Reading :: Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business: Thoughts on the Past, Present, Future, and Nurturing of Homo Scribens

By Charles Bazerman

The link above goes, not to Amazon, but to the WAC Clearinghouse, the open-access publisher that Charles Bazerman has used for his books for years. (I think his first book at WAC Clearinghouse was a collection he coedited with David R. Russell in 2003.) Because he publishes through WAC Clearinghouse, he can distribute his books more quickly and broadly, and readers can read them at no cost. 

I suspect that at the WAC Clearinghouse, he also has a freer hand than he would at a for-profit publisher, where an editor might take a more active role. Such editorial constraints may not appeal to Bazerman at this point: he is newly retired and his recently published works have focused on (a) pulling together the threads of his wide-ranging research and insights and (b) yielding a cohesive overview of their implications for future work. That’s true in his festschrift and his recent autobiography/autoethnography —- and it’s certainly true in Unfinished Business as well, which combines versions of previously published works with unpublished ones. In the Introduction, he explains:

Almost half of these chapters are previously unpublished, either freshly written for this volume (Chapters 1, 2, 6, 9, 19) or transformed from recent conference presentations (Chapters 7, 8, 10). Some have been published in places not usually seen as part of writing studies (Chapters 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18) or only in Spanish translation (Chapter 15). Some, though published and accessible, nonetheless fill in some of the connections among the other essays (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 11). Together, I hope they present how I see writing and its instruction these days. None are the last word, and I rely on some speculative leaps. Yet I hope they intrigue some researchers to pursue questions, seek evidence, or await more definitive knowledge from researchers in other disciplines.

The questions addressed here range from the most fundamental ideas about humans as writers and writing as constituting modern society to the most practical issues of curriculum and teaching. The answers to some may someday become clearer as data are gathered or as the future reveals what will happen. Other questions are less empirical and more about our values and commitments as writing instructors. But they all relate in some way to the purposes, means, skills, situations, and development of writers—and our actions as instructors. In ways more distant or immediate, they all bear on what we do on Mondays. (p.3)

These materials are arranged in five sections, totaling 263 pages:

1. Section I: How evolution produced writing humans and how writing humans remade their world.

2. Section II: Writing and knowledge

3. Section III: Nurturing Homo Scribens: Puzzles of writing instruction

4. Section IV: The ethics and values of writing

5. Section V: Guesses at unknown futures

And within those sections, Bazerman draws on a vast set of materials, many of which he has produced, but many from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, the rhetoric of science, sociology, and many others. 

If you’re thinking that it might be difficult to keep such a book cohesive — that was my experience as well. Each section represents a broad topic in itself, and even within one section, traveling from one chapter to the next entails encountering different disciplines and literatures. In addition, chapters range widely, with some being densely cited (Chapter 5 cites 34 sources), others thinly so (Chapter 6 cites only two sources). Even though I’m pretty familiar with Bazerman’s works and at least a good chunk of his sources, I sometimes had trouble finding the thread of a consistent argument. Sometimes the chapters felt like different conversations being had by different communities. Here, I think a more active editor could have helped to iron out some of the connections that I suspect are blindingly obvious to Bazerman, but not always clear to readers.

Nevertheless, the chapters in toto provide a grand unifying vision of writing as a uniquely human pursuit that has been explored across a range of disciplines and complexities. In highly literate societies, writing sometimes seems natural — but examined carefully, it is revealed as a complex set of human practices that are rooted in our biological abilities and proclivities, exercised through our material environments, culturally constituted in sometimes ragged layers, constantly practiced and constantly evolving, through subtle and overt conflicts as well as concessions and collaborations. These many chapters help us to explore these different aspects of writing, from its origins in the past to its current applications to its possible futures. If you’re interested in writing, definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies

 Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies: Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design

by Johanna Phelps

As someone who does field research, I’ve had to write my share of IRB proposals. And as a professor, I have had to mentor many PhD and MA students through the process as well. I even teach the process to my undergraduate students, although they are exempt because their studies are for learning purposes only. The IRB process is often frustrating: not only do institutional requirements sometimes change, the individuals involved in the process often rotate to other assignments, meaning that standards are sometimes implemented differently from semester to semester. Yet the IRB proposal is a vital part of the research process, pushing us to think more deeply about how we can support and benefit our participants rather than just about how we can collect data and write papers based on them.

