Reading :: Writing as a Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman

 Writing as a Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman

Edited by Paul M. Rogers, David R. Russell, Paula Carlino, and Jonathan M. Marine

This festschrift for Charles Bazerman was published in 2023, so I’m a couple of years late in reviewing it. Honestly, I feel bad about this, since I read it as soon as it came out — and I have a chapter in this collection as well. So today I have shoved aside a couple of reading projects to make time for this review.

The book is, of course, a festschrift — a reflection on the lifelong work of a foremost scholar, Charles Bazerman, who has left a deep mark on writing studies through both his scholarship and his organizing (especially the iWAC conference). I’ve reviewed several of his books on this blog over the years, and most (perhaps all) of these are, like this festschrift, available for free via the WAC Clearinghouse — reflecting Chuck’s deep interest in ensuring that scholarship is available to all (something that Mike Palmquist discusses in detail in his chapter). 

Not surprisingly given Chuck’s energetic promotion of writing across fields and international boundaries, the chapters in the festschrift were written by international and interdisciplinary scholars. The 18 chapters are grouped into several sections:

• Academic and Scientific Writing
• Writing Pedagogy
• Sociology of Knowledge & Organizational Communication
• Activity Theory
• Writing Research Development
• New Media and Technology

Rather than covering every chapter, I’ll just call out a few.

Editors’ Introduction (David R. Russell, Paul M. Rogers, Paula Carlino, Jonathan M. Marine)

This introduction was written by four of Bazerman’s collaborators (and David was, of course, also my dissertation director). It attempts to summarize Bazerman’s contributions across his scholarly life, clarifying how these added up to a lifelong contribution. Arrestingly, they declare: “Bazerman created—with the help of many, many others—what amounts to a new field: writing studies” (p.4). In the rest of the chapter, they overview his scholarly biography, discussing how he first became interested in teaching writing, how he became interested in writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID), and how he came to grips with writing as a social phenomenon. As a restless and relentlessly interdisciplinary scholar, Bazerman explored the humanities and social sciences, rhetoric, genre, social studies of science, and practice theories — including but going well beyond activity theory. The authors also overview Bazerman’s many service contributions to the profession.

Chapter 7. Genre Change around Teaching in the Covid-19 Pandemic (JoAnne Yates)

JoAnne Yates confesses that Bazerman’s book Shaping written knowledge came out too late to influence her own book on genre, Control through communication. Yet his work on genre systems deeply influenced her and Wanda Orlikowski’s later work, and they used genre systems when examining “how people use sequences of typified communicative actions to coordinate their activity over time and space” (p.170). In this chapter, she examines “the changes in teaching genres, genre systems, and genre repertoires triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic” at the Sloan School at MIT (p.170). Using genre, genre systems, and her and Orlikowski’s concept of genre repertoire, she develops a detailed case study of genre changes. 

Chapter 9. Writing and Social Progress: Genre Evolution in the Field of Social Entrepreneurship (Karyn Kessler and Paul M. Rogers)

In this chapter, Kessler and Rogers focus on “explore the role of writing as a tool of mediation in the formation and evolution of a newly recognized area of activity,” in this case, “the field of social entrepreneurship—work that seeks to address the world’s most intractable problems through entrepreneurial behavior and a commitment to the public good” (p.227). They examine the case of an organization called Ashoka: “this study aims to examine the ways in which a particular genre … served as a primary driver in the activity of identifying a new category of social actors (social entrepreneurs) and building a new global field (social entrepreneurship)” (p.227). 

What’s Ashoka? “For the past 40 years, Ashoka has spread the idea of social entrepreneurship primarily through its rigorous process for identifying, designating, and supporting the world’s leading social entrepreneurs in a network of ‘Ashoka Fellows’” (p. 231). And for Ashoka, one genre — “The Fellow Profile—has emerged and persisted as the primary tool for internally organizing people, activity, ideas, and processes, as well as for presenting evidence for the existence and effectiveness of the impact and activity of social entrepreneurs” (p.233). Kessler and Rogers identify this genre as unique to Ashoka, contrasting it with more familiar genres such as funding proposals and capability statements (pp.234-5). 

In this study, Kessler and Rogers focus on the tension between stability and flexibility in genre, a tension that has often been mentioned but not so often explored. They also examine the profile as having multiple uses within the ongoing activity (activities?) in which the fellows are enmeshed.

These profiles made me think of the Team slide in an investor pitch, a slide that highlights the entrepreneurs' qualifications. Similarly, accelerators and incubators usually have pages describing the entrepreneurs as well as links to their social media. The entrepreneur isn't the venture, but sometimes audiences are more interested in the entrepreneur than the venture anyway (and sometimes that fact is reflected in pitch deck order -- the Team slide sometimes comes first instead of last!). 

I think this question of the entrepreneur's identity is really crucial since any entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship) involves a great deal of risk. Stakeholders (investors, partners, distributors, etc.) have to get a basic idea of who they might be able to trust and what they'll trust that founder to do. In some cases, they invest in the entrepreneur even if they don't believe in the venture idea itself. 

