Writing workplace cultures : an archaeology of professional writing / Jim Henry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Henry, Jim, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching.

English language.

English language--Technical English--Research.

English language--Business English--Research.

English language--Rhetoric--Research.

Technical writing--Research.

Technical writing.

Business writing--Research.

Business writing.

English language--Rhetoric.

English language--Business English.

English language--Technical English.

Physical Description:

xiv, 260 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, [2000]

Summary:

In Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing, Jim Henry analyzes eighty-three workplace writing ethnographies composed over seven years in a variety of organizations. He views the findings as so many shards in an archaeology on professional writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

These ethnographies were composed by either practicing or aspiring writers participating in a master's program in professional writing and editing. Henry solicited the writers' participation in "informed intersubjective research" focused on issues and questions of their own determination. Most writers studied their own workplace, composing "auto-ethnographies" that problematize these workplaces' local cultures even as they depict writing practices within them.

Analyzing the research produced by his study from a postmodern perspective, Henry eschews a master narrative and offers instead a basis for understanding these researchers' abstracts as petits recits to counter hegemonic discourses. He analyzes verbal performances by writers as these performances shape the writers' subjectivities and others' realities.

Henry establishes links between current professional writing practices and composition instruction as both were shaped by national economic development and local postsecondary reorganization throughout the twentieth century. He insists that if we accept basic principles of social constructionism, the text demonstrates ways in which writers "write" workplace cultures to produce goods and services whose effects go far beyond the immediate needs of its clients.

This book is the result of a unique collaboration between Henry and professional writers from eighty-three different sites. It is innovative in its extensive and varied analysis of subjectivity as shaped by workplace discourses. Finally, this is a groundbreaking work in its melding of modernist and postmodernist understandings of discourse that prompts greater insight into organizational writing practices and academic instruction.

Contents:

Introduction: Changing Modes of Composition 1

Part 1. 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 2. 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

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 3. 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

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-254) and index.

ISBN:

0809323206

OCLC:

43076885