In this book, Phelps examines how IRBs have impacted writing studies. She overviews the principles that animate IRBs; discusses how IRBs came to be; and goes into detailed exploration of how the IRB process interacts with different kinds of research in writing studies. What emerges is an argument for how IRB compliance can align closely with the field’s focus on justice. 

The book is well worth reading, and it’s also available as an open access download, making it a good fit for graduate and perhaps even advanced undergraduate classes. If you research, teach research, or have to deal with IRBs, it’s definitely worth a look.

Reading :: Rewriting Work

 Rewriting Work

Edited by Lora Anderson

The link above goes to the free download of this collection at the WAC Clearinghouse. The collection itself comprises an introduction and seven chapters focusing on various aspects of workplace writing, particularly understood in terms of how technical and professional communication has changed as a field. 

I’ll just pull out a few chapters that I found interesting.

Chapter 1, “Common Thread, Varied Focus: Defining Workplace in Technical and Professional Communication” (Rosselot-Merritt & Bloch), notes that the term “workplace” has been operationalized and conceptualized in many different ways. If that argument sounds familiar, I made a similar one in Written Communication late last year — we must have been writing our pieces at the same time. I wish I had gotten a chance to read their chapter before finishing mine! Our arguments are different — they’re more interested in surveying different uses of the term, so they provide a metasynthesis of TC scholarship using the term — but I think that this metasynthesis could have helped me to better contextualize my own argument. 

Through the metasynthesis, the authors argue that the TPC understanding of “workplace” has tracked with the field’s different “turns” since the 1980s: humanistic, social, cultural, and social justice. They conclude with their own working definition of “workplace”:

Any context in which communicative practices or activities meeting any of the criteria below can and/or do take place. Those practices or activities

• further a mission or purpose which may be implicit or may be codified in a formal statement (such as a “mission statement”);

• involve an exchange of physical materials, virtual quantities of something, and/or ideas; and

• often, but not always, involve material or financial gain on the part of those conducting the communicative practice or activity or the individuals or organization on whose behalf they are acting. (pp.35-36)

They map the elements of this statement to their corpus. 

In contrast, in Chapter 2, “Emphasizing Place in Workplace Research,” Lisa Melonçon argues that the place aspect has been understudied. She argues that we should examine “micro-contexts—highly localized places where communication can be created and/or be used” (p.47). She describes an ethnographic study of an organization, focusing on specific communication problems to illustrate the importance of these localized places in them. “As these examples show, the physical spaces of the three different ‘offices’ directly impacted the way communication was considered and done. Without thinking through the where, much of the work we did would not have been as successful because of the impact the material places had on work” (p.61).  

Skipping ahead, in Chapter 4, “ Freelancers as a Growing Workplace Norm: Demonstrating Expertise in Unfamiliar Communities of Practice,” Fitzpatrick and McCaughey draw on Communities of Practice (CoP) theory “to identify and explain the unique challenges that organizations and freelance/gig workplace writers face when it comes to onboarding, communication, and enculturation” (p.93). Drawing on two case studies, they argue

that freelancers are often on the outside of such communities as they perform their work, communicating to and with such groups from this outside space. In the context of freelance workplace writers, a community of practice framework allows us to see these temporary workers as they work to demonstrate expertise across tasks, organizations, and industries. (p.97)

They add: “Freelancers serve as kind of itinerant specialists, bouncing from community of practice to community of practice, taking with them each experience, yet not necessarily finding each one wholly applicable to their next temporary homes” (p.106). And they conclude that one way to better understand this movement is by revisiting the literature on transfer.

