By Steve Lemanski | Member
It has been more than 20 years now since Robert Reich, the U.S. Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, wrote a book titled The Work of Nations (1991), in which he proposed a new category of work—symbolic-analytic work—that he characterized as involving the higher-level skills demanded in the global, information-driven economy and that would be more highly rewarded than the other two classes of service work—routine production and in-person service—rooted in legacy economies. It was only a few years later when Johndan Johnson-Eilola of Purdue University wrote a seminal article about the need for the technical communication community to revisit its own orientation toward the value of its work, and he drew heavily upon the framework of the symbolic-analytic worker posited by Reich.
In his article “Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age” (1996), Johnson-Eilola advocates that technical communicators adopt a new symbolic-analytic mindset that would help them shift their role and image within society away from the routine production and in-person service jobs they have inherited from their genesis in the industrial age toward the more valued and meaningful jobs available in the post-industrial age—the world in which we now live—the information age. He built a strong theoretical foundation with which technical communication practitioners, many of whom now possess a variety of technological and communication skill sets, can reinvent themselves and assume a more influential role in their organizations. He showed clearly how Reich’s notions (regarding the higher order competencies of symbolic-analytic workers coming to be increasingly valued by culture and industry) could be applied to the technical communication field:
[S]ymbolic-analytic work mediates between the functional necessities of usability and efficiency while not losing sight of the larger rhetorical and social contexts in which users work and live.
And Johnson-Eilola made some powerful claims on behalf of this new framework of value:
By rearticulating technical communication as symbolic-analytic work, we might use our professional diversity and flexibility to empower ourselves and technology users.
However, now—almost two decades later—we still hear and read some of the field’s authors (such as Daniel Maddux and the author team of Jack Molisani and Scott Abel) reiterating such facts as: 1) there is a lack of respect being accorded tech comm practitioners, as professionals; and 2) there are good reasons for that. The controversy about the technical communicator’s true value and role in the organization persists, and, it would seem, there is still a large segment of the profession that remains hesitant to move beyond the scribe or translator role (equating to Reich’s routine production or in-service worker). They seem to be happy with tried-and-true job titles and position descriptions, otherwise, why would prominent voices in the community still decry what they see as a pedestrian attitude taken by many in the field toward their role in the organization?
Search Continues for Lasting Professional Value
Molisani and Abel, little more than a year ago, voiced the clarion call to “stop calling yourself a ‘technical writer’!” By doing so, they bluntly echo Johnson-Eilola’s call from two decades ago for technical communicators to become symbolic-analytic in their professional orientation, thereby expanding their sphere of influence. They also voice a concern that the advancing digital age is fast marginalizing the historic role of the technical communicator as a writer-editor of documentation, and they suggest too many practitioners are choosing to ignore the reality of “the gradual, imminent, frightening changes that are doing the most damage to our place in industry: the commoditization of technical writing.” These authors advise the current generation of technical communicators how to determine where they stand and where their potential lies as professionals by doing a SWOT analysis (i.e., an honest evaluation of their professional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). In an effort to help practitioners frame their skills sets in a context that is relatable to other knowledge workers (and their hiring managers) in most present-day industries, Molisani and Abel catalog the skills of the content management lifecycle as well as those of the product development lifecycle, and explain how most or all of these skill sets are easily rearticulated as technical communication competencies, when one takes a broad view of the contributions of tech comm practitioners in the information age.
However, the answer to the professional dilemma facing today’s technical communicators doesn’t necessarily involve a wholesale career change. They may not be facing the cut-and-dry choice between (a) continuing to do what many of them enjoy most—writing and editing high-quality, compelling text of a technical nature, or (b) stopping their writing and starting to do something more sexy like Web design or software development. Bill Hart-Davidson has pointed out that the problem isn’t that good writing isn’t valued anymore; it’s just the opposite. The advancing digital age, with the ubiquitousness of the Internet, mobile technologies, and multimedia, has transformed the economy to such an extent that now information is as much the product of many industry segments as anything else. And that has turned everybody in the organization into a writer. He explains that the technical communicator’s best response to that situation is not to devalue her advanced writing skill (or buy into some managers’ attempts to automate or eliminate the need for it), but to promote it as a “strategic activity for a whole enterprise” and a “critical means to just about every organizational end.”
It probably hasn’t escaped the attention of many of today’s technical communicators that good writing in the workplace (or on the Web) is as scarce, maybe even scarcer, now that there are writers galore in cubicle space and cyberspace. Ken Coates, Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), believes that is the case. In a 2011 presentation he gave to an audience of local STC chapter members on the subject of technical communication’s future in the digital age, he remarked: “The effects of the Internet on worldwide communication have been hard to predict, but several decades after its inception, we’ve observed a deleterious effect on reading and writing.” To prove his point, he cited just a few of these observations concerning the quality of online communication: superficial treatments of subjects, low expectations on the part of readers (users), and a lack of publishing rigor resulting in bad grammar and content that is typically geared to no more than a fifth-grade reading level.
So is “To write or not to write (or edit)?” really the vital career question today’s technical communicators need to face? And, although there are certainly more than a few technical communicators who struggle to keep current with the latest technology, the most popular media, and the newest software tools proliferating at an ever accelerating rate, is the burning question whether or not they should keep acquiring new technical skills in order to have a sustainable career in the digital age? Hasn’t that handwriting been on the wall for a long time now? However, the more powerful question that may be the strategic one for practitioners who are still trying to navigate the changes in the field and what it all means for them is: What are some specific ways the symbolic-analytic orientation to work is playing out for technical communicators? Could it be that this work concept, which has been difficult for practitioners to get their arms around, is now coming into clearer focus?
The purpose of the literature review that follows, therefore, is to examine some non-scientifically random examples of purportedly valuable roles for today’s technical communicators—examples put forth by researchers since those nascent years of the Internet, in the mid-1990s, when Johnson-Eilola dissected that labor classification Reich proposed and that has been touted often in the literature ever since. Could these suggested roles be some of those that tech comm practitioners can now take on in an effort to reinvent themselves as symbolic analytic workers and thereby increase their relevance?
Where Value Is Located in the Post-Industrial Age—Symbolic-Analytic Work
Johnson-Eilola drew upon Reich’s descriptions of symbolic analytic work and the four skills he identified as crucial components to this type of work in developing what serves as a heuristic for locating this work role and the value it delivers in the domain of technical communication. Reich delineated the four skills inherent to symbolic-analytic work as collaboration, experimentation, abstraction, and system thinking. Johnson-Eilola took these four skills and characterized them as four indicators of where symbolic-analytic work is being (or could be) performed by technical communicators in the workplace.
Johnson-Eilola’s heuristic for identifying technical communicators as symbolic-analytic workers (based on Reich): Does the work performed involve the use of one or more of these four competencies?
- Collaboration
- Experimentation
- Abstraction
- System Thinking (rhetorical & social context)
Heuristic for Identifying Technical Communicators as Symbolic-Analytic Workers
- Collaboration—technical communicators cross complex disciplinary domains to work with other specialists as peers, preventing their teams from subordinating communication to technological values
- Experimentation—technical communicators form and test hypotheses about how information is processed through technology, orienting this activity toward understanding broader communication and learning processes rather than merely functional, decontextualized uses of technology
- Abstraction—technical communicators identify patterns, relationships, and hierarchies in large masses of information with an eye to structuring that information for specific types