Preparing for the Future by Looking to the Past

By T. Kenny Fountain | Member – and
By Bernadette Longo | Senior Member

Technical communicators spend a great deal of time and energy preparing for the future. We learn the latest technologies, practice today’s in-demand skills, and prepare ourselves for workplaces of the future. These are important steps for keeping our skills sharp and our knowledge current. But when we consider that today’s in-demand skills have been profoundly shaped by yesterday’s decisions and outcomes, we can look to the past to help us prepare for the present and future. To do this, we must look to our file cabinets, both the electronic ones on our computers and the physical ones filled with the documents of yesterday. With a greater knowledge of the past, we can better recognize how our decisions as technical communicators inevitably ordered past and present events into the workplace culture we experience today. Also, by gaining a historical perspective, we can forecast the future actions likely to succeed and the ones most likely to fail.

In The Order of Things, philosopher Michel Foucault describes history as a complex process of creating relationships, which involves both making systems of order as well as recognizing those ordered processes. Though we might not always realize it, we are actually the ones who create the definitions and systems of classification that seem so inevitable to us.

Figure 1. Levels of taxonomic classification for the Grizzly Bear illustrate how we use language to order life.

Think, for example, of how you save files to your computer. Think of all the decisions you make about which documents go in which folder, the names of those folders, the way those folders are stored, and even the number of folders to use. All of these decisions represent a process of ordering, of creating categories and finding what seems to be an intuitive system (at least to you). In the work we do to create order, we often fail to acknowledge the historical and cultural influences that shape our decisions about categories and what things fit together—the forces that have made our world what it is today.

Many historians of technical communication describe our profession as creating systems of order by communicating scientific and technical knowledge. In this sense, technical communication works hand-in-hand with science and technology to determine what knowledge is valuable and what is not. Our documents, whether print or online, communicate scientific and technological ideas and processes to general publics and expert audiences. Consider for a moment all the reports, documentation, and instructions involved in making and marketing the first personal computer, the first application software, even the first mobile phone. Technical communicators played a crucial part in all of these events, creating the documents that shaped these amazing technologies.

Because technical documents give voice to valuable knowledge, technical communicators play a powerful role in shaping scientific and technical knowledge economies. Bernadette Longo’s cultural history, Spurious Coin, focuses on the ways this powerful role goes unnoticed when technical communicators do our jobs well. For example, technical communicators, scientists, and engineers have mistaken technical documents for uncomplicated texts used only to contain and transport technical knowledge. As a result, they have often failed to appreciate the way we craft technical documents to shape and influence knowledge and practice.

Technical communicators, regardless of the workplace setting, create and use documents to order knowledge, shape information, communicate practices, and explain objects that are deemed valuable to a particular workplace. As such, technical communication does not simply influence workplace practices, it actively develops those practices by influencing organizational culture. An organization’s culture, after all, is a result of its members’ previous decisions and actions, as well as the values and knowledge its members have developed through years of day-to-day activities. Some of these values and traditions stem from successful past decisions; others stem from unsuccessful decisions that provide cautionary tales of action to avoid. These values and traditions become part of a corporation’s culture that is explicitly taught to new hires and implicitly learned through observation and participation—through trial and error. Whether as good examples to emulate or bad decisions to avoid, an organization’s history lives on in its current culture and is communicated through its policies, its stories, and, of course, its documents.

But how exactly do we learn to “fit into” our workplace? How do we become full-fledged members of an organization to the extent that it shapes our thinking and actions? And how are the historical practices of that workplace still being played out in the present? For decades, these questions have fascinated researchers in management and technical communication. One focus of this work has been the study of how people learn an organization’s culture in order to know what is acceptable or unacceptable in that culture. After all, one way of doing a job well is to know how things are done in that workplace, especially how other current and past workers have handled similar tasks. Often, we seem to absorb this knowledge simply by being exposed to the organization’s practices. For example, after working a job for some time, we seem to know the right and wrong ways to do things in that setting, and we seem to know this without having to think about it. This is in part because knowledge of acceptable and unacceptable practices comes to us often through indirect processes of acculturation. Like an anthropologist studying another culture, we become so immersed in the practices and knowledge of our workplace that soon we are shaped by those practices and that knowledge before we even realize it. According to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice, these ways of seeing and doing become almost second nature to us because we have participated in them for so long.