Other chapters in the collection also do important work, but these were the most relevant to my interests. If, like me, you’re interested in workplace writing, certainly consider picking this collection up.

Reading :: Dialogue in Focus Groups

 Dialogue in Focus Groups: Exploring Socially Shared Knowledge

By Ivana Markova, Per Lindell, Michele Grossen, and Anne Salazar Orvig

“This book is neither a manual telling the reader what to do at various stages of work, nor is it a methodological guide answering practical questions,” the authors tell us at the beginning of Ch.2 (p.31).  By Chapter 2, I had figured this fact out — but I can understand why they had to tell us this, since the title and cover really do make it look like a textbook on focus groups. 

If it’s not a textbook or a guide, then, what is it? Drawing on dialogism, the authors argue that understanding small-group dynamics is critical to doing focus group research. This point, they say, is often lost on researchers who conduct focus groups, researchers who conceive of focus groups as a way to get answers out of collections of individuals. Rather, focus groups generate socially shared knowledge; we can focus on “the ways people generate heterogeneous meanings in the group dynamics” (p.2). 

Before getting into what that entails, let’s jump back to Chapter 1, where the authors stake out dialogism in the Bakhtinian tradition (p.8). In this tradition, the limits of the self are always in relation to the other, and understanding is always evaluative (p.8). Noting developmental psychology research that suggests that children are born with a predisposition to intersubjectivity, they relate dialogism to Lewin’s field theory, in which a group is understood as being interdependent and dynamic (p.12). 

Lewis is invoked again in Chapter 2, understood as the founder of the study of small-group dynamics (p.38). Given the fact of small-group dynamics, the authors provide “four main assumptions on which analytical tools should be based if we want them to be congruent with a dialogical approach to focus groups” (p.48):

1. “Considering focus group discussions as group discussions”: The authors recognize that focus groups create an outer framing (an orientation to some topic) and an inner framing (a context specific to the group), and the interplay between these two framings “gives way to specific communicative activity types that need to be analysed in themselves” (p.48). 

2. “Considering the subject’s heterogeneity”: They note that each individual is heterogeneous — they can have different social identities and they may speak from various positions (p.49).

3. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as circulation of ideas”: Discourse in the focus group may respond to other focus group members, but it may also respond to antecedent discourse from elsewhere. Analysts must not just account for what is said, but also how, for whom, and in what communicative activity types (p.49).

4. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as a situated activity which relies on historically and culturally shared social knowledge”: They more or less argue that we can’t understand focus-group discussion either as just here-and-now or as reflecting socially fixed preexisting positions (p.49). 

With these principles in mind, the authors go on to examine focus groups that they conducted individually or in pairs. And here, dear reader, I remembered why I don’t conduct discourse analyses. The data and analysis become very granular. So I admit that I ended up skimming most of the rest of the book. 

No matter. The first two chapters gave me a great deal to think about, both theoretically and methodologically. If you also think about focus groups, social dynamics, and dialogism, I highly recommend the book.  

Reading :: After Lockdown

 After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis

By Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour has long been one of my favorite academic authors. I fell in love with his exuberant writing style in books such as Laboratory Life, Science in Action, and Aramis. Even more so, I really enjoyed his contrarian takes on controversies, particularly as they came out in his field research. For instance, in following around researchers at the Salk Laboratory, Latour watched what they did rather than simply following what they said, and these observations led him to argue that science is not necessarily done by geniuses, but by technicians who set up chains of re-representations in order to make arguments using longer and stronger networks of actants. His fieldwork, in fact, is much more interesting to me than his purely conceptual or theoretical works such as We Have Never Been Modern.

Latour retired in 2017 and passed away in 2022 of pancreatic cancer. His last fieldwork book (The Making of Law) was published in English in 2010; his books since then have been conceptual and theoretical, and largely focused on ecology and the question of how we are to live in the world. After Lockdown (2021) is in this vein. It’s not his last book — looking at Wikipedia, it looks like he published a coauthored book in 2022 and a set of interviews with Nicolas Turong in 2024 (neither of which I have read.)