But I also think it's hard for first-time entrepreneurs to draw that separation -- that is, to understand how to use the genre to describe themselves as an entrepreneur rather than as a part of a venture. At the time of writing, they are obsessed with this venture idea and how it will change the world. After some time as an entrepreneur, they may have gone on to other ventures or changed this venture idea significantly, and they thus start to see themselves as separate from a given venture idea. I see a reflection of that transition in Kessler and Rogers’ interviews, in which two interviewees see their profiles as outdated. Yet they likely patterned their profiles on other profiles by other young entrepreneurs. That is, in a sense, the genre is a time capsule that reflects an early stage in the entrepreneur's development and is thus tied to a fairly limited orbit of circulation across activities. It's possible that if Ashoka wanted to provide more guidance, they could revamp the genre by having experienced entrepreneurs revise their profiles, fine-tuning them for more expanded circulation across broader activities. That revamping could then provide scaffolding and reorientation for less experienced entrepreneurs. The tug of war between stability and flexibility might play out differently.

That being said, I'm sure experienced readers of these profiles also know the game, and also know that the profiles serve the distinct purpose of advertising Ashoka's past projects. Surely the rhetorical work mentioned above goes on in LinkedIn, in the entrepreneurs' own websites and social media, etc., and readers know where to look for these updated genres. 

In any case, I’m sure I will go back to this chapter when thinking through entrepreneurs’ profiles!

Chapter 10. Two Paths Diverge in a Field: Dialectics and Dialogics in Rhetorical Genre Studies (Clay Spinuzzi)

I won’t review my own chapter, but wanted to flag it in case people are interested. I started thinking about writing a version of this piece in 2010, but couldn’t get traction on it, so I put it aside for a while. After another decade-plus in which I researched the Vygotsky Circle more thoroughly, I developed this chapter, which finally helped me to articulate my misgivings about dialectics.

Chapter 11. Writing for Stabilization and Writing for Possibility: The Dialectics of Representation in Everyday Work with Vulnerable Clients (Yrjö Engeström)

Bazerman essentially brought Yrjö Engeström to writing studies, circulating his work to colleagues in the mid 1990s. Here, Engeström salutes Bazerman’s 1997 argument that discourse contributes strongly to structuring professional activity systems. Rather than writing my own summary, I’ll just present Engestrom’s forecasting statement:

In what follows, I will first summarize the characteristic features of the shift from emic to etic representations in encounters between professionals and vulnerable clients. I will then discuss the available literature on possibilization and possibility knowledge. This leads me to introduce three types of representational instruments developed and used for possibilization in my own studies and those published by others. These three types are written agreements, four-field models, and pathway representations. I will show how each one of these types of representation can work to open up and support discursive and practical re-orientation toward dynamic possibilities in professional-client interaction. I will conclude the chapter with a discussion of possible transitions and iterative movement between the contextualized-emic, the decontextualized-etic, and the recontextualized-prospective modes of representation and writing, arguing for a politics of deliberative shifts in representation. (p.294)

Throughout this chapter, Engestrom demonstrates that broadening the scope of an activity entails finding or developing regulatory genres, genres that can project actions. He mentions “written agreements negotiated between the professional and the client,” “four-field models that depict zones of proximal development for an activity,” and “pathway representations” (p.296) — each illustrated by studies in which he was involved. Critically, these different genres project a future and require participants to sign onto them, committing to that future. 

As I discuss in my upcoming book, from the 1980s to the 2020s, Engestrom steadily broadened the scope of his investigatory cases, and as he did, he changed the focus of the specific genres under discussion: Whereas his earlier, closely focused cases examined the many different texts and tools being used in work, his later, broadly scoped cases focused on producing regulatory genres such as care agreements in which participants sign onto a change in their work. That is, the earlier cases are descriptive, examining how people execute specific actions; the later cases are deliberative and sometimes prescriptive, envisioning how they will conduct their activity in the future. As a side note, it’s hard to understand how writing studies picked up activity theory in the 1990s and 2000s without realizing that we took Engestrom’s early descriptivist case studies as models (especially 1990’s Learning, working, and imagining: Twelve studies in activity theory and 1992’s Interactive expertise: Studies in distributed working intelligence). 

Chapter 17. Change, Change, Change—and the Processes that Abide (Charles Bazerman)

Chuck has two response chapters at the end, one focused more on research and the other on teaching. Here, I’ll just focus on the research chapter. Here, Chuck generously discusses each of the pieces, concluding in this way:

Perhaps at some point writing studies will develop a small, stable canon of issues, ideas, and methods, but we are not there now. I feel fortunate to be part of this period of proliferation and expansion, opening our eyes to the complexity of writing. It has certainly provided me the pleasure of new vistas coming into view through the haze. It at least fit my disposition to look broadly and seek underlying processes. I suspect our field will remain interesting in this way for a time to come, or at least I hope so, for it seems to me there is so much fundamental still to be discovered, beyond the reach of our current disciplinary tools and imagination. I thank my friends and colleagues, those contributing to this volume and so many others, for accompanying me on this rewarding journey into the haze of the unknown. (p.413)

This seems like a good way to close this review. If you’re interested in the impact Bazerman has had on writing studies, this festschrift seems like a critical part of your journey. And if you’re not interested — you should be!