The second premise for this book relates to the pedagogical perspective: textbooks that address workplace writing can tend to overlook many of the factors that shape texts in the workplace, often adopting reductive approaches that see texts as standalone entities, free of any context. This book not only aims to provide an account of the various factors and issues that influence and shape workplace writing, but also to consider their pedagogical implications. Having said that, this volume is not intended to be a course book, nor is it intended to be prescriptive; rather, it is hoped that it can serve as a point of reference for anyone who wants to look beyond potentially simplistic accounts of workplace writing, whether researchers, teachers or students or even practitioners.

It should be stressed that although this book is about workplace writing, the central focus is not so much on text itself, but on the contextual considerations and activities surrounding the construction of texts. Bhatia (2010), in discussing the relative degrees of attention that have been given by researchers to text on the one hand, and context on the other, talks of “text-internal” and “text-external” factors or resources: a focus on text alone would take into account the former, while research that sees context as having a key role would also look at the latter. Bhatia (2010, p. 34) notes that text-internal resources “have been well-researched within discourse and genre analytical literature”, and this is certainly borne out by the substantial body of studies that have analysed texts in a variety of workplace settings.

In seeking to assign greater importance to context in his analysis of professional genres, Bhatia (2010, p. 33) proposes a model which takes account of various levels of context, and suggests that in addition to looking at the lexico-grammatical, rhetorical and organisational resources of a given genre and its conventions, we need to consider the practices and culture of the relevant profession, discipline or institution, saying that “any instance of professional communication simultaneously operates and can be analysed at (these) four levels, as text, as representation of genre, as realization of professional practice, and as expectation of professional culture”.

This book also acknowledges the significance of context but differs from Bhatia in terms of its motivations, in that it is more overtly concerned with the implications for teaching and learning. There are of course tacit pedagogical implications in any enquiry that seeks to understand why workplace practitioners write in the ways that they do, which is the aim of much contemporary analytical investigation of genres in professional settings. But in taking a more directly pedagogical perspective, this work considers additional contextual factors which contribute to the ­construction of workplace texts that are pertinent to the transition from the academy to the workplace, such as collaborative practices and socialisation processes.

Given this book’s concern with the challenges that the complexities of writing in the workplace pose for pedagogy, one area that is considered at the outset is the fundamental difference between the workplace and the academy, and this is addressed in the next section.

The workplace and the academy: a comparison

As Mabrito (1999, p. 105) explains, “We will never be able to exactly duplicate in our classrooms many of the constraints and pressures that writers experience in the workplace”. There is little doubt that the two contexts differ in a number of ways: they represent and function as very distinct communities, with different cultures, aims and patterns of interaction. This section outlines ways in which the two contexts differ, and in effect will serve as a preview of the various elements of workplace writing that will be addressed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

In describing and explaining aspects of these two contexts for writing, there is a risk of presenting them as binary entities with exclusive practices, and that attempting in one (the classroom) to prepare students for the other (the world of work) represents an almost impossible project. This would do a disservice to the many instructors who make considerable efforts in their teaching to somehow reduce the gap between the academy and the workplace. We see many reports in the literature of courses and projects that attempt to replicate features of workplace practices, with varying degrees of success – the work of Freedman, Adam and Smart (1994) representing just one example. Similarly, it is important to acknowledge that teaching and learning, both formal and informal, can take place in either context at various moments; as Roberts (2010, p. 211) points out: “The boundaries between education and work are no longer patrolled by time, with a period of formal education leading seamlessly to work.” It should also be emphasised that there is considerable variety from workplace to workplace, and from classroom to classroom. Nevertheless, there are certain elements of the two contexts which are fundamentally different, and which have an unavoidable impact on the ways in which writing takes place, lending strength to Mabrito’s somewhat gloomy contention, and it is these elements that are explained and discussed below.

Communities and cultures

The first consideration is the reason or basis on which the respective communities are formed, and the function that writing serves for them: workplace communities are constituted for the purposes of getting things done, whether it is manufacturing and selling a product for profit, managing a government department, running a charity or any other enterprise. Writing in these organisations serves to further those instrumental goals and might involve promoting, reporting, persuading or myriad other functions. Academic communities, on the other hand, are primarily constituted for the purpose of learning, thus most of the writing that takes place in these is intended to help develop writing skills or for the display of knowledge (Freedman and Adam, 1996) i.e. to demonstrate whether learning is taking place.

Closely connected to this is the kind of culture that will evolve in a given community – every workplace has its own specific culture, both professional and organisational, and with this culture come certain traditions, practices, expectations and so on. The culture of the classroom also has its own dynamic, and its own disciplinary influences and expectations. Of course, there will be variety from one classroom context to the next, but given that the central aim in such contexts is teaching and learning, however these are conceived and managed, these classroom cultures will generally be very different from those seen in the world of work.

This fundamental difference between the two communities and their cultures has an impact on many other elements of the workplace writing process, the composition of the different communities and the levels of diversity found in them being a major factor. Within workplace communities, differences among members can be seen in several respects. First, there is the role they play within the organisation, and the department or unit they represent, with the attendant interests and motivations; Dautermann (1993, p. 103), in her study of a hospital community, gives a sense of this kind of diversity: “Within the writing group, each writer represented a unit, a specialty, a hospital role, or a level of commitment to the hierarchy.” Second, there will be varying levels of knowledge and experience. The third – often related – area of potential difference is that of status, which may be the result of a formal position or of social abilities, explained respectively by Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris (1996, p. 637) as “inherent status”, which “results from holding a powerful position … acknowledged by all members of the … community and beyond”, and “relative status”, which is “enjoyed as a result of the power an individual can exercise in an inter-personal relationship”.