So how is After Lockdown? In a word: underwhelming. Like his previous two works on climate change, Down to Earth and Facing Gaia, this one pulls out some of Latour’s well-work author’s tricks, tricks that seemed so fresh in the 1980s but that have become threadbare. He uses a controlling metaphor throughout the book, that of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He sets up dichotomies (natural and artificial, pp.20-21; map and territory, p.72), only to pull out the rug from under them. He assembles people into two camps, then represents them as differing reactions to the same underlying reality (in We Have Never Been Modern, it was the modernists and postmodernists; here, it’s Extinction Rebellion and Great Replacement theory, p.39). Ah, and networks get a look in: COVID lockdowns, he says, exposed the networks that keep us alive (p.35). Finally, just as Latour famously and daringly suggested that we have a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations, here he challenges us to stop saying that things have an “economic dimension” (p.62).

And what is the central lesson of After Lockdown? Latour essentially argues that we will have to reorient our lives and localize ourselves differently, because nothing has been left untouched after lockdown. If that seems like a revelation to you, certainly you should pick up this book. 

For me, however, this book really felt like Latour himself had run out of steam. He still manages to write both allusively and clearly — quite a gift — but his declarations do not seem revelatory, instead retreading points that he made in the halcyon 1980s and 1990s. 

(Come work with us at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing!)

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We're seeking an assistant professor of rhetoric and writing. We seek candidates with scholarly expertise in rhetorical history/historiography and a secondary scholarly investment in any sub-discipline in rhetoric and writing studies that would contribute to our graduate and undergraduate programs.

Here's the job ad:
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Any questions? Don't hesitate to reach out.

Reading :: Doing InterViews

InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing, Third Edition
By Svend Brinkmann and Steinar Kvale

My colleague David Guile suggested this book to me, especially because of the metaphorical distinction they make between “miners” (interviewers who are trying to excavate a specific topic) and “travelers” (interviewers who are more exploratory and tend to follow their participants through emergent topics). I gained access to it through my library and read it online, and as a result, I only now see that the authors use a pun in the title. Their approach to interviews really is about “inter-views,” exchanging views between the interviewer and interviewee.

This book is written in a straightforward, engaging manner that will likely be accessible to undergraduates, but will still provide useful advice for those at graduate and postgraduate levels. The authors provide plenty of examples to dissect, and they cover aims, epistemology, ethics, planning and conducting, interview variants, interview quality, transcription and analysis, and generalizing and reporting. Chapters are short and lucid, and examples are robust.

If you’re new to conducting research interviews — or teaching students who are — definitely check it out.

Reading :: The social life of a herstory textbook

The Social Life of a Herstory Textbook: Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory
By Massilia Ourabah

Forgive me for a brief review of a book that deserves a more substantial one. 

In this short (80pp plus index)book, Ourabah examines the textbook La place des femmes dans l’histoire (The Place of Women in History). This historiography was written to be incorporated into French primary and secondary educational curricula, but so far, it rarely has been. To examine this case, Ourabah conducts ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing the people who conceived of, commissioned, wrote, and publicized the textbook, as well as some who have actually deployed it in classrooms. To analyze her fieldwork, she applies institutionalism and actor-network theory in separate chapters.

She concludes that this “pick-and-mix” approach, applying two different frameworks to the same case, is rewarding. Through it, she concludes that

the piecemeal approach to educational change that this story embodies is grounded in a tradition of feminist reformist and “under-the-radar” activism. It argues that feminist educational change cannot be substantive if it only relies on individual and opportunistic action, and if it requires a great amount of translational work from educational practitioners, as in the present case study. (p.71)

Although I didn’t double-check this, I suspect this book began its life as a dissertation or thesis. It’s short; the analysis is neatly bifurcated; the uptake (applying two frameworks to the same case is generative) isn’t particularly surprising. Yet I think it’s also useful for understanding how a piecemeal approach runs into the institutional wall of secondary education. If you’re interested in dual frameworks, secondary education, or educational change, definitely take a look.

