I have finally finished my draft of the article which describes my thinking on how these ideas about knowledge management and knowledge work relate to my thinking about business writing. Here is the long article in its entirety.

Abstract
This paper describes a framework for teaching and research in business writing structured around key theoretical concepts from Peter Senge’s foundational text in management, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. It begins by making the argument that the academic fields of organizational management and organizational writing can be a productive site for interdisciplinary scholarship, and that such connections are quite natural, given the fact that many instructors of business writing work within schools of business and management. It then moves to a description of Senge’s framework, and describes ways in which each of the five theoretical disciplines he develops might inform, and be informed by, teaching and research in business writing.











Writing the Learning Organization:
A Framework for Teaching and Research in Business Communication
Introduction
In a recent article in Business Communication Quarterly, Kitty Locker argued that “business communication is in danger of being buried by professional communication and needs to preserve its identity as a field” (p. 118). In this article, she argues that a lack of scholarship in business writing is a central reason for the marginalization of business writing within the professional writing curriculum, and she traces that missing scholarship to the fact that in many institutions the business communication courses are housed within schools of business and management, and taught by faculty who are not rewarded for their research. Locker laments that “Only a small band of scholars seem to suspect that poor communication contributes to poor decisions, reduced morale, and increased workplace stress” (p. 126). In this article I will argue that one way out of this position of isolation and marginalizing might come from aligning our own research interests with progressive voices in the fields of business and management.
If we are willing to look outside our disciplinary boundaries a bit, we will find that there is actually a vigorous scholarly debate within these fields concerned with issues central to business communication. The fields of organizational learning and knowledge management have emerged as major areas of study in schools of business, and the more I look at the research being done by researchers in these fields, the more I am convinced that, far from being a stagnant discipline populated by “a small band of scholars,” organizational communication is actually a exciting place in which to be doing scholarship!
My own research interest in the field has emerged quite naturally, from my teaching. When I began teaching business writing courses a few years back, I decided I wanted my students to do more than simply engage with the exercises and assignments from one of the several fine business writing textbooks which teach the “state of the art.” I wanted my students to enter a larger debate about communication practices in business, and I began looking for other texts to supplement the traditional textbook. Last year, the text I selected revolved around issues of sustainability and international communication (Inayatullah and Leggett). This years’ supplement was Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, one of the foundational texts of the organizational learning movement. During our interrogation of Senge’s text, my students and I began to realize that the ideas developed in The Fifth Discipline might provide a progressive framework from which to approach business communication.
I began by asking my class to consider what Senge means when he uses the term “learning organization,” and I challenged my class to read Senge’s text from a writer’s lens, asking the question, “What might it mean to write the learning organization?” As we began to become familiar with Senge’s terms and his approach to business, it became clear that, while the terms he used were sometimes different, many of the theoretical concepts he was introducing to management science were equally applicable to writing and rhetoric. While my own ideas (and those of my students) on this subject are still evolving, in this paper I will identify several areas where Senge’s theories might inform, and be informed by, scholarship in professional communication.


The First Discipline: Personal Mastery
The central thesis of Senge’s text is that the only enduring source of competitive advantage in business will come from a company’s success at learning “how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization” (p. 4). Senge is envisioning an idealized institution that manages in a way fundamentally different from those of the traditional corporate hierarchy. Instead of managing people, Senge believes we should empower them. In this approach, the goal is to develop employees who are creative, self-motivated, eager to learn and improve themselves, with personal goals that are in alignment with the goals of the organization. Senge believes that creating such an organization can be accomplished through the lifelong practice of a set of disciplines. The first of these disciplines is personal mastery.
By personal mastery, Senge means “the discipline of personal growth and learning” (p.141). His argument is that by encouraging employees to see all aspects of personal existence, even our time on the job “as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint” (p.141), we create an organization which is managed by individuals working collaboratively towards a common vision, rather than by top-down coercion.
Personal Mastery in the Classroom
One of the first steps I ask my students to take on the path to “writing the learning organization” is that of developing a personal vision of business/professional writing as creative work. I use a classroom exercise where I ask students to begin the process of developing such a vision through reflective writing. This is a “low risk” writing assignment: it is neither graded or collected.

