By Thomas Barker | Fellow
Considerations of who we are as technical communicators have stimulated academic discussions for years. Articles about defining technical communication occupy special issues of Technical Communication and Intercom and books and conference presentations. Our professional identity has grown over the past 25 years, as we have responded to massive social and technological shifts. And yet, despite the chaos of history, academics have repeatedly tried to define technical communication. Sometimes practitioners led academics (we all became “desktop publishers” in the 1980s) and sometimes academics led practitioners (we all became “public intellectuals” in the 1990s.) And we failed. We didn’t fail at the time, but we failed in the long run. No consistent definition of technical communication has emerged.
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to thomas.barker@ttu.edu. or the column blog at http://theacademicconversation.ning.com/.
What emerges, however, are three dominant approaches to defining technical communication: approaches that reflect the turmoil of change. Not surprisingly, these three approaches reflect, respectively, the perspectives of research, teaching, and practice—the three pillars of our profession. In this column, I’d like to compare and contrast these three views with the intention of shaping the academic conversation about professionalism.
Professionalism as Symbolic-Analytic Work
The most traditional definition also reflects the most radical definition of technical communication. Why? Because it attempts to situate our profession as closely as possible to the central trend of the decade: knowledge work. This trend defines us as abstractors, experimenters, collaborators, and system thinkers—all with information. The trend parallels the growth of information as product over the past 30 years. The trend simply asserts that the information about a product is as important as the product itself. We all know the trend in our economy from a production economy to an information economy. With it, production of goods moved to cheap labor markets of the world, while production of information (processes, development, management) took over the center of corporate life. The attempt to work this trend into a definition of technical communication in this environment led to the hailing of technical communication as “symbolic-analytic work.” And nowhere did we see that definition as clearly as we did in the writings of Johndan Johnson-Eilola, then of Purdue University.
In 1996, when the article “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age” came out, the profession burned to find out where technical communication, as a “value-added” endeavor, fit into the exploding digital economy. The Society for Technical Communication funded a well-intended but largely unfruitful study on ways to assess the value of technical communication. Management philosophy of the time was all about value. Value seemed inherent in then Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s “symbolic-analytic work.” We solve problems, we engage in strategic thinking, and we rise above production and subservient relations to products in the “support” metaphor. We’re all about information and value.
In my view, however, the symbolic-analytic knowledge worker definition situates the profession squarely in the context of corporate settings, even though those settings, those corporate structures, are distributed out to coffee shops and Wi-Fi hotspots. This definition asserts that we provide those corporate structures with the core value that makes technical communicators indispensible and invaluable. But it limits professional activity to that function. Because of this impulse, the symbolic-analytic worker definition embraces the opportune corporate structure that gives it validity. It redefines what we do—and it is not “service” to the “real” product—but it doesn’t necessarily redefine where we do it. No wonder, then, that some thinkers, emboldened by the revolutionary view of work, sought to break free from corporate shackles, to abandon even those corporate structures, and see technical communication and communicators as free agents.
Professionalism as Boundaryless Employment
The word for the free-agent definition of technical communication, however, is not unbounded, but boundaryless. And this trend grows out of the increasingly well-defined career path of the independent consultant. There is a trend toward consulting, especially as evidenced in STC, where roughly 75% of members define themselves as “self employed” (yet they called themselves technical communicators).
Consultants—trainers, contractors, researchers—grew their technological sophistication, but slowly. When I assumed the manager’s role of STC’s Consulting and Independent Contracting Special Interest Group (CIC SIG), the members were woefully under-technologized. Their “captive” counterparts enjoyed much faster PCs, more stable networks, and classier software, mainly because corporations paid the bill. But during the late 1990s, all that changed and independents acquired technologies on a par with their symbolic-analytic knowledge worker pals at IBM and Microsoft. In doing so, although they did not define it as such, they laid the groundwork for the development of the boundaryless career.
