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!