Roberts, Smith and Ross (1994) developed the exercise, “Drawing Forth Personal Vision,” which I have adapted for the classroom. It can be found in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, a text which provides suggestions for practicing Senge’s theoretical disciplines. In its most basic form, the students spend an entire class session reflecting on a series of questions which asks them to imagine an ideal version of their life. It asks them to describe, with as much physical detail as possible, the self-identity they most desire, the material objects they want, the home environment in which they wish to live, the relationships they would like to have, the profession and place where they would like to work, the creative activities they would like to pursue, the community in which they would like to live, and any other desires they feel they need to describe. Finally, based on these very material visions of the future they want, I ask them to focus on what they see as their life purpose.
Next, I ask the students to take this writing home with them, to put it aside for a day, then to return to it, and write a personal vision statement which explicitly states what they see as their life purpose, and sets three or four primary goals which will help them achieve that personal vision. Some of my students have found this to be a very gut-wrenching process. Others have enjoyed it, but initially questioned its connection to business writing. I reply to those questions by asking my students to consider their future business careers as something not separate from their creative desires, but as an integral part of those desires.
Personal Mastery in Research
Personal mastery will be an issue that becomes even more important to our students in their future roles as managers and employees. Research into the ways in which high levels of personal mastery contribute to their success in those roles seems to be a fertile area for investigation. There has already been some significant theoretical work done in the area of worker efficiency in the new economy which such research might build upon. Let me attempt to connect that theoretical work to some of the problems workers face in the field.
In my own discussions with people in the business world who manage large writing projects, I hear a great deal of frustration about efforts of upper management to measure the efficiency of their writers. Frequently the discussion on this topic turns to the use of metrics, and it often seems to come down to answering the question “how many pages of text should a writer be able to produce in a certain period of time?” Most of these managers resist such efforts, making the argument that there is no practical way to develop such metrics because of the huge variety of writing tasks each organization undertakes. Here the managers are making a claim based upon an analysis of the rhetorical field: the amount of audience research required, the individual writer’s knowledge of the genre in question, the amount of technical research required, the context and specific requirements of each writing assignment make such metrics either useless, or impossibly complex to design.
These managers are making the argument which Johndan Johnson-Eilola advocated back in 1996: “If the problems are of sufficient complexity or uniqueness to preventing a corporation from setting up a ‘knowledge base’ that matches common problems to routine, pre-scripted answers, these operators may begin to work as symbolic analysts” (p. 253). But while such workers are given wide latitude in the performance of those “symbolic analytical” tasks, the pressure is still on their managers to improve the efficiency of the writing process within the organization.
Peter Drucker’s famous article on improving the efficiency of knowledge workers from the Winter 1999 issue of The California Management Review seems to nicely connect this Johnson-Eilola’s argument with Senge. Drucker lists six factors necessary to improve the efficiency of workers doing knowledge work (Johnson-Eilola uses Robert Reich’s term “symbolic-analytical work”):
1. Clearly defined tasks
2. Autonomy
3. The responsibility to innovate
4. A commitment to continuous learning and continuous teaching
5. Quality of outputs as a signature requirement. Quantity is irrelevant until a quality standard exists.
6. Knowledge worker as asset not cost
Drucker claims that “Each of these requirements (except perhaps the last one) is almost the exact opposite of what is needed to increase the productivity of the manual worker” (p. 84). Taylorist methods such as management by production metrics are actually counterproductive to the task of the knowledge worker. Why? Drucker answers this question by pointing out that where in production work, “lack of quality is a restraint,” in “knowledge work, quality is not a minimum and a restraint. Quality is the essence of the output” (p. 84). Attempts at regulating the work practices of knowledge workers through Taylorist methods tends to reduce their productivity because it reduces their autonomy and destroys their morale. Drucker is advocating a different form of management of knowledge workers, and terms like “autonomy” and “continuous learning” seem to fit nicely into Senge’s argument for the importance of “personal mastery” in knowledge workers.
Johnson-Eilola, Senge and Drucker are advocating an idealized, new workplace, and they realize that getting to that point will require a major transformation in corporate practice. They seem to be getting at the practices which so concern Locker when she states that “poor communication contributes to poor decisions, reduced morale, and increased workplace stress” (p. 126). Research which investigate attempts at aligning the process of business writing along the lines of Drucker’s six requirements for knowledge-worker efficiency is certainly one possible direction scholarship in this area might take.
The Second Discipline: Mental Models
Senge describes mental models as “deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting” (p. 174). These models can be very powerful forces in determining our actions, and both empower and limit our behavior. The problem with mental models is not that we have them. “The problems with mental models arise when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness” (Senge, p. 176). This idea of mental structures which both constrain and empower us is not a new one; one famous formulation of the concept is the “structuration theory” of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens who describes a “duality of structure” where “structure is not as such external to human action, and is not identified solely with constraint” (61). Senge argues that we need to reflect upon these structures so that we can revise them or develop new ones.
Mental Models in the Classroom
Those of us who teach business writing classes are clearly in the business of teaching mental models. Many of foundational concepts we work with fit into the category of what Senge calls mental models. The writing process is such a conceptual model which we teach to our students, and most of us have grown to understand that the process must be seen as a flexible, recursive path to creating a text rather than a linear series of steps which a writer uses the same way for every task. This is the kind of generative, creative use of mental models that Senge advocates.
Another important mental model we work with is that of genre. Reading Senge has helped my students and I realize that we must approach generic structure in the same reflexive way in which we approach the writing process. One way I do this in my own classes is through an assignment which asks students to analyze a business genre. In this assignment I give my students homework which requires them to find a business writing genre which is not directly taught in their textbook. Students are quite creative with this, and have brought in everything from sales brochures, to warranties, to coupons. I then give my students a series of questions which provide a model on how to investigate the nature of a genre. These questions are arranged into three groups which help the students realize three major aspects of how genres work. The first group of questions address the “social image” of the genre, and help students realize that they already come to a genre with ideas about it “in mind.” The second series of questions address the “rhetorical dynamics” of the genre, the institutional and power relationships inscribed in the genre which moves a writer to write the text and a reader to read it. The third set of questions address the “formal elements” of the genre, and here the questions help the students identify the stylistic features, the formatting, the way the genre uses visual rhetoric to accomplish its task. This method of genre analysis connects with my own research, as I first used it to analyze the manifesto genre in my doctoral dissertation, but I have refined it by adding questions suggested by the forum analysis developed by James E. Porter (1992) as well as by Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi’s recent rhetoric Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres.
Mental Models in Research
Both the writing process and genre are areas that have been heavily researched by scholars working in both the field of rhetoric and composition, as well as in the field of professional writing. Recent research in genre has shown that these “rhetorical forms developed from actor’s responses to recurrent situations” (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995, p. 4) are in fact complex social structures that display the sort of duality of structure which Giddens describes, and must be seen as complex social processes, worthy of the kind of reflection and analysis which Senge advocates (Bawaarshi, 2004; Devitt, 2004).
Our field’s extensive inquiry into the ways in which genres function across a complex web of institutional and social relationships could certainly help inform the research being done on mental models within the field of organizational management. Similarly, our own studies in genre could certainly benefit from some cross-fertilization from a discipline which is focusing on how to change and improve mental models like genres. One area of research in which I see such cross-fertilization taking hold is in the area of computer-mediated genres, where the concept of the mental model is already being seriously investigated (Committee on Human Factors, 1987; Gay, Sturgill, Martin & Huttenlocher, 1999).
The Third Discipline: Shared Vision
Senge says that “At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, ‘What do we want to create?’” (p. 206). While developing the first discipline of personal mastery can help us develop a personal vision, such a development will not help the organization unless there is some alignment of that personal vision with that of the organizational vision. The concept of corporate vision statements as a managerial tool was made famous by General Electric President Jack Welch, who in a letter to shareholders wrote: “In the new culture, the role of the leader is to express a vision, get buy-in, and implement it” (Stevens, p. 51). While businesses like GE focus on getting employees to “buy-in” to the corporate vision, Senge is advocating a much more recursive relationship: not only is the organizational vision important to the employee, but the employee’s personal vision must be valued by the organization.
Shared Vision in the Classroom
I bring this idea into my class during our unit on “employment communication.” Like many business writing teachers, I have always included an assignment which asks students to prepare a résumé and cover letter for a job position in which they might be interested. I have always stressed the importance of “understanding your audience” when preparing these texts, and have taught my students the importance of learning everything they can about the prospective employer as part of the research they should do as they prepare to draft these texts. Senge’s work has suggested an additional way to research the prospective employer. First, as I described earlier, I have already asked my students to compose a “personal vision statement” in which I ask them to imagine and then make explicit what they want from life. Now I ask students to search the web for corporate vision statements, focusing particularly on those organizations which they are targeting as potential employers. In class we then examine these vision statements, and gain knowledge about a genre of business writing that is scarcely touched upon in most textbooks. Finally, I ask students to write a short paper which compares and contrasts their own vision statements with the corporate vision statements. The purpose of this paper is to help the students decide if they and the prospective employer are “a good fit.”
Investigating the intersection of organizational and personal vision serves another purpose: it puts questions of corporate and personal ideology in the forefront of the curriculum, where it should be. Conflicts between personal and organizational visions are almost always conflicts rooted in ideology, and in asking students to articulate a vision, and then to compare it to a corporate or organizational vision, the socially constructed roots of those ideologies are more likely to be revealed. This is the pedagogical strategy that James Berlin famously advocated in his 1988 College English article, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” and it is an important corrective to the naïve notion of “objectivity” that is still too often emphasized in the professional writing classroom.
Shared Vision in Research
The importance of the organizational vision statement to organizational success, and the personal vision statement to personal success, suggests that the genre should become a target for research. Some early signs of interest in the subject have appeared in both the fields of organizational management (Lucas, 1999; Kirkpatrick, Wofford, & Baum, 2002), and professional writing (Tarnow, 2001; Dicks, 2004). A study of this genre, perhaps along the lines of Charles Bazerman’s 1988 work on the scientific article, is overdue.
The Fourth Discipline: Team Learning
Aligning personal vision with organizational vision isn’t a matter of chance, or even simply a matter of good hiring practices (though hiring personnel with compatible visions would be a start)—it is a matter of practice and process. Senge calls this process “team learning” (p. 236), and describes it as a discipline marked by “three critical dimensions:
● the ability to think insightfully about complex issues
● the ability to act in innovative and coordinated ways
● the ability to play different roles on different teams” (p. 236).
The importance of teamwork in business communications has not been ignored by the field of business communication. Our textbooks acknowledge its importance, and many of us integrate group assignments and collaborative projects into the curriculum. It is also an important subject of research in the field, (Mescon, Bovée and Thill, 1999; Wambeam and Kramer, 1996; Ede and Lunsford, 1994; Lay and Karis, 1991; Bosley, 1991; among others).
“Despite its importance, team learning remains poorly understood” (Senge, p. 238). We are a nation of rugged individualists, and many of my students resist working in teams, often expressing a concern that they will lose control over their individual grades. The traditional nature of the university, with its “Dean’s Lists” and emphasis on individual scholarship, individual achievement, and individual grades is a powerful force working against the kind of team learning experience so important to success in business. When I began teaching in my institution, I was given a copy of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, a handbook for college teachers now in its eleventh edition. It certainly encourages collaboration, but only devotes two pages of a 371- page text to “Team Learning,” while devoting entire chapters to subjects such as “lecturing” and “teaching large classes.” Unfortunately, preaching the importance of collaboration does little to develop the discipline of team learning. The discipline is only developed through practice.
Team Learning in the Classroom
One way I have encouraged team learning in the classroom is through the use of a “learning history assignment.” The learning history is an emerging business report genre which was developed by Art Kleiner and George Roth of MIT’s Center for Organizational Learning, which Senge directed. The genre is a kind of analytical report which typically has been used to analyze a recent event, or series of events, in an organization’s history, and to learn from that experience. However, it is a genre that goes well beyond the kind of “lessons learned” reports which organizations have traditionally used for this type of activity.
One thing that makes the learning history unique, is that it is a report that is written in many voices. Kleiner and Roth like to use the metaphor of a tribe gathered around a campfire, telling a story. In this “jointly-told tale,” “managers, factory line workers, secretaries, and outsiders such as customers, advertising copy writers, or suppliers, tell their part of the tale” (Kleiner and Roth, p.2).
Another unique feature of the learning history is its format. A learning history typically consists of three parts: single column text which briefly describes the events being discussed, and transitions from event to event. This part of the text is typically written by a single team member, but revised by taking into account comments from the entire team. The right hand column consists of the jointly told tale: the rich mix of individual voices telling their versions of “what happened.” Each participant gives their own range of thoughts, observations, and emotional reactions to the events which occurred. The left hand column consists of the analysis. Typically, analysis of the material is performed by a team which includes both constituents and outside consultants, who code the rich verbal data from the right hand column, and distill it into information which can be used to make the organization better.
In my assignment, the subject of the learning history is our own classroom. Four times during the semester, each student will submit their individual contributions to the jointly told tale describing what occurred in the classroom. I make this a “low-stakes,” un-graded assignment, and take steps to give students the anonymity they need to honestly respond to classroom events. During another four sessions, students are assigned to teams which must do the analytical work of the left-hand column. In these teams they are asked, at different times, to engage in reflection, inquiry, and dialogue, three completely different processes. Thus this assignment asks students to engage in each of the three critical dimensions of team learning which Senge describes.
Team Learning in Research
At its very core, the learning history is a research genre, and it has been used by Kleiner and Roth to research complex business problems at Fortune 500 companies such as Ford and IBM. However, it is the kind of research genre which potentially could be a major component of academic research into business communication.