Yet a technical communicator’s workplace knowledge is never complete; our ways of seeing and ways of knowing inevitably change as new skills, technologies, and practices develop. No doubt, many of us have experienced this. We find ourselves working at the same job for a while, and we feel comfortable with our ability to master the routines and tasks we face each day. Then, sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly, situations arise in which the right or acceptable course of action is unclear. Policies and practices change, and technologies advance at what seems like an impossible rate. As we move into new positions, we find new cultures to learn. And as new information, technologies, or research changes how a job is done, sometimes an organization’s culture changes as well. How then do we learn to adapt to a constantly changing workplace? One way to prepare is to remember and acknowledge the powerful role that past technical documents have played in shaping an organization’s current practices and culture.

Our socialization into an organization’s culture, its ways of seeing and doing, is made possible largely through the existing documents and past and present practices of that workplace. This specific culture is developed from and communicated through not only the official policies of a company, stating what workers should and should not do, but also through past reports, proposals, and documentation, even through mundane emails that have influenced important decisions and outcomes. These technical documents, of yesterday and today, influence a technical communicator’s decisions and actions. As such, these documents inevitably shape the culture of that setting. An organization’s culture, then, is constructed and communicated through various media, including documents, verbal stories, and the design of physical spaces. By understanding the influence of the past on the present, we can appreciate the role workplace documents play in socializing people on the job and standardizing their actions.

This socialization and standardization often occurs because technical communicators look to prior documents for examples of how to complete current and future tasks. In ways both large and small, we tend to emulate past documents as we make decisions about how to craft future messages. This use of past documents translates existing organizational culture into current documents and practices. A report written today will have similar format and content structure as earlier reports, even though today that document might be created and read as a PDF file on a screen. Documents of a genre embody conventional elements of format and style that help readers anticipate both the kinds of information a document will contain as well as its location. For example, we expect to see information about who is sending a message and who is receiving it at the beginning of a “memo,” even though today our memos are primarily delivered as email. In a concrete way, historical knowledge and judgments are reflected in a document’s visual and verbal conventions, which serve to address the social needs and relationships of those involved in that communication. In this sense, technical communicators must know what came before and use that information to either recreate the past or perform different actions in response to new information and circumstances.

Technical communication is a process of ordering knowledge, of socializing communicators into certain cultures of writing, of creating documents that reveal the past and shape the future. Because all forms of communication are influenced by their contexts and circumstances, technical communication practices are embedded in historical and cultural processes that influence what counts as technical communication, as well as the consequences of that communication. These processes of ordering often take the form of workplace culture and organizational history, both of which continue to influence the contemporary workplace. Through this continued influence of the past on the present, technical communication practices and documents play a socializing role. These practices and documents encourage certain actions and values while discouraging or complicating others. The traces of history direct human action and offer a window into that action.

Being successful as a communicator—a producer of meaning—relies on first being successfully socialized into a workplace culture. It requires understanding what is currently acceptable and unacceptable based on historical knowledge. It requires exercising good judgment regarding what needs to be changed and how to effect that change within the organization’s current culture. And it requires adapting to the changing technologies and economies all around us. One important way to gain this knowledge and prepare for both the present and the future is to look to the actions and documents of the past. After all, the past is alive in the workplace culture of the present, shaping the actions and decisions of tomorrow. γi

T. Kenny Fountain (tkenny.fountain@case.edu) PhD, University of Minnesota, is an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Bernadette Longo (blongo@njit.edu) PhD, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an associate professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Further Reading