Classroom communities, on the other hand, tend usually to be made up of students of a similar age and status, offering similar levels of knowledge and experience. It is perhaps overly simplistic to suggest that students are largely uniform in terms of what they bring to the classroom: there are likely to be differences among them in areas such as interest, motivation and, to some extent, knowledge and experience; greater differences might be seen among postgraduate student groups when compared with undergraduate groups; language proficiency, disciplinary background, culture and personality will all have a part to play too. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to posit that the degree of homogeneity in a student community, particularly in relation to workplace writing competence, is higher than would be seen in its workplace counterpart, a homogeneity that is strengthened by the students’ shared aims when it comes to writing.

The different makeup of the communities in terms of these elements leads in turn to different types of interaction and varying contributions to the writing process. Contributions and inputs may be based on particular knowledge or skills that are possessed by participants in the process. The power and status that derive from position, experience and knowledge also play a part here. In this regard, Bhatia (2004) talks of the “participatory mechanisms” that can be found in workplaces, which in effect regulate who can contribute – and what they can contribute – to the writing process, a point considered by Yates and Orlikowski (2002, p. 17) in their discussion of “who is not empowered to initiate or receive certain genres”. This question is related to motives for instituting collaborative writing groups in an organisation. Often, for example, the contributions of participants in a collaborative process are decided by management, so that best use can be made of individual talents, knowledge and experience. At the same time, organising people into teams can act as a form of control. However, as noted, writers may have different goals and interests according to their position or department, and this can add an extra dimension to interactions, requiring the negotiation of textual content and organisation, with the attendant possibility of conflict.

Meanwhile, by contrast, students generally share the same goals, offer similar levels of knowledge and experience, and for the most part enjoy similar status. The main reason that they collaborate is that they are required to – often as part of the assessment process. In most cases, they can decide themselves how they divide up tasks, and this division can be based on a number of factors (cf. Bremner, Peirson-Smith, Jones and Bhatia, 2014), perhaps relating to particular skills they might have, such as editing or design, if, for example, the written output is multimodal in nature. A further dimension to student collaboration is that the lack of status differentials can often result in interactions in student groups depending on personality and social skills alone, rather than external factors.

A major difference in the two contexts relates to the audiences for the written product. Workplace texts, with their instrumental “real world” goals are intended either for an audience within an organisation or for external readers, who are expected to take appropriate action on the basis of what they have read. The production of workplace-like texts in classroom contexts, however, although often similar in terms of language and content, usually has the display of knowledge as its goal, and most student output is only read by teachers, primarily for evaluative and developmental motives. These motives contrast with those of readers of texts created in real workplaces, as explained by Freedman et al. (1994), who say that in workplace writing “the prime concern is for what the reader can get from the text, not for what the writer got out of the process of writing” (p. 206). One other potential by-product of the objective of displaying knowledge and understanding on the part of the student writer is the inclusion of information that would not normally be expected or necessary in a workplace setting (Dovey, 2006).

Resources for writing

Not only do the two communities have different goals and audiences for their writing, but they also have access to and draw on different resources in constructing texts. This key difference is tied up with the notion of intertextuality, the “explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts” (Bazerman, 2004, p. 86). It is largely accepted that texts composed in professional settings draw on – and are shaped by – other texts in a variety of ways, whether referring specifically to other documents, taking shape within chains of emails or other interactions, incorporating the work of colleagues as part of the collaborative process, or being informed by the templates, practices and traditions that are specific to an organisational setting and which have evolved as a result of its institutional history.

Students, on the other hand, often have no other documents to refer to when doing their assignments. Rather, they work with a “scripted context” (Bremner, 2008) which tells them who they are and what they think and gives guidelines as to what to write. Indeed, despite the many studies that have identified the ways in which intertextuality plays out in professional contexts, there is little evidence that the fruits of this research are being applied in the classroom. Many course books, for example, appear to overlook this feature of workplace writing, treating texts as standalone, decontextualised entities, rather than components in wider systems of activity (ibid.).

Learning and socialisation

Finally, there is the question of learning and socialisation and how these are effected. Given the different aims and composition of communities in workplace and academic settings, it is to be expected that the two function quite differently as contexts for learning (Freedman and Adam, 1996). Every workplace organisation has its own specific goals that relate to the nature of its activities, and although these goals are paramount, learning does take place as newcomers engage in the organisation’s work – this may be the incidental outcome of the interactions that surround the business of getting things done, or it may be the outcome of more considered schemes whereby newcomers and junior employees learn from colleagues with particular skills or experience (cf. Lave and Wenger, 1991). The diversity seen among employees is often the reason that such outcomes are possible. The academy, on the other hand, is set up with the primary goal of learning, but sources of information and guidance tend to be different in nature from those found in workplace settings, and are often restricted to textbooks and instructors. A key difference between the workplace and the classroom as contexts for learning is that in the former, skills are being acquired in the situations for which they are needed, while in the latter, skills are being acquired for future, a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The workplace and the academy
• 2 Workplace communities and workplace writing
• 3 Genres and genre analysis
• 4 Intertextuality
• 5 Collaboration
• 6 Power, politeness and language
• 7 Channels of communication
• 8 Organisational culture
• 9 Socialisation processes
• 10 Workplace writing and pedagogy: concluding thoughts
• References
• Index