An example of such research can be found in Rupesh Shah’s 2001 doctoral dissertation for the University of Bath (UK). This project used a learning history to investigate not just a single organization, but rather, a series of relationships between organizations. Participants included managers at the British headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell, the multinational petroleum company; Shell’s managers and workers in Nigeria who were in charge of developing oil fields in the Niger River Delta; the British environmental organization Living Earth, which had a history of opposing such development; and local residents and the Nigerian branch of Living Earth who were attempting to ensure that any development which did occur in the delta was sustainable and environmentally sound. It is a project which truly emphasizes “action research,” in the best sense of the term: an attempt at understanding a communicative relationship “by first introducing change into it and then observing its effects” (Locke, p.14). Shah’s dissertation, which emerged from Bath’s School of Management, is a model of the kind of rigorous, inter-disciplinary scholarship that researchers in the field of business writing should be conducting.
The Fifth Discipline: Systems Thinking
Senge tells us that “Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots’”(p.68). In business organizations we can identify a number of systems and systemic relationships. For example, just like a military unit, many organizations have a chain of command, a hierarchical system of relationships. But information transfer doesn’t always follow this “chain,” instead proceeding through what Karen Stephenson has called “social networks.” Between the informal communication network, commonly referred to as the “grapevine,” and the formal hierarchy, there often exists a third network of very important people which Kleiner (2003) has called the “core group” which “sets the organization’s direction” (p. 8). This group doesn’t appear on the formal organizational charts of the hierarchy, but includes many individuals on that chart as well as many of their friends and relatives, a kind of not-so hidden “clan” within the organization. Finally, there is the market system itself, which plays its own role in influencing decision making within an organization. All of these systems interrelate with each other in complex ways, and Senge argues that failing to see these interrelationships by focusing “on snapshots, on isolated parts of the system” is the fundamental reason “our deepest problems never get solved” (7). In The Fifth Discipline he exams a number of organizational cases, and uses causal loop diagramming from systems engineering to describe the cases, and argues that much of what goes wrong in organizational systems follows a series of systems archetypes which he describes in the text. By becoming familiar with these “maps,” he argues that we will become much more adept at changing organizations.
Systems Thinking in the Classroom
While Senge’s systems archetypes are useful for describing macro level problems faced by business leaders at the highest levels of management, I have found them to be less useful in describing the rhetorical relationships business writers must navigate. However, I have found other methods of diagramming systemic relationships to be an important tool to my students’ developing an understanding between the complex relationships between readers, writers, and texts. Beginning with a simple communications triangle defined by classical rhetoric, I then take my students into a deeper analysis of the rhetorical field by using “activity diagrams” to analyze writing as a social practice within an organizational structure. The method I ask my students to use relies heavily on diagramming methods borrowed from the work of David Russell (1997), who in turn was inspired by the work of Charles Bazerman (1988), as well as by Vygotskian Activity Theory.
My assignment usually starts with a scenario of some sort, which puts the student in the role of a worker in a corporation, working either as an individual or as a member of a group. This set of relationships is the basic activity system. The scenario then introduces an exigency for action by the student, to reach some sort of motive or outcome. The student will use the mediational tool of writing to achieve the outcome. I ask my students to create diagrams to show not only the activity system they are within, but also to describe other activity systems with which their system intersects; in the process my students come to learn that the genres that both constrain and empower their business writing are themselves systemic components of much larger social systems. In many ways this process is simply a way of analyzing audience and context which good rhetorics have always advocated. However, I believe that the process of diagramming these relationships make the material nature of writing visible in ways more traditional methods of audience and contextual analysis do not.
Systems Thinking in Research
I have already mentioned Bazerman and Russell as exemplars who use systems thinking in research in organizational communication. A number of other thinkers are involved in similar research, or building upon that research (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994; Zachry 2000; Winsor 2001;) but I will briefly discuss one example. Clay Spinuzzi’s 2003 article, “Compound Mediation in Software Development: Using Genre Ecologies to Study Textual Artifacts” uses both activity diagrams and genre ecology diagrams to show how software developers use more than a dozen off-screen and on-screen genres which “jointly mediate the activity” (p. 9) of software development. Spinuzzi’s research into these “genre ecologies” suggests that rather than focusing on studying genres in isolation, we need to pay more attention to the ways in which genres reflexively mediate each other in complex systemic relationships. This research suggests that teaching business writing genres in isolation may be less useful than asking students to write a series of texts which are systemically related. I consider my own approach to teaching the writing of employment correspondence which I described earlier, as a small move in this direction.
Conclusion
Using Senge’s theories as a framework for teaching and research in organizational communication may provide opportunities for improving the marginalized status which some scholars in business writing feel exists. The “contempt that many technical communication scholars show for business communication” (Locker, pp.129) is largely based upon a perception that “business writers are essentially greedy and deceitful” (David Dobrin, quoted by Locker, p. 128). I have never experienced the sort of contemptuous attitude from my colleagues described by Locker. However, it is important to my own personal vision and identity as a progressive thinker that the so-called “service courses” I teach are taught in a framework which does not let the “greedy and deceitful” side of communication within a capitalistic system go unchallenged. Senge’s theories give me an opening to the world of business and business communications that allows me to challenge the reproduction of many of the negative aspects of the status quo, without putting myself in the position of opposing the dreams and aspirations my students hold.





















