BOOK REVIEW

Melinda Knight, Editor

University of Rochester

Writing Workplace Cultures: An

Archaeology of Professional Writing
By Jim Henry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2000. 260 pp. Index.
Reviewed by Deborah C. Andrews
University of Delaware, Newark

geography professor once formulated the principal question in his

field this: &dquo;Why do people do what they do where they do it?&dquo;

as
~L Early on, cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others asked
this question in the setting of exotic peoples, often those in once colonized
locations. More recently, however, such qualitative research (called ethnog-
raphy) has been conducted closer to home, especially (with the Chicago
School of Sociology in the 1920s) in educational institutions, where
researchers look at variations within ethnic and racial groups (for more
information on ethnography as a research method, see http ://labweb.edu-
cation.wisc.edu/cni916/def_eth.htm). Currently, ethnographers are exam-

ining an even wider range of cultural settings, including urban street

gangs, suburban communities (gated and ungated), Internet discussion
groups, and members of a profession. Writing Workplace Cultures can be
seen as one such examination.

More than compiling mere descriptions of daily life, ethnographers

today interpret how incidents represent the network of meanings by
which the culture lives. To do so, they generally investigate three sources
of data. One source is their own experience; &dquo;participant observers&dquo;
engage in the field setting over several months or years. They learn what
it’s like to live there both by living there and by observing and then
describing those who live there. A second source is interviews with mem-
bers of the culture; targeted, open-ended questions help elicit cultural
knowledge. Finally, they collect sample artifacts that embed characteris-
tics of the culture of interest. Some researchers aim largely to inform
scholars through rich description; others are activists, seeking to gain
power for those who have been devalued in a culture.
Writing Workplace Cultures, which won the ABC Distinguished Publi-
cation Award for 2001, can be considered an activist ethnography. Henry
and his collaborators, &dquo;participant observers,&dquo; conducted ethnographic
studies of 83 workplace field sites between 1993 and 1999. They focused
on the role of writing and of writers and on the relative status of writers
462

(compared to other knowledge workers and managers) at the sites.

Henry’s collaborators were practicing (or aspiring) professional writers
who were students in a graduate course, &dquo;Cultures of Professional Writ-
ing,&dquo; which Henry teaches at George Mason University, outside Washing-
ton D.C. Many of the student-researchers decided to study their own work-
places for both practical reasons-they were already employed at the
workplace-and pedagogical ones-they both learned about the site and
learned how they could intervene to improve themselves as writers there
and improve their organization’s communication processes. Writing
Workplace Cultures pulls together their findings, the discussion of those
findings conducted during workshop sessions in the course, and Henry’s
analysis of this database through a diversity of frameworks and theories.
Writing Workplace Cultures is divided into three parts (8 total chap-
ters), which present the discussion and analysis, and four appendixes,
which contain the bulk of the data. Let me briefly describe the appendixes
before commenting on the discursive chapters. Three appendixes consist
of extensive tables. One describes the student-researchers’ professional
writing backgrounds (e.g., public relations/policy, journalism, technical
writing/editing). A second lists the topics they chose for self-assessment
(a marvelously varied lot); the sites of their research (many in govern-
ment and professional associations and societies, given the location of the
study, but also private businesses and nonprofit and educational institu-
tions) ; and their research topics and themes. The third categorizes their
work, their position in the organization, and the size of the organization.
The final appendix reproduces the abstracts of their ethnographies. All
the researchers are identified by first name only. These data tables sug-
gest the large scale of this project, probably an unprecedented research
undertaking. The tables and researcher abstracts, petit recits, in Jean-
Francois Lyotard’s sense, provide an incredibly detailed snapshot of writ-
ers and writing in very specific settings.

Henry’s &dquo;pulling together&dquo; of those findings in the major discursive

chapters of the book must be understood in a postmodern sense. Aiming
to &dquo;resist totalizing accounts of any cultural trends or practices&dquo; (p. xi), he
conceives of his book as &dquo;an archaeology&dquo; (p. xii) in which his students’
ethnographies become shards, fragments that can be represented &dquo;from
various perspectives and in various dimensions&dquo; (p. xii). In addition to
ethnography, those perspectives include feminist criticism, social con-
structionism, narratology, rhetoric, discourse analysis, and economic
theory. In these pages, for example, Michel Foucault meets Robert Reich,
the former U.S. Labor Secretary. To use a term Henry seems very fond of
(perhaps from his background in architecture), the eight chapters of his
analysis and discussion imbricate; that is, they overlap, like tiles on a roof.
The first of the three discursive parts of the book, &dquo;Writers in Theo-
ries and Practices (Mapping the Dig),&dquo; looks at issues in writing instruc-
 463