The real boundaryless career definition takes shape through the lens of a field called career studies. Career studies, which grew out of analytical approaches to work and productivity in the 1950s, asserts that boundaryless work gives primacy to professional identity, not corporate structures. According to scholar Jeffrey Jablonski at The University of Nevada Las Vegas, career studies asserts that boundaryless free agents constantly develop new skill sets and capabilities by virtue of their fluid movement from job to job. Career changing—defining the career as a stint in this industry or that—becomes the norm as workers begin to crave new skills. Scholars in career studies examine how free agents move from one flattened, downsized organization to another, growing in skills as they go. And—where this gets really interesting—organizations start to thrive, not on the growth of institutional knowledge and company loyalty, but on the steady, heady stream of new knowledge and expertise from their pools of consultant workers. Moving with great agility from project to project, rising above the need for raises, trailing their spouses and kids, telecommuting in flextime, working from the beachfront—no wonder this vision appeals to students. It appeals to me. And yet, it seems somewhat detached from what really happens on the job.
Professionalism from the Bottom Up
What really happens on the job comprises what I see as the bottom-up approach to defining technical communication. Inductive in spirit and traditional in approaches, the bottom-up approach looks at what technical communicators actually do. The bottom-up approach appears in Gerald Savage and Dale Sullivan’s book Writing Professional Lives and in the “My Job” articles in STC’s Intercom magazine. Shockingly frank in their descriptions, these accounts of what we do show writers getting humiliated by more powerful subject-matter experts, abused by ill-tempered bosses, and scrambling for resources as lone writers. The bottom-up definition also shows clever, committed, and creative writers enjoying their work for Home Depot, The Cheesecake Factory, and Walt Disney Studios. The bottom-up definition shows us the great variety of communication work that people do, and through such expansion, allows for the most inclusive, and perhaps most functional, definition of all.
The inclusive definition helps organizations such as STC expand its membership and university programs steal students from other majors. It informs the new definition of “Technical Writer” in the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Labor Department (see www.bls.gov/oco/ocos319.htm), bringing in editors, writers, designers, publications managers, marketing writers, public relations writers, health and environmental writers, human resource specialists, consultants, freelance writers, usability specialists, information architects, indexers, interface developers, and just about every other communication-related work you can think of. All structures, all agencies, all contexts come under scrutiny in this approach, and rightly so. Who can argue with such a clear-eyed, inclusive view of reality?
Scholars using this approach, like Hillary Hart and James Conklin, craft their research methods to the task. They study “experienced communicators” hoping to construct a meaningful model of technical communication “from the inside out” (396). Their study represents the professional perspective of day-to-day technical communicators. No surprise, then, when these researchers determine that limiting models don’t work. Their focus group found that, “The models and descriptors (for example, ‘writer’) that explain the purpose and role of technical communication as having to do mainly with written communication are obviously outdated and inaccurate” (395). It’s not surprising that they unearth metaphors of technical communication as gluing, networking, flowering, webbing, negotiating, facilitating, and, my all time favorite, cleaning a dirty beach. Bursting and emerging, the metaphors of technical communicators contain the following: gods, monsters, negotiators, powerful helpers, wizards, psychotherapists, midwives, shepherds, and mediators. What a cast of characters, and yet this definition complements the previous two approaches by putting a face on the symbolic-analytic worker and grounding the boundaryless in a workplace context.
The three academic definitions of technical communication I’ve featured in this column each see our work as valuable, flexible, and real. The research shows that each definition contributes something quite unique to our understanding of who we are: we follow current trends in knowledge work, we adapt to changes in career patterns, and we accomplish miracles in everyday life. It’s clear that we add value to any organization; that we dance to the challenges of a global, mobile workforce; and that we have overcome the stigma of wordsmiths and grammar cops. So, “Thank you, academics!” for helping us know ourselves, even on the beach.
References
Jablonski, Jeffrey. 2005. Seeing Technical Communication from a Career Perspective: The Implications of Career Theory for Technical Communication Theory, Practice, and Curriculum Design. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 19: 5–41.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. 1996. Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5.3: 245–270.
Hart, Hillary, and James Conklin. 2006. Toward a Meaningful Model for Technical Communication. Technical Communication, 53.4: 395–415.