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I've been working some of the ideas in this blog into a potential article. I'm thinking it might be appropriate for Business Communication Quarterly, or the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. Here is the beginning section of the article:

Introduction

In a recent article Kitty Locker argued that “business communication is in danger of being buried by professional communication and needs to preserve its identity as a field” (p. 118). In the piece she questions why the field of technical writing has come to dominate the professional writing programs which many practitioners saw as a way to merge business and technical writing curriculum into a more powerful institutional force. I don’t totally agree with her position. For example, I think institutional use of the terms “professional writing” and “professional communication” varies greatly: in some programs the terms seems to primarily refer to technical writing and digital communication, while in other programs creative writing, journalism, and business communication constitute major parts of the curriculum. However, Locker is absolutely correct in identifying the lack of scholarship as a central reason for the marginalization of business writing within the professional writing curriculum, and she traces that missing scholarship to the fact that in many institutions the business communication courses are housed within schools of business and management, and taught by faculty who are not rewarded for their research. Locker laments that “Only a small band of scholars seem to suspect that poor communication contributes to poor decisions, reduced morale, and increased workplace stress” (p. 126). It from this position of isolation and marginalization which scholars working in business communication wish to escape, but in this article I will argue that one way out of this position might come from aligning our own research interests even more closely with schools of business and management.

If we are willing to look outside our disciplinary boundaries a bit, we will find that there is actually a vigorous scholarly debate within the field of management concerned with issues central to business communication. The fields of organizational learning and knowledge management have emerged as major areas of study in schools of business and organizational management, and the more I look at the research being done by scholars in these areas, the more I am convinced that, far from being a stagnant field populated by “a small band of scholars,” organizational communication is actually a exciting place in which to be doing scholarship!

My own scholarly interest in the field has emerged quite naturally, from my teaching. When I began teaching business writing courses a few years back, I decided I wanted my students to do more than simply engage with the exercises and assignments from one of the several fine business writing textbooks which teach the “state of the art.” I also wanted my students to enter a larger debate about communication practices in business, and I began looking for other texts to supplement the traditional textbook. Last year, the text I selected revolved around issues of sustainability and international communication (Inayatullah and Leggett). This years’ supplement was Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, one of the foundational texts of the organizational learning movement.