Reading :: Making Christ present in China

Making Christ present in China: Actor-network theory and the anthropology of Christianity By Michel Chambon

In this ethnography, Michel Chambon examines churches in the Yanping District — state-licensed and underground; Catholic, Protestant, and three-self — to understand how Chinese Christians take up Christianity and translate it in their practice. 

The book is substantial, but not exactly in my field of expertise. So I’ll only say a few things about it. 

First, although Christians encourage us to understand Christianity as an underlying truth, it’s also common knowledge that Christianity is adapted to the environment that hosts it. For instance, most of us know that Easter is celebrated with iconography emphasizing Christ’s resurrection, but also symbols of fertility (eggs, rabbits). Catholic holidays are littered with this casual synchretism. Although Christianity has been applied to colonize non-Christian countries, those countries also reinterpret Christianity in terms of their own cultures and beliefs. Chambon provides more evidence for this fact. Interestingly, he points out that Thanksgiving — a specifically American and not necessarily religious holiday — has been taken up by Chinese believers as a Christian holiday and linked with Chinese customs that predate it. This uptake apparently came from South Korea, where US troops brought it during the war. And it is so broadly accepted that the people Chambon interviewed were surprised to hear that it wasn’t celebrated by Christians worldwide.

Second, Chambon also examines the uptake of symbols. One mildly surprising symbol was the piano, which churchgoers took to be the quintessential Christian instrument — so much so that they couldn’t imagine a church without it. They could imagine a church without a cross, but not without a piano. 

Although I enjoyed this discussion, I was not convinced that actor-network theory was a necessary part of the analysis. I also didn’t think the book was especially dense — honestly, I think it could have been much shorter. 

Still, if you are interested in how beliefs are taken up and translated in new environments, I recommend reading this book.

Readings :: Organizing Networks

Organizing Networks: An Actor-Network Theory of Organizations
By Andréa Belliger and David J. Krieger

I've continued my interest in actor-network theory (ANT), organizations, and sociological approaches, which first came together in my book Network. So when I saw this book in the library, I went ahead and picked it up.

This book was published in 2016, and it's definitely a product of its time, focusing on examples such as networked social movements, open educational resources, and open-source software. The authors' goal is to understand such networked organizations by using the concepts and terms of ANT. 

In contrast to networked organizations, "the networks we are talking about are the basic from of social and organizational order and not a particular way in which some traditional organizations might decide to work together. Based on ANT, the concept of network we propose is neither market, nor bureaucracy, nor a mixture of the two. Our aim is to offer a different theoretical foundation for talking about organizations as networks" (p.12). ANT, they say, is "fundamentally different from relational sociology. ANT has its basis in ethnography and science and technology studies and proposes a methodological symmetry between humans and non-humans. This clearly distinguishes ANT from relational sociology" (pp. 12-13). They add, "For actor-network theory, social space is flat and the whole is always less than the sum of the parts. Networks are scalable actors, and actors are always made up of many heterogeneous associations. In other words, the actor is the network. ... Following actor-network theory, we will portray organizations as processes of organizing in which heterogeneous actors, both human and non-human, are constantly negotiating and re-negotiating programs of action" (p.14).

Since "organizing is indistinguishable from activities of networking," they acknowledge that "it would probably be more appropriate not to speak of networks at all, but only of networking. ... when we use the word 'network,' we always understand this term to imply the activity of networking as it is defined by ANT." (p.15)

The authors, then, want to focus on processes rather than things or products. They nominate ANT as "the basis for a foundational theory of organizations that is not dependent on modern sociology" (p.17). In their approach, they argue, "ANT proposes a non-linguistic concept of communication. Not words, but things make the difference" (p.18). And in this approach, "Networking, [Weick's] sensemaking, [Goffman's] staging, and narrative all refer to the same process by which organizations are constructed, maintained, deconstructed, and transformed" (p.20). And "Making sense via enacted narrative is the kind of communication that constitutes organizations" (p.22).

