Worlds Apart

Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts

Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, Anthony Par

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135691400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts offers a unique examination of writing as it is applied and used in academic and workplace settings. Based on a 7-year multi-site comparative study of writing in different university courses and matched workplaces, this volume presents new perspectives on how writing functions within the activities of various disciplines: law and public administration courses and government institutions; management courses and financial institutions; social-work courses and social-work agencies; and architecture courses and architecture practice. Using detailed ethnography, the authors make comparisons between the two types of settings through an understanding of how writing is operative within the particularities of these settings. Although the research was initially established to further understanding of the relationships between writing in academic and workplace settings, it has evolved to examining writing as it is embedded in both types of settings--where social relationships, available tools, and historical, cultural, temporal, and physical location are all implicated in complex ways in the decisions people make as writers. Readers of this volume will discover that the uniqueness of each setting makes salient different aspects of writers and writing, resulting in complex, and potentially unsettling implications for writing theory and the teaching of writing.

III

WORKPLACE WRITING

As mentioned in chapter 1, the widening focus of composition studies since the late 1970s and early 1980s has produced a considerable body of research on writing in the workplace. Recently, Cooper (1996) called this work “the most exciting area of research and scholarship in writing” (p. ix); and, she continued, “the most exciting thing about research on nonacademic writing is the way it problematizes the traditional assumptions about writers and texts” (p. x). It is the extreme complexity of workplace writing that challenges those traditional assumptions. Unlike many of the school writing tasks described in the previous section—which typically have discernible beginnings and endings, single authors and readers, and relatively stable, epistemic rhetorical aims—workplace texts are but one strand in an intricate network of events, intentions, other texts, relationships, and readers.

In an early study of workplace writing, Knoblauch (1980) described the rhetorical challenge facing the business executives he observed: “These writers set out to achieve several conflicting purposes simultaneously while responding to the needs of several, quite different, intended readers, each with different expectations of the writing” (p. 155). Anderson (1985), Driskill (1989), and Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller (1985), among others, have specified a range of possible purposes for workplace writing—all of them instrumental or praxis-oriented. This complex picture has been further elaborated in survey research (e.g., Anderson, 1985; Bataille, 1982; Faigley & Miller, 1982) and studies of workplace writers and writing contexts (e.g., Doheny-Farina, 1985; Odell & Goswami, 1982; Selzer, 1983; see also collections by Anderson, Brockmann, & Miller, 1983, Odell & Goswami, 1985). Since that early work, many studies have emerged to further our understanding of the place and function of writers and writing at work (e.g., Bazerman & Paradis, 1991a; Dias & Paré, in press; Duin & Hansen, 1996; Spilka, 1993).

From this brief tradition of research, we have come to see that rhetorical purpose in workplace settings is in large part institutional rather than individual, plural and contradictory rather than singular and coherent, and ideological rather than merely communicative. Many workplace texts, as Cooper (1996) explains, “are primarily means of restructuring relationships of power and influence in the pursuit of particular goals” (p. xi). Moreover, institutional documentary practices are inseparable, even indistinguishable, from the intricate culture of practices that constitute “activity systems”: As Engestrom (1993) states, “If we take a closer and prolonged look at any institution, we get a picture of a continuously constructed collective activity system that is not reducible to series or sums of individual discrete actions, although the human agency is necessarily realized in the form of actions” (p. 66).

The conflict and difference Knoblauch identifies above are the consequence of complex and overlapping activity systems. In law, government, and various types of negotiation, rhetorical conflict is institutionalized and built into the activity system: courtrooms, committee hearings, parliaments, and other legislative arrangements are structured along partisan lines, with designated roles for advocates, opponents, plaintiffs, prosecutors, judges, and so on. And, as Bazerman (1988) has demonstrated, “the scientific community developed around the engendering and management of conflict” (p. 149). More often, however, the conflicts played out in and through institutional texts are the undesigned, inevitable result of tensions between the discourses of competing workplace interests (Herndl, 1993; Paré, in press). Even when those interests are organized to collaborate rather than compete—as they are in most large collectives—the differences in their motives, perspectives, procedures, topics, arguments, and goals are likely to cause friction. The hierarchical structure of organizations creates economic and political imbalances that work against shared goals, and the continual growth of specialization, including the increased use of technology, rules against any common discourse. Competition for decreasing funds, and consequent concerns for “accountability,” further intensify the struggles for power. To complicate matters more, there is in many fields a tendency toward the use of multidisciplinary or multiprofessional teams which become, in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) words, “tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (p. 98).