I began by asking my class to consider what Senge means when he uses the term “learning organization,” and I challenged my class to read Senge’s text from a writer’s lens, asking the question, “what might it mean to write the learning organization?” As we began to become familiar with Senge’s terms and his approach to business it, became clear that, while the terms he used were sometimes different, many of the theoretical concepts he was introducing to management science were equally applicable to writing and rhetoric. While my own ideas (and those of my students) on this subject are still evolving, I can see several areas where Senge’s theories might inform, and be informed by, scholarship in professional communication.

The First Discipline: Personal Mastery

The central thesis of Senge’s text is that the only enduring source of competitive advantage in business will come from a company’s success at learning “how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization” (p. 4). Senge is envisioning an idealized institution that manages in a way fundamentally different from those of the traditional corporate hierarchy. Instead of managing people, Senge believes we should empower them. In this approach, the goal is to develop employees who are creative, self-motivated, eager to learn and improve themselves, with personal goals that are in alignment with the goals of the organization. Senge believes that creating such an organization can be accomplished through the lifelong practices of a set of disciplines. The first discipline is personal mastery.

By personal mastery, Senge means “the discipline of personal growth and learning” (p.141). His argument is that by encouraging employees to see all aspects of personal existence, even our time on the job “as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint” (p.141), we create an organization which is managed by individuals working collaboratively towards a common vision, rather than by top-down coercion.

Senge raises an issue that is important to our students in their future roles as managers and employees. In my own discussions with people in the business world who manage large writing projects, I hear a great deal of frustration about efforts of upper management to measure the efficiency of its writers through the use of metrics, which always seems to come down to answering the question “how many pages of text should a writer be able to produce in a certain period of time?” Most of these managers resist such efforts, making the argument that there is no practical way to develop such metrics because of the huge variety of writing tasks each organization undertakes. Here the managers are making a claim based upon an analysis of the rhetorical field: the amount of audience research required, the individual writer’s knowledge of the genre in question, the amount of technical research required, the context and specific requirements of each writing assignment make such metrics either useless, or impossibly complex to design.
These managers are making the argument which Johndan Johnson-Eilola advocated back in 1996: “If the problems are of sufficient complexity or uniqueness to preventing a corporation from setting up a ‘knowledge base’ that matches common problems to routine, pre-scripted answers, these operators may begin to work as symbolic analysts” (p. 253). Yet the pressure is still on the manager to improve the efficiency of the writing process within the organization.

Peter Drucker’s famous article on improving the efficiency of knowledge workers from the Winter 1999 issue of The California Management Review seems to nicely connect this argument with that of Senge. Drucker lists six factors necessary to improve the efficiency of workers doing knowledge work (Johnson-Eilola uses Robert Reich’s term “symbolic-analytical work”):

1. Clearly defined tasks
2. Autonomy
3. The responsibility to innovate
4. A commitment to continuous learning and continuous teaching
5. Quality of outputs as a signature requirement. Quantity is irrelevant until a quality standard exists.
6. Knowledge worker as asset not cost

Drucker claims that “Each of these requirements (except perhaps the last one) is almost the exact opposite of what is needed to increase the productivity of the manual worker” (84). Taylorist methods such as management by production metrics is actually counterproductive to the task of the knowledge worker. Why? Drucker answers this question by pointing out that where in production work, “lack of quality is a restraint,” in “knowledge work, quality is not a minimum and a restraint. Quality is the essence of the output” (84). Attempts at regulating the work practices of knowledge workers through Taylorist methods tends to reduce their productivity because it reduces their autonomy and destroys their morale. Drucker is advocating a different form of management of knowledge workers, and terms like “autonomy” and “continuous learning” seem to fit nicely into Senge’s argument for the importance of “personal mastery” in knowledge workers.

Senge and Drucker are advocating an idealized, new workplace, and both realize that getting to that point will require a major transformation in corporate practice. They seem to realize like Kitty Locker that “poor communication contributes to poor decisions, reduced morale, and increased workplace stress” (126), and I would argue that their work seems to indicate that the kind of research in business communication which Locker advocates might focus on attempts at aligning the process of business writing along the lines of the six requirements Drucker makes. Developing a personal vision of business/professional writing as creative work is a good first step.

Listening to Condaleeza Rice testify before the 9-11 Commission today, I was struck how much of the "failure of intelligence" prior to the 9-11 attacks involve issues of knowledge management. For example, there was some serious contention over a presidential daily briefing the President received which was titled something to the effect that "Bin-Laden is Targeting the United States," which Ms. Rice characterized as "old news" and a summary of historical data. There was also the issue of FBI knowledge of Al-Quaeda cells in the US, Middle-Eastern men seeking flight training, and a potential terrorist in FBI custody at the time who had large sums of money from an uncertain source, who had been attempting to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner. While Ms. Rice may have had access to some of this information, she seems to indicate the President did not. There was also, evidently knowledge from the Clinton era, in documents archived within her agency which talked about the possibility of terrorists using airlines as a weapon against targets during the Atlanta Olympics. From Ms. Rice's testimony, it is clear that the nature of her access to this knowledge was not of the kind that allowed her, or anyone in her agency, or the FBI, or the CIA, to make the connection between the "old news" and the "new news." And making that connection between "old news" and "new news" is precisely what knowledge management systems are all about.

Ms. Rice points out that much of the blame for the 9-11 attack must be assigned to structural defects which prevented from the FBI and the CIA from sharing data. And while the administration makes a big point about the fact that changes have been put in place which now allow these agencies to share their "new news," I don't get the impression that the government has set up robust knowledge management systems which will allow agents at all levels to make the connections between "old news" and "new news" across governmental agencies. I hope my impression is wrong! I fear it is not.

I'm thinking today about knowledge, and what Peter Senge calls "mental models...our internal pictures of how the world works" (174). In writing those mental models are called "genres," and they consist of forms, or even model texts we have in mind when we write. Yet these "genres," though powerful and prescriptive they may be, are by no means fixed. Even a very overdetermined genre like the business letter has evolved over the years, and the letter with indented paragraphs, and one's return address in the right-hand top, has been replaced by the very clean-looking block format where everything is left-justified, and paragraphs are separated by lines of space, rather than indents.

