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.