tion and the representation of writers (note, by the way, the use of the
plural &dquo;theories&dquo; and &dquo;practices&dquo;). He starts from a background in com-
position studies, citing in particular how the teaching of composition has
often &dquo;grossly undermined the potential of inquiry by composition
researchers or by writers themselves into their agencies and subject posi-
tions&dquo; (p. 2). Instead, instruction has followed the &dquo;current-traditional&dquo;
approach that emphasizes &dquo;patterns of arrangement and superficial cor-
rectness&dquo; (Berlin, quoted on p. 2). The approach sees student work not as
messages for real audiences, not representations of the author’s charac-
ter or agency, but as objects for assessment and correction. The approach
also fits historically with the takeover of composition instruction in the
early twentieth century by English departments from departments of rhet-
oric. English departments, with their bias toward belles lettres, required
students to write about literature rather than &dquo;ponder[ing] the discursive
’I’ as it assumed membership in a discipline while researching topics
valued by the discipline&dquo; (p. 3).
This emphasis on formal standards might have been appropriate to the
rather simple writing demands of the &dquo;high-volume&dquo; and &dquo;high-value&dquo; pro-
duction workplace, as Reich defines it in The Work of Nations (quoted on
p. 5). The systematic management practiced in that workplace (following
Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, published in
1911) valued impersonal, &dquo;instrumental,&dquo; written communication (p. 3). But
the curren~traditional approach did not allow students to &dquo;compose posi-
tions (and selves) in the discursive realms of their future active lives&dquo; (p.
3). A shift in the national U.S. economy from high-volume to &dquo;high-value&dquo;
production, however, has brought new demands for such subjective compo-
sition. In this setting, writers need to understand that they &dquo;not only com-
pose but are composed by the discourses of the workplace&dquo; (p. 6) and thus
can contribute to profits through &dquo;continuous discovery of new linkages
between solutions and needs&dquo; (Reich, quoted on p. 5). As knowledge work-
ers, writers add value in a setting of dispersed decision making and col-
laborative enterprises. Although most of the student-researchers in Henry’s
class spent a good deal of time writing, they did not necessarily conceive of
themselves as &dquo;writers,&dquo; a term often loaded with literary connotations that
didn’t seem to float in the workplace. A theme of some of the research,
then, was an enhanced definition of writer in these field settings.
The chapters in &dquo;Part Two: Research on Discursive Work in Organiza-
tional Settings (Uncovering Shards)&dquo; categorize in multivalent and very
interesting ways the discursive, political, and organizational issues raised
in the ethnographies. This is a detailed, highly useful categorization that
has a nice ring of reality to it. The analysis reconfirms the important role
of writing in constructing, not just representing, reality, even in such
seemingly low-life forms as memos and sets of instructions. The discus-
sion further investigates the status of writers in organizations-writers
464

who find themselves in the &dquo;paradoxical position of being charged with

producing discursive representations while excluded from inner circles of
information and knowledge that could inform those representations&dquo; (p.
88). In part, this lower status reflects a common perception that work-
place writers communicate &dquo;predetermined thoughts rather than ...
exploring and instantiating reality&dquo; (p. 88). Writers may find themselves
caught up in document routing processes that are repetitive and thus may
be unable to see new possibilities; on the other hand, they might bring
their skills at organizational analysis to bear on reshaping the documents
that convey organizational procedures. The ethnographies point out areas
of dissonance between what we may teach as appropriate business com-
munication practices (clarity and brevity) and what may give power within
an organization (obscurity and information hoarding).

&dquo;Part Three: Implications and Applications (Links to Other Shards,

Other Sites)&dquo; moves from analysis to intervention. It discusses in more
detail issues of author identity and subjectivity, especially as these develop
across the &dquo;disappearing boundary&dquo; (p. 166) between author and audience.
The heightened interactivity of information technology only hastens that
disappearance. Henry sets an agenda for the education of professional writ-
ers that would counteract the current-traditional &dquo;erasure of the ’I’ ...

roundly seconded by workplace discursive practices&dquo; (p. 165). The time is

ripe, he says, because of three developments:
(1) theories for apprehending the complexities of discursive constructions of
subjectivities-of the ways in which the social constructionist elements of lan-
guage and discourse practices shape our identities-have finally made their
ways to composition studies; (2) the shifts in our national economy, particu-
larly as global capitalism has positioned U.S. economy, render earlier subjec-
tivities required by the workplace archaic and even counterproductive; (3)
developments in technology have revolutionized discursive circuits, opening
channels for reshaping subjectivities and for reimagining rhetorics&dquo; (p. 165).

Henry discusses the implications of each of these as part of a broad-

scale project to &dquo;re-present&dquo; discursive work in academic and workplace
settings. He is particularly concerned with the politics of authorship and
representation, of &dquo;who speaks for whom, to whom, and under what con-
ditions&dquo; (p. 167), especially as such representations are shaped through
technology and collaborative writing.
This review opened with an ethnographic question. It ends with a ped-
agogical one, paraphrasing Stanley Fish: &dquo;Is there content in this course?&dquo;
The answer for professional writing classes, as Henry makes clear, is a
resounding yes, if that content is framed as Henry advocates. Writing
Workplace Cultures provides a treatise on method-on how to teach in a
postmodern classroom, on how to conduct research with students who do
more than merely collect documents or produce correct documents but
 465

who develop a new set of eyes and an enriched understanding of an orga-

nizational workplace. It also provides a treatise on writers and writing in
the workplace grounded in thorough, dense, and complex analyses from a
variety of perspectives. Henry envisions as his audience &dquo;professional writ-
ers (or aspiring writers), workplace managers, writing teachers, curricu-
lum designers, professional writing scholars, and compositionists&dquo; (p. 11).
Many (perhaps most) JBC readers would fall into this audience, probably
in overlapping categories.
In its density and complexity, Henry’s text can offer tough going for
the casual reader. Its discussion of subjectivities and the contingency of
discourse may also strike some readers as an inappropriate view of orga-
nizational life. But even if you find the language of theory off-putting and
difficult and the point of view challenging, it’s worth the time to read
(and, often, reread). This is an important and rich work whose depths of
evidence and insight have only been touched on here. Anyone interested
in teaching business communication or in doing research in the field
needs to be aware of the issues Henry addresses so well.