The acquisition of genre knowledge is an ever-changing, and complex process. I'm thinking back to the time, early in my naval career when I was being trained to enter the submarine service. As a student in the navy's nuclear propulsion program, I had to take very rigorous, weekly exams. Admiral Rickover, founder of the nuclear navy, was old school when it came to education. The exams were essay only, no multiple choice, no true or false. We were expected to write literate paragraphs answering questions describing complex scientific processes, often using equations we had to learn. We were allowed no notes, no calculators:just our minds, our pencils, and our slide rules--remember those?

In preparing to write in this genre, I did several things. First of all, I (as well as most of my fellow students) took extensive notes from our classroom lectures. We were also required to study and read for several hours a day, so I would take notes from my reading too. But trying to remember the contents of 30-50 pages of notes was itself a very challenging task. Before an exam, I would try to summarize those notes to the 4-5 pages of most important material. Then I would take the formulas I had to learn, and I would construct little mnemonic poems and sayings which would help me remember the formulas. Finally, I would sit down with a study partner, and he would pose a question he expected on the test, and I would write down my answer. Then I would ask the question, and he would answer.

So writing in this very determined and fixed genre (the essay exam at nuclear power school) actually involved other work in unofficial genres. Where the exam itself was a one-way communication with me trying to demonstrate to the grader that I had the knowledge to "pass," as Clay Spinuzzi has demonstrated, these unofficial genres are nonlinear, "self-mediated," and work together with the official genres to form what Spinuzzi calls "genre ecologies." Spinuzzi's research has included efforts to map these ecologies, and to frame these maps within the larger maps of activity systems that David Russell and others have made of genres. My own experience tells me that this is important work. Very rarely do our teaching efforts cover these messy, self-mediated genres which contribute to the composition of the "published genre" or "final draft." And yet my students tell me that this invention stage is often the most difficult part of the writing process for them, and the little work on brainstorming or tree diagramming they do in class doesn't seem to be adequate preparation for the real work of writing.

Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Russell, David. "Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis." Written Communication 14: 504-54 (1997).

Back to the Blog after yet another break. A whole lot of interest going on with the issue of outsourcing. I get nervous when I hear my friends in labor and on the left attack outsourcing. They are right to be concerned with the upheaval caused by these rapid changes in the world economy, but when they move into the protectionist mode, the rhetoric gets awfully nationalistic. And I don't think that kind of rhetoric serves us well when we must deal with a world economy which is no longer easily contained within borders. Much better to talk about international standards for wages, environmental protection, worker safety. That will make for a much better/fairer playing field for all workers.

Knowledge work: some of my colleagues in technical writing fear that efforts to "capture" corporate knowledge are steps towards outsourcing. While there may be a certain element of truth to that, I don't see how one can work in an organization, and at the same time hoard one's knowledge for fear that one might become replaceable. If your company values you so little, find a new company which sees you as an asset!

Back after a tiring three weeks, I now turn from Drucker's knowlegde worker, back to the university as a knowledge-making institution.

In an important 1996 TCQ article discussing the future of technical communication, Johndan Johnson-Eilola challenged us to “relocate value in technical communication relationships from an industrial to post-industrial relationships” (246). Arguing that Robert Reich’s notion of the worker a “symbolic analyst” should move us away from functionalist “decontextualized uses of technology” and towards investigating “broader, contextualized communication processes” (255), Johnson-Eilola proposed “five key projects that might help our students become better educated for their new roles:
1. Connect education to work
2. Question educational goals
3. Question educational processes and infrastructures
4. Build metaknowledge, network knowledge, and self reflective practices
5. Rethink interdisciplinarity”

In the eight years since this article appeared, the field has begun taking on the task of reconfiguring the professional writing curriculum along the lines suggested by Eilola. At the university where I teach (IPFW) we have connected education to work through internship programs, and by engaging with practitioners through our local STC chapter. We have engaged with local corporations by listening to their concerns, and through consultancies.


We have also taken on the task of reconfiguring our education goals, but focusing more of our classwork towards complex, symbolic-analytical tasks such as contextualized, service-learning projects, and away from functionalist preparation for “skill slots determined by industry” (12). However, we have been less successful at reengineering the educational institution itself in critical way.

One reason for that is the inertia which is part of any institution. Yet another, perhaps more fundamental reason the university is so difficult to reengineer is at the very nature of the work it does. In the public view, we are here to educate the next generation. And of course, we do spend a great deal of time working at that (One reason my Blog hasn’t had an entry for three weeks is the fact that my teaching load has demanded virtually all of my attention). But the other part of our work, the part that is most likely too get us promotion and tenure, is our research. And I think one reason the institution we call the university is so resistant to change is because of this “secret life” of the university. Major change will likely involve public debate, and to many in the university, such public debate is unlikely to be supportive of the research mission. So we go like we always have, teaching and researching in our garrets.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age.” Technical Communication Quarterly Summer 1996, Vol. 5, issue 3. 245-71.

Greenspan's testimony today got me hinking some more about this whole issue of knowledge-worker productivity.

Some thoughts to chew on:

1. Recent numbers from the Fed indicate that the rate of increase in worker productivity, the economic indicator which is driving economic growth, is down for the first time in several years.
2. Today, in testimony before the Senate, Alan Greenspan noted that the transition of the American economy from an industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based economy is accelerating.
3. Greenspan also argued that the greatest long-term threat to the American economy may be the inability of the educational system to properly train enough knowledge workers to support economic growth.
4. Management guru Peter Drucker has argued that the greatest task facing our nation is learning how to increase knowledge worker productivity.
5. Drucker notes that the top-down management styles, and Taylorist approaches to efficiency which produced enormous gains in industrial productivity, actually damages knowledge-worker productivity.
6. If people like Greenspan and Drucker are right in assuming that knowledge is the ultimate form of capital, then isn’t discovering and circulating that knowledge efficiently the primary task facing businesses in the 21st century?
7. Shouldn’t a company’s “professional communicators” be leading these efforts?
8. What are the communication practices which will most efficiently utilize a company’s corporate knowledge and memory?
9. Does the story I told of lessons learned using an email list as a tool for helping solve the problems faced by a process/document development team suggest other practices which might expand the knowledge base upon which corporate growth may be built?




Sources: (1) Alan Greenspan. Senate Testimony. CNBC. 2/13/04.
(2) Peter Drucker. “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge.” California Management Review. 41:2 (1999): 79-94.

