THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
2.1
(January 2002): 26-30
© 2002 National Communication
Association
Jim Henry. Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional
Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 260 pages.
Appendices, research abstracts, and index. $34.95.
Jim Henry maps a discursive archaeological dig and describes the shards found by his researchers, students across seven semesters of his course, The Cultures of Professional Writing, who have undertaken auto-ethnographic studies of writing in a variety of professional contexts. The result is tentative, incomplete, and sometimes frustrating, and as at many an archeological site, the excavation unearths more mysteries than it solves. That, however, is the lure of archeology, and it is the promise of future understanding that makes this volume intriguing.
The stated purpose of Henry’s research is to “turn the lenses of discourse theory to workplace writing” (x). Contemporary research in composition reflects the postmodern academy’s shift toward the deconstruction of reifying discursive structures. Theorists have moved from studies of students’ written products to investigations of writing processes and writing contexts, turning their attention toward the ways in which cultural and discursive practices define a writer’s agency and subject position. Meanwhile, the contemporary workplace has evolved away from “high volume” structures in which “writing required primarily a mastery in generating and interpreting impersonal written communication to the ends of executive efficiency” (5). The nation’s economy is turning toward “high value” production, which depends on writing as a “mode of learning” that can “contribute to discoveries of new linkages between solutions and needs” (6).
This volume is conceived as a step toward research that addresses these changes in composition theory and organizational practice, asking, “What will writers learn through workplace writing?” (6). Not only is writing the means by which the high value organization manages knowledge, it is also the means by which realities become socially constructed and individual writers negotiate their own subject positions. Organizational and personal success thus requires that practicing writers “hone their skills in perceiving the ways and means of this social construction via language” (6).
Henry’s method is to engage practicing or aspiring professional writers and editors in “informed intersubjective research” to conduct “ethnographic analyses of workplace cultures in their organizational and discursive dimensions” (7). Comparing the effort to an archeological dig, he presents the “shards” uncovered at 84 sites, cataloged in a matrix of tables, abstracts, lists, and an index. Resisting the urge to mount a reductionist “encompassing narrative,” Henry invites the reader to “chart readings through the book according to their own interests” (10), using the materials as “heuristic maps” for their own projects.
The reader who wishes to learn about writing practices in the contemporary workplace finds little here to work with. Henry provides lists of occupations, workplaces, and documents observed by his student researchers, but neither original documents nor metanarrative to guide us toward any reconstruction of their reality. For the reader who is comfortable with the archeological metanarratives provided by the Discovery Channel, the resulting volume is unsatisfying. Without the photographic recreations and explanatory voiceover, how is the naďve observer supposed to interpret tiny fragments of clay or glass? What are we to make of these lists of topics, roles, documents, and processes? Henry never allows us to handle the fragments themselves; the short abstracts provide descriptions of the research but no summaries of the findings, no context in which to interpret the researchers’ comments, no method for judging the importance of any one factoid.
Henry does, however, create his montage with a discernable bias. He admits that any archeologist filters the evidence through his or her own expectations, and he suggests that readers with other perspectives might reassemble the pieces in a completely different way. Nevertheless, Henry constructs an argument for the development of a “professional class” of writers whose work might create value for the post-Taylorist organization, even as they explore discursive subjectivities from a position of perpetual critique.
Henry’s text is divided into three parts. The first presents a theoretical framework derived from recent composition studies, which he frames in Foucauldian terms as the analysis of subject positions and subject formation within discourses. The second section explores workplace writing from the subject’s position, offering a survey of “writers” and “writer’s work” across various workplaces. Organizational and discursive features are listed, but the inventories are always framed in terms of the relationship between the organization and the individual writer. Henry’s third section then offers a framework for pedagogy and research in composition that might raise the status of workplace writers and allow them to resist their typical organizational roles as “discursive functionaries” (51).
