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.





















References
Amidon, S. (2003). Manifestoes: A study in genre. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.
University of Rhode Island, Kingston.
Bawarshi, A. (2004). Genre and the invention of the writer: Reconsidering the place of
invention in composition. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the
experimental article. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T.N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary
communication: Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erblaum
Associates.
Berlin, J. (1988). Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English 50,
(pp.477-494).
Bosley, D.S. (1991). Designing effective technical communication teams. Technical
Communication 38:4 (pp. 504-512).
Committee on Human Factors, National Research Council. (1987). Mental models in
human-computer interaction: Research issues about what the user of software
knows. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Devitt, A. J. (2004). Writing genres. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Devitt, A., Reiff, M.J., & Bawarshi, A. (2004). Scenes of writing: Strategies for
composing with genres. New York: Longman.
Dicks, R.S. (2004). Mission and vision statements. Management principles and
practices for technical communicators. New York: Pearson Longman.
Drucker, P.F. (1999). Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge.
California Management Review, 41:2, (pp.79-94).
Ede, L.A., & Lunsford, A.A. (1994). Collaborative authorship and the teaching of
writing. In M. Woodmansee & P. Jaszi (Eds.). The construction of authorship:
Textual appropriation in law and literature. Durham: Duke University Press
(pp. 417-438).
Gay, G., Sturgil, A., Martin, W., & Huttenlocher, D. (1999). Document-centered peer
collaborations: An exploration of the educational uses of networked
communication technologies. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication,
4:3.
Giddens, A. (1987). Social theory and modern sociology. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Inayatullah, S., & Leggett, S., Eds. (2002). Transforming communication: Technology,
sustainability, and future generations. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Johnson-Eilola, J. (1996).Relocating the value of work: Technical communication in a
post-industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5:3 (pp. 245-270).
Kirkpatrick, S.A., Wofford, J.C., & Baum, R.J. (2002). Measuring motive imagery in the
vision statement. Leadership Quarterly, 13:2 (pp. 139-150).
Kleiner, A. (2003). Who really matters: The core group theory of power, privilege,
and success. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Kleiner, A., & Roth, G. (1997). Learning histories: A new tool for turning
organizational experience into action. New 21st Century Working Papers Series.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Coordination Science
(http://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/mit21c/002.html).
Lay, M.M., & Karis, W.M. (Eds). (1991). Collaborative writing in industry:
Investigations in theory and practice. Amityville, NY: Baywood.
Locke, K. (2001). Grounded theory in management research. London: SAGE.
Locker, K. (2003). Will professional communication be the death of business
communication? Business Communication Quarterly, 66:3, 118-132.
Lucas, J.R. (1998). Anatomy of a vision statement. Management Review 87:2 (pp. 22-
26).
McKeachie, W.J. (2002). McKeachie’s teaching tips (11th ed.). Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin.
Mescon, M.H., Bovée, C.L., & Thill, J.V. (1999). Business today. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Orlikowsko, W.J., & Yates, J. (1994). Genre repertoire: The structuring of
communicative practices in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly 39
(pp. 541-574).
Porter, J.E. (1992). Audience and rhetoric: An archaeological composition of the
discourse community. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Roberts, C., Smith B.J., & Ross, R.B. Drawing Forth Personal Vision. (1994).In
P.M.Senge, A. Kleiner, C. Roberts, R.B. Ross, & B.J. Smith, (Eds.), The fifth
discipline fieldbook: Strategies and tools for building a learning organization
(pp. 201-207). New York: Currency Doubleday.
Russell, D.R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory
analysis. Written Communication 14:4 (pp. 504-554).
Senge, P.M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning
organization. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Shah, R. (2001). Relational praxis in transition towards sustainability: Business-NGO
collaboration and participatory action research. Doctoral dissertation.
University of Bath, UK. (http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/RupeshShah/TitlePage.htm).
Spinuzzi, C. (2003).Compound mediation in software development: Using genre
ecologies to study textual artifacts. In C. Bazerman and D.R. Russell (Eds.)
Writing selves, writing Societies: Research from activity perspectives. Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse (http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/index.cfm).
Stevens, M. (2001). Extreme management: What they teach at Harvard Business
School’s advanced management program. New York: Warner.
Tarnow, E. (2001). A recipe for mission and vision Statements. IEEE Transactions on
Professional Communication 44:2 (pp. 138-141).
Wambeam, C.A., & Kramer, R. (1996). Design teams and the web: A collaborative
model for the workplace. Technical Communication 43:4 (pp. 349-356).
Winsor, D. (2001). Learning to do knowledge work in systems of distributed cognition.
Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15:1 (5-28).
Zachry, M. (2000). The ecology of an online educational site in professional
communication. In T.J. Malkinson (Ed.), SIGDOC 2000 conference proceedings
(pp. 433-442). New York: ACM, Inc.