Back in the saddle again. I was pleased to see today's New York Times had a major, front page article on the Musharraf pardon.
But I will get off my political rant, and return to the six factors that Drucker says determine knowledge worker productivity.

The fifth factor here is the question of quality. How do you measure the quality of the work I do as a writing professor. As Ira Shor has convincingly demonstrated, beginning in the eighties, the conservative political movement in the United States has attempted to wrest control from its knowledge workers in higher education with a series of attacks based upon the slogan that "Johnny can't read/or write." This attack has damaged the credibility of those of us working in the educational system, and has also led to a movement which wants to use "high-stakes testing" to measure educational outcomes at the secondary level. There are similar pressures at the university level to measure outcomes.

The concept of measuring outcomes is not a bad idea. The problem comes when people who aren't knowledge workers in the field define what the goal of the outcomes should be, and how the outcomes should be measured. And I'm not encouraged by what I see out there. Some universities are asking students to write timed essay tests, and then those essays are scored by a group of experts. There is a major problem with this approach, in that it fails to measure what students are actually taught in a composition class: to go through a series of steps, a process, where they come up with an idea, research it, organize their ideas, draft, get audience feedback, revise, proofread, edit and publish. The timed essay ignores this complex rhetorical process in favor of a measuring tool which measures only the ability to write a timed test.

There are better measuring tools. Asking students to keep a portfolio of work created throughout their college career, and then having groups of experts evaluate the portfolios for evidence of their growth as writers is a better measure. However, such a measurement process is time-consuming, expensive, and slow, as most any longitudinal measurement is. And I have yet to see a conservative politician (or a liberal one for that matter), who is willing to commit the financial resources to that kind of extensive sampling of our students, and the correlating and analysis of data to the performance of specific teachers.

But the pressure is there. And frankly, I want a discussion of what it exactly is we are expected to be teaching our students. But I want a discussion that goes beyond the rants of those who scream "teach them grammar," without understanding the complex nature of the task of writing instruction; those who simply believe that returning to the failed instructional methods of the past will solve all of our problems.

Its been a couple of days since I've had time to post to the blog. And what brings me back today is a touch of political anger. I'll return to my discussion of "knowledge worker" in a later post.

As you may have guessed, my politics veers to the left. That being said, I'm not one of these leftists who think that America can ignore its status as the worlds strongest economic and political power, and turn a blind eye to the world. There are "dark forces" out there, who if left alone, will use violence to impose their will on the rest of us. I suppose where I differ with the interventionists on the right, is my belief that one of the greatest threats to our freedom is one posed by the actions of large, multi-national corporations.

Having said that, today I'm going to vent at the so-called major Presidential candidates--all of them--from Bush, to Kerry, to Edwards, Clark and Dean.
Over the past day or so, the founding scientist of Pakistan's nuclear program has confessed, over Pakistani TV, that he transferred or attempted to transfer Pakistan's nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iraq. Today, incredibly, President Musharaff, pardoned this scientist.

This act of terrorism poses a much greater potential threat to civilization than 9-11. If nuclear weapons are developed by terrorists, or terrorist nations, they will be in a position to impose their agenda on the world. Yet are Presidential Candidates our silent on this subject. President Bush has called President Musharaff a friend and ally in the war on terrorism.

Shame! The President and our presidential candidates should demand that President Musharaff immediately turn over this terrorist to an international agency, which should investigate exactly what technology was transferred, and to whom. If Pakistan refuses, then America and the world should isolate Pakistan, and impose the same type of international sanctions that were imposed upon Iraq!

In looking back at Friday's post, I wonder if a reader can connect that post to Drucker's contention that "autonomy" is a factor which determines knowledge-worker productivity. My concern with the word "autonomy," is that most people will make the jump from "autonomy" to its near synonym, "freedom," and with that jump, miss what I think is another part of the meaning of the word "autonomy." I'm thinking "empowered to work in an organization." It gets rid of the notion of "autonomy" as the lone woman working in her cubicle, the idea that "autonomy" is somehow related to isolation. My argument is this: we aren't truly empowered, we don't have autonomy, unless we have access to the corporate knowledge of our organization. Without it, autonomy becomes nothing more than something we give lip service to.

Drucker's third factor is "continuous innovation." What does continuous innovation mean to me as an educator, doing knowledge work in the university? It means that I am not merely transmitting a "fixed knowledge" from one generation to the next, a work that merely perpetuates the status quo. Rather, it means I see my task as teaching a process. To again use the very overused maxim, "you give a man a fish, you feed him once; you teach a man to fish, you feed him again and again." I teach process, and process is a dynamically evolving set of skills.

Having said that, I wouldn't necessarily agree with those who might say that, as a writing teacher, I teach a "contentless" subject. Besides the writing process, I teach the theory behind that process, and my students receive a solid foundation in rhetorical theory, and a little bit of the history of rhetoric.

I am going to dicuss the idea of knowledge worker autonomy, self-management, or management from the ground up, by telling a story about the autonomy of knowledge itself. This story describes how I learned the importance of freeing information from the hierarchical structure in which it is hidden.

Three years ago I was paying my way through college by working as a Manufacturing Engineer for a small battery developer and manufacturer in Pawcatuck Connecticut, right near the Rhode Island border. I was part of a team that was developing Lithium-Ion batteries, the kind you find in some cell phones and laptop computers, for larger scale use as power sources for aerospace applications.

Our major project at the time was building a prototype of the battery cells for the Mars Rover spacecraft which are currently in the news. My job was to take the battery design as developed by the chemists and electro-chemical engineers, and supervise the technicians who would build the prototypes. During this process it was my responsibility to develop the specifications, quality checkpoints, and manufacturing procedures which would be used to build the battery cells for what would become the Spirit and Opportunity spacecraft.

Despite daily meetings between myself, the project manager, the senior scientist and the lead design engineer, the project was progressing slowly. Anyone who has tried to take a new product from the design stage to the production stage will recognize the kinds of problems we faced on a daily basis—clearances on manufacturing jigs which looked fine on the computer screen were so tight that the technicians couldn’t fit the battery plates into the jigs. The unique electrolyte chemicals developed which allowed the battery to actually supply energy under the extreme Martian temperatures, wouldn’t flow through our electrolyte fill machines, due to their unusual chemical characteristics. These are the typical problems faced by a manufacturing engineer. Unfortunately, we were on a very tight schedule, and there was little tolerance for schedule slip because of the narrow time window the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had in which to launch the spacecraft.