As a result of this complexity, the notion of audience—an inheritance from the Classical rhetorical tradition—is inadequate to explain the multiplicity of readers and reader expectations associated with any given workplace text (Ede & Lunsford, 1984; Paré, 1991b; Park, 1982). Any analysis of the reading practices in the workplace is necessarily limited because specification of the full range of potential readers over time is almost impossible. This fact itself suggests a significant difference between academic and workplace writing. The readers of any document in the workplace are both many and indeterminate, in contrast to the students’ readers who are clearly identified and generally singular. In the workplace, papers are passed up and down the hierarchy (for collaborative reading/input as well as for action) and potentially consulted at points distant in time and place, by readers with complex, shifting, and often unpredictable agendas.

Even the once-solid image of the author has fragmented in the face of research reports of collaborative authorship, boilerplated texts, and document-cycling practices (Lunsford & Ede, 1990; Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985; Smart, 1993). Many of the workplace writer’s activities would be unlikely, impossible, or illegal in the school context: writing in pairs or teams, claiming authorship for text produced by another, appropriating research without attribution, receiving extensive assistance from colleagues, making multiple submissions of similar or identical texts, and so on. Rhetorical intentions, long considered the author’s prerogative, are more accurately located in the workplace community’s collective aspirations and goals. As Bazerman and Paradis (1991b) put it, workplace writing is the “textual harnessing of human social energies to support institutional versions of reality” (p. 6). Though individuals may appear to control invention, arrangement, and style, most workplace authors follow a host of implicit and explicit rhetorical rules; successful compliance marks membership, failure may mean career stagnation or job loss.

In large part, the complexity of workplace writing arises from the subtle interplay between various, often competing, social motives. In institutions, there is more than one motive at work, and the motive that becomes prominent—that is, influences all other motives—is the motive of the highest status social group within the institution. In the chapters that follow, we paint a picture of that rhetorical conflict and complexity.

6

THE COMPLEXITY OF SOCIAL MOTIVE IN WORKPLACE WRITING

In this chapter, we provide a glimpse into one complex workplace setting in order to demonstrate the difficulty that newcomers face as they attempt to make the transition into writing on the job. By describing the position of writers and texts within the complicated dynamics of human work, we wish to demonstrate the highly situated, contingent, and ideological nature of writing. The chapter relies primarily on genre studies for its theoretical basis, and offers a picture of the intricate and purposeful organization of genres in an institutional setting. Briefly, our argument is this: workplace genres embody and enact ideology; that is, genres both reflect and create the ideas, interests, and values of those who participate in them and use them for their particular ends. Although the genres of stable, homogenous institutions may display a relatively consistent ideology, most contemporary organizations of any size consist of overlapping communities of practice (COPs) whose genres embody a variety of ideologies, some in concert, some in conflict. Indeed, as we hope to demonstrate below, individual genres may serve as sites of ideological struggle, as different communities within the larger collective seek to advance their own knowledge, values, and beliefs. As individual newcomers enter the workplace and participate in a particular community’s genres, they adopt its ideology and join the struggle that is played out through rhetorical practice.

As we have noted in previous chapters, genres spring from a collective or social motive, and that motive is the manifestation of ideology: it is the beliefs, power relations, and aspirations of the community transformed into rhetorical action. We have argued that the social motive of workplace writing is instrumental because its primary aim is to get something done. But because there is more than one ideology at play in complex organizations and more than one thing to do, there is more than one social motive.

The workplace setting that is the basis of our analysis in this chapter is a large, urban hospital for children. In particular, we consider the genres associated with the hospital’s social service department. We locate that department within the ideological tensions of the larger institution, tensions created by overlapping, competing COPs, and we consider the multiple social motives that compete for and in the department’s genres.

GENRE: ENACTING SOCIAL MOTIVE

Genre theory has helped delineate patterns in the rhetorical complexity of the workplace and allowed us to see how COPs (companies, agencies, institutions, disciplines) organize sociorhetorical rituals in response to socially construed exigences. Bazerman (1994) offers this explanation of that phenomenon:

Over a period of time individuals perceive homologies in circumstances that encourage them to see these as occasions for similar kinds of utterances. These typified utterances, often developing standardized formal features, appear as ready solutions to similar appearing problems. Eventually the genres sediment into forms so expected that readers are surprised or even uncooperative if a standard perception of the situation is not met by an utterance of the expected form. (p. 82)