With this introduction, they embark on five chapters.

Chapter 1 draws on Gibson to discuss technical mediation in terms of affordances. Here, tool and hand translate and enroll each other (p.34), and "The result of these links and interfaces, that is, the result of technical mediation, can be called an 'actor-network'" (p.35). In places, the authors sound almost Vygotskian: 

The episodic and very limited representational connection that determines how apes perceive and handle objects is broken and things remain with us even when we are no longer holding them in our hands. Big brains that can process links, that is, as cognitive science argues, outsource information into the environment, have an evolutionary advantage over those that cannot. Technical mediation is a motor of evolution. Technical mediation “translates” and “enrolls” animals and things into actor-networks, that is, associations in which different actors have different functions. These functions then become concerns, goals, or what ANT (Latour 1994: 33) calls “programs of action.” Goals, interests, concerns, or what traditional sociology has called “intentionality,” arise when both human and non-human actors are mutually translated and enrolled into programs of action. (p.37)

And "Only when things quite literally 'get out of hand' do they become part of a social world together with humans, take on an 'agency' of their own, and come to play their roles in those hybrid and heterogeneous networks of humans and non-humans that Latour calls 'actor-networks'" (p.39). They understand storytelling as "that form of language in which the assigning of roles and functions to actors in a meaningful series of events takes place" (p.42), and thus "the task of creating social order becomes a matter of information control or information design" (p.44). The authors conclude:

Organizing is not what happens, when people do things together, this is what monkeys also do, but when things quite literally “get out of hand” and yet still play roles and influence social relations. What makes organizations more than mere interaction, which monkeys also do, are the many non-humans that have been linked up to human activities in actor-networks. (p.50) 

In Chapter 2, the authors review Weick on sensemaking, covering these elements: retrospective accounts; perceptions of what counts as relevant; persuading others, resulting in a shared problem; developing plausibility and coherence of a story; interpretation rather than mirroring facts; sense making as ongoing activity. Weick's sensemaking became the cornerstone of "communicative constitution of organizations" (CCO). (p.55). They then review various models in CCO: McPhee and Zaug's four flows model (p.61), Taylor's imbrication (pp.67- 72), and Cooren's ventriloquism (pp.72- 76).

Chapter 3 brings them to Goffman's sociology of interaction. They declare that 

Our aim is not to be faithful to Goffman, but to explore the possibility that Goffman’s work can be faithful to ANT. ... Our goal in bringing Goffman into the story is to try to get a better grasp on how so-called face-to-face communication is dependent upon many actors both human and non-human who are not physically present at the moment of interaction, indeed, how meaning and sensemaking are enacted, embodied, extended, and embedded in networks. (pp.79-80)

Along the way, they identify several types of info control in staging: 1. identification 2. front 3. standardization 4. idealization 5. simplification 6. exclusion 7. selection and segregation of the audience 8. solidarity 9. mystification (p.93). And they summarize: 

Our claim is that insights gained from ANT and from Goffman’s dramaturgical theory of interaction provide a basis for understanding Weick’s “sensemaking” as constitutive of organizations in a way that extends and enriches the work done by the CCO school of thought. (p.102)

They want to make narrative "a foundational concept for a network theory of organizations," but not a version of narrative that buys into the subject-object split (pp.115-116). And "Networking, sensemaking, staging, and enacted narrative are different words for one thing, organizing" (p.136). So "Our claim is that the problem of the communicative constitution of organizations can be posed as the problem of localizing and globalizing narratives, that is, when narrative is theorized as networking, staging, and sensemaking." (p.144).