One morning at our daily management meeting, the project manager turned the meeting on its head by asking us to discuss process, rather than the imminent crises we were dealing with. She asked us to describe, in detail, how we had spent our last day of work. I described mine, which was spent running back and forth between the engineers, the scientists, the manufacturing labs, the quality control and supply offices, trying to solve problems that were delaying the work. Occasionally I actually got some time to work on the computer to write the procedures and documents I was charged with developing. The lead engineer and the senior scientist were similarly engaged, bouncing back and forth, relying upon the each other’s knowledge to solve problems.

At the next day’s meeting, the project manager announced that she was establishing a listserv for the group. She asked that whenever we ran into a problem, no matter how small, to put it on the listserv. The only other rule she imposed was this: everyone in the group was to read the listserv messages every day. She didn’t want to find any of her scientists or engineers “surprised” by a problem that had been promulgated through the listserv.

We were horrified. You know the old cliché about making sausage—you really don’t want to see how it’s done. Still, we were a relatively small organization, about 50 people in the group, and for the most part we had a fair amount of trust in each other. So we went ahead with the Project Manager’s idea.

At first, it seemed tedious. Taking the time to sit down and describe each problem you faced to the entire group was yet one more demand in an already packed day. Yet gradually, the system began to bear fruit. The nagging problem with electrolyte fill was solved when a tech suggested that we elevate the electrolyte containers in a way which would provide more Net Positive Suction Head to the fill pumps. I had never considered this woman as a resource—she was a chemical lab technician assigned to a Ph.D. working on another project, and she was very quiet and reserved. But I learned that she had worked at the company for over 24 years, in almost every aspect of battery design and manufacturing, and she had a wealth of knowledge. Later, I posted drafts of my manufacturing specifications and procedures on the listserv, and again I found that suggestions from unexpected sources within the company helped to smooth the prototyping and development process.

Reflecting on this experience, I am reminded of Peter Drucker’s mantra that knowledge is the real asset of today’s companies and organizations. And corporate knowledge, corporate memory if you will, resides in the minds of individuals, individuals who work at all levels of an organization, from the president of the company, to the retired lady who comes in the evening to help file procedures in the document control office. And practices that help tap into that knowledge, practices that encourage conversation across the hierarchical barriers that separate individuals within almost every organization, may be the key to organizational success.

Returning to Drucker's six factors which determine knowledge-worker productivity.

The first factor is determining the task. As Drucker points out, this is the essential factor which differentiates knowledge-worker productivity from manual-worker productivity, where "the key question is always How should the work be done?" (Drucker 84). The notion here is to identify the task of the knowledge worker, and then eliminating those distractions in the work place which have nothing to do with the task.

The problem is, what is the task of the university? The answer you say, is "educating our students!" And already we face a problem. The university where I work is a "research" university. Our mission is not simply teaching, but teaching and research. Furthermore, when it comes to promotion and tenure, the word on the street is that your research is the key factor in determining whether or not you will be promoted.

There is a perfectly logical reason for this. The research university is designed not merely to transmit knowledge, but to advance it. The theory is that by having our best students taught by researchers, we will ensure that the curriculum doesn't atrophy, and with that atrophication, our students will no longer have the skills that will make them the best knowledge-workers. So perhaps a better answer to the question about the task of the university might be "developing new knowledge workers."

But what about all the time faculty members must spend on curricular affairs committees, tenure and advancement committees, etc.? Surely these activities could be eliminated, couldn't they? Again, the answer is no. The university must be self-governed. If we allow these responsibilities to be transferred to experts in the science of "educational administration," then inevitably we lose our ability to control the curriculum. Educational administrators are experts at "how the work should be done," and while they might be sources for advice, this is not the question the university should be focusing on. To put it quite simply, these administrators tend to focus on "cost," and as Drucker argues, knowledge work, university work is not like manual labor. We must see it as an asset, not as a cost. Unfortunately, the market economy doesn't know how to deal with the knowledge economy. The educational administrators at the state and local level, whether they be elected officials(yes, the governor of a state is an "educational administrator"), or governmental employees have no idea how to do this. No matter how much they explore "partnerships" and "curricular initiatives," ultimately they always must focus on the bottom line, because that is what they, in their knowledge work, have been taught to do. No, these individuals cannot be given the responsibility of determining, assessing, or promoting the faculty at the university. The faculty itself must take on that task.

Therefore, I will close by summarizing the task of the university faculty as follows: To advance knowledge, to educate new knowledge-workers, and to maintain the quality of that process by advancing and assessing the curriculum and those who create the curriculum. And this is the key to understanding the conflict between university faculty, and administrators and governmental officials at all levels-knowledge workers cannot be "managed." They must manage themselves. And it just so happens, that this is Drucker's second factor, which I will look at more closely tomorrow.

The purpose of this blog is to investigate the notion of a "post-capitalistic" society and economic structure. It emerges from a sense of frustration at what I believe to be the accelerating transfer of capital from the poorest members of society to the richest. While I am amazed at market capitalism's ability to co-opt almost any idea which might oppose it, it seems to me that the transfer of capital from the poor to the rich will not be indefinitely sustainable.

Peter Drucker has argued that the transformation of our economy from a manufacturing-based to a knowledge-based system will lead to a kind of post-capitalistic economy. Writing in the Winter 1999 issue of The California Management Review, Drucker argues that focusing on "making knowledge workers more productive" will result in systemic changes to the entire economic system, because it "requires changes not only on the part of the individual knowledge worker, but on the part of the whole organization." (CMR, 41:2,pp.79-94).

As a university professor, I am a knowledge worker, working in what many people see as a very unproductive system. Frankly, I don't understand the system well-enough yet to decide whether I agree or disagree with those people. However, I know that I personally want to become a more productive member of society, so I will begin by trying to find my own way through understanding how my own productivity is defined.

management Blogger Jim McGee paraphrases Drucker in identifying "six factors that determine knowledge worker productivity." Those factors are:

1. Definition of task
2. Required autonomy of knowledge workers
3. Continuing innovation
4. Continuous learning and continuous teaching
5. Quality of outputs as a signature requirement. Quantity is irrelevant until a quality standard exists.
6. Knowledge worker as asset not cost

I will begin my research by investigating each of these factors.