Miller (1994) makes a similar point about what Bazerman calls “a standard perception” when she refers to rhetorical exigence as a “form of social knowledge—a mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (p. 30). It is critical to note that the patterns of similarity that motivate genres are not so much identified as they are constructed: “Sameness is not a quality that can be recognized in things themselves; it is conferred upon elements within a coherent scheme” (Douglas, 1986, p. 59). Genres develop as responses to what is perceived socially or collectively as sameness in situations. The coherent scheme that confers the sameness is ideology. And, because they are conservative forces, genres tend to reify that sameness: they turn the interpretation of similarity into reality. To borrow from Bourdieu’s (1972/1977) definition of habitus, genres, are “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (p. 72). Bourdieu’s notion of habitus helps explain the dialectic relationship between genres and the collective experience of repeated exigence. According to Herndl (1996), habitus is “the way of thinking we inherit from past experience which then makes sense of our current experience and allows us to act. Furthermore, this habitus is itself continuously produced by our ongoing activity” (p. 29). Once communities have developed “a standard perception of the situation,” as Bazerman puts it above, a genre is designed or evolves to respond to the situation and to generate the knowledge and ways of knowing the community needs to conduct its business. Participation in these “structuring structures” initiates newcomers into the collective, into its ways of knowing, learning, and doing. A genre, according to Miller (1994), “embodies an aspect of cultural rationality” (p.39), and by participating in a genre, we learn “what ends we may have” (p.38).

Within large COPs, genres produce specific types of knowing and knowledge and are organized as genre sets: relatively stable collections of repeated and related texts. Amy Devitt (1991), discussing tax accounting texts, explains:

These texts … interact within the community. They form a complex network of interaction, a structured set of relationships among texts, so that any text is best understood within the context of other texts. No text is single, as texts refer to one another, draw from one another, create the purpose for one another. These texts and their interaction are so integral to the community’s work that they essentially constitute and govern the tax accounting community, defining and reflecting that community’s epistemology and values. (pp. 336–337)

Within multidisciplinary or multiprofessional COPs, such as hospitals, large corporations, or government departments, genre sets are organized in cross-community patterns so that rhetorical (and therefore cognitive) activity can be distributed across the collective. (See chap. 7 for an analysis of the rhetorical distribution of cognition in a bank.) The genre set of one group is structured and sequenced so that it will (or can) influence another group at some point: the initial management proposal leads to the technical viability report, which leads to a market study, which leads to legal reports and sales brochures, and so on. Bazerman (1994) calls such chained texts “systems of genres” (p. 79); in effect, one group of people think and write in a particular way so as to produce a text that allows another group to think and write a different way. As a result, texts serve as critical points of interaction between and among institutional sub-groups. (And, as we demonstrate in chaps. 9 and 10, it is often in multi-group contexts—hospital rounds, presentations, team meetings—that newcomers begin to learn the organization’s discourse conventions and dynamics.)

Fairclough (1995), too, speaks of complex organizational intertextuality, and refers to “the ordered set of discursive practices associated with a particular social domain or institution” (p. 12), which he calls “ideological-discursive formations,” or IDFs. He argues that IDFs “are ordered in dominance: it is generally possible to identify a ‘dominant’ IDF and one or more ‘dominated’ IDFs in a social institution” (p.41). Fairclough explains the relationship between ideology and regular discourse practices thus:

A particular set of discourse conventions (e.g., for conducting medical consultations, or media interviews, or for writing crime reports in newspapers) implicitly embodies certain ideologies—particular knowledge and beliefs, particular “positions” for the types of social subject that participate in that practice (e.g., doctors, patients, interviewees, newspaper readers), and between categories of participants (e.g., between doctors and patients). In so far as conventions become natural and commonsensical, so too do these ideological presuppositions. (p. 94)

Thus, engagement in a genre promotes particular ways of knowing and acting. To participate in a genre is to assist in the production and reproduction of an organization’s knowledge, power, and culture. As Coe (1994), following Burke (1957), puts it, “genres embody attitudes. Since those attitudes are built into the generic structures, they are sometimes danced without conscious awareness or intent on the part of the individual using the genre” (p. 183). Thus, genres form a principal means of situating the individual’s cognitive activity in the community’s overall epistemology and ideology. Genres, Coe says, are “important factors in the social construction of orientations, paradigms, ideologies, worldviews and cultural perspectives” (p. 184).

And though genres do change over time, they are by definition somewhat stable, and their stability promotes a sense of normalcy. Devitt (1991) explains: “The mere existence of an established genre may encourage its continued use, and hence the continuation of the activities and relations associated with that genre” (pp. 340–341). This historical force of repetition creates regularity; sociorhetorical habits become “the way things are done,” and the reality they create becomes the ontological norm. In the process, the origins and underlying human agency of genres are obscured. Smith (1974) puts it this way: “So...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• I Introduction
• II University Writing
• III Workplace Writing
• IV Transitions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index