Theories of Technical Dysfunction

It makes sense that within an organization there is social activity, and so being, that there is a rhetorical context within an organization. If we are in agreement that knowledge is part of a social contract – that “social communities frame contexts for knowing,” then it should be of the utmost importance for organizations, groups, businesses and schools to acknowledge that and educate those workers, members and students how to engage in these environments successfully.

Teresa Harrison, in her article “Frameworks for the Study of Writing in Organizational Contexts,” even proposes the idea that organizations are systems of knowledge. “An organization is constituted in part because its members share in a potentially unique worldview…the content and structure of a knowledge or cognitive system is generated by individuals interacting with each other and with their environments.” The focus of recent articles I’ve read are exploring the relationship between technical communication and rhetoric within organizations, how knowledge in generated or shared, and how educators should approach teaching their students. What I’ve come away with after reading these articles, among them Harrison’s above mentioned piece and “Writing Technologies at White Sands” by Powell Henderson is a strong sense that there are problems with the relationships between people and people with technology.

Whereas I am not wholly surprised by the apparent confusion and conflicts found in the workplace -- within groups and organizations, what do surprise me, though, is the consistent documentation of it over several decades. As far back as the sixties you have people such as Lloyd Bitzer making inroads as to the nature of rhetoric and few, if any, of the aforementioned articles I’ve read recently were written within this century. This makes me curious as to why there is so much past theory, observation and documentation on technical communication within the classroom and workplace environments, the various problems that exist in the workplace and how it relates to technical communication but yet there are no solutions referenced. With so much apparent dysfunction within organizations, et al, with so much apparent need for better, particular education for technical communicators we are reading study after study, article after article documenting and expressing these sentiments. Has no progress been made over the years? Should we expect that there will be any progress any time soon?

What’s the point of reading and analyzing such theoretical articles about things that I agree are interesting and important, yet there is a lack of evidence that any positive changes have happened in industry and education? The same set of questions arises in these studies as do the same observations of conflicts and problems. How are we supposed to respond to all of this?