Chapter 4 turns to "the impact of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) on society" (p.148), following ANT's lead by "defining human social order in terms of 'technical mediation' ... and 'interobjectivity' (p.147). In opposition of seeing ICTs as technical infrastructure a la Castells (p.150) or flow of new media content a la Manovich (p.151), they focus on usage a la Benkler, Shirky, and Tapscott (p.151). The latter is the most ANT-relevant in their view, and they classify it under the social construction of technology (SCOT) (p.159). And they conclude, "Not persuasion, not manipulation of opinion, not hype, but authentic and transparent communication is what characterizes networks" (p.170). I'm not sure how this view squares with ANT, which seems pretty persuasion-focused, nor how persuasion is opposed to authenticity. 

In the final chapter, the authors "take a closer look at some of the more important trends and challenges that characterize organizing in the global network society." (p.173).  

So what did I think? To be honest, I had a hard time figuring out what this book was about. That is, I understood that the authors were interested in using ANT to understand organizations and organizing, and I understood that they wanted to compare/contrast with other frameworks sociologists use to examine organizations. I also saw their efforts to signpost the argument from one chapter to the next. But perhaps because I'm not a sociologist, I had difficulty understanding the stakes. Yes, we could understand organizations in terms of ANT. Yes, doing so would entail parting with established frameworks -- while still sticking close to a lot of what those frameworks already do well. 

But I was missing a compelling argument for contributions that (a) ANT uniquely brings to the discourse and that (b) entail a significant payoff. Even as an ANT enthusiast, I just didn't see the case being made effectively.

On the other hand, I learned a lot about other major frameworks in the sociology of organizations. I've made a lot of notes, which I think will lead to more reading into organizational sociology. So the broad review was helpful. 

Should you read this book? If you're interested in the sociology of organizations, this book overviews several frameworks and makes a case for ANT, and I think it's probably worth the price of admission. 

(Attend my online talk for ECIS DATIS)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'll be addressing the Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies (DATIS) workshop for the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). The details are below. 

Those in North and South America may find this to be a difficult start time (5am CST!), and I'll certainly be drinking my share of coffee before the talk starts. But this time is convenient for ECIS's members, and I'm thrilled to have a global conversation with them about activity theory and IS. I hope you'll join us. 

==

We are delighted to share this invite with you for our Pre-ECIS 2024 “Developing Activity Theory in Information Studies” (DATIS) Online Talk, presented by Professor Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin, US.

 

Please use the Zoom Meeting Link below to join us. We would also really appreciate it if you can send quick email to Paul Kelly (p.kelly@essex.ac.uk) to confirm you will be joining us for the event. 

 

Date: Friday 7 June, 2024

 

Start Time: 11 am UK / 5 am Austin US / 8 pm Brisbane Australia

 

Duration: 1 hour

 

Title of Talk: "‘Fourth-generation activity theory is about WHAT?’ Thinking through our mission(s) for 4GAT"

 

Abstract: In "The future of activity theory: A rough draft" (2009), Yrjö Engeström suggested that a fourth generation of activity theory (4GAT) might be needed to address social production and peer production, in which "the boundaries and structures of activity systems seem to fade away." Some of us interpreted Engeström as addressing post-bureaucratic society, specifically changes in work organization. But his later work demonstrates that he is instead addressing post-market society, specifically alternatives to capitalism. Can a single 4GAT address both? And what does IS as a field need from a 4GAT?

 

Meeting URL:  https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/99552841813?from=addon

 

Meeting ID:   995 5284 1813

 

This online talk is a special pre-cursor to the DATIS Workshop scheduled for 16 June at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) in Paphos, Cyprus. For more information about the ECIS DATIS Workshop, see the ECIS Workshops page here:   https://ecis2024.eu/workshops/

For any questions, please get in touch with Dr Paul R Kelly (p.kelly@essex.ac.uk), who is arranging this event with the DATIS Organising Committee and Professor Clay Spinuzzi. With kind regards to all and look forward to seeing you for the talk!