In spite of his ostensible attempt to avoid the reductionist metanarrative, Henry’s position within the disciplinary boundaries of composition studies focuses his attention on the tensions between authorial agency and organizational submersion. Henry assures us that raising the status of professional writers would add value to the contemporary corporate organization, but his primary concern is to rectify their “second class status” with respect to subject matter experts and managerial classes. Henry fits his fragments into a narrative of the writer as unappreciated hero. Within the workplace, a writer’s personal aspirations are limited “because reigning epistemologies of composition have colluded with Taylorized organizational structures to deny professional writers a say in the social ends of organizational authorship” (45). Looking at the discursive shards through the lens of contemporary composition theory, Henry is more concerned with the writer’s ego than with the use of writing to reach collective organizational goals.
In one instance, a researcher-writer finds her professional status compromised in a “realization that the strong organizational goal of preparing boys for college through conventional argumentative writing sabotaged her own efforts to instruct the boys in expressive journal writing” (87). The organization might well question the loyalty or intelligence of a member whose “own efforts” consistently ignored or interfered with its goals, but Henry concludes instead that it is the organization’s representation of the writer’s subject position that is in need of revision.
Henry’s researchers find that workplace writing is typically understood as “collective work requiring skills and knowledge in extratextual domains” (41); the typical workplace writer is the preparer of documents, dependent on high status professionals for content and excluded from managerial decision-making. Developing content expertise is recommended as a career move (62), but steps that might integrate the writer’s “functionary” scribing into broader management discourse are consistently resisted. In fact, Henry warns that workplace writers are likely to be “subjugated to strong (even if subtle) socialization into the culture’s norms and values” (86), and he argues that adequate preparation of writers must equip them to “do battle” with representations that see writers as “discursive functionaries who do not contribute to the content of an organization’s deliverables” (51).
As he excavates these workplace sites, Henry finds issues of identity, individual ego, and writerly status, but the shards before him could just as easily be fashioned into a relic of organizational sensemaking (Weick). The researchers’ ethnographic abstracts illustrate the complex matrix of review, revision, collaboration, and organizational politicking that is workplace writing. Professional writers are expected to engage in a full range of discursive activities: negotiating meaning in conversational and team settings, managing information and document flow within the organizational structure, and strategizing the political exploitation of inscribed discourse. The residue of these activities is discarded, however, as rubble that must be moved away in the effort to find agency, identity, and individual expression.
It is certainly true, as Henry notes, that “professional writers daily compose and recompose the cultures of their workplaces” (8) through their discourse. But, so do team facilitators, meeting participants, and lunchroom conversationalists. The management role in any organization is an inherently discursive one, and an organization’s strategic work is done in conversations, presentations, and meetings (Mintzberg). Written documents perform a unique role as vehicles of commitment, justification, and memorialization, but the creation of texts is only one of many discursive activities that “compose” an organization.
Upon viewing the way Henry has arranged his discursive shards, a sense of frustration arises. Why doesn’t he see that writing is only a fragment in the organization’s discursive fabric? Why does he think the act of inscription gives discourse a status equal to that of an executive meeting or a technician’s analysis? How could a writer expect to gain organizational status while resisting the organization’s norms and values? How can an academic program prepare discursive professionals without attention to the full range of managerial discourse? Why doesn’t the low status writer take a course in strategic management or bone up on the technical details of the corporate product to become more useful to the organization?
Then we realize we are engaged in a dialogue with the archeologist. Henry’s book is not “about” workplace writing. The dig is instead an exploration of the relationships between document creation and organizational culture, between literacy and orality, between community and critique, between individual and collective identity, between rhetorical performance and rhetorical text. The real treasure unearthed by Henry’s archeology is material evidence of conflicts and controversies at the heart of contemporary rhetorical theory.
Mintzberg, Henry. “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact.” Harvard Business Review 68, no. 2 (1990): 163-176.
Weick, Karl E. Sensemaking in Organizations. Foundations for Organizational Science. Ed. David Whetten. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995.
Dale Cyphert is the Business Communication Program Coordinator at the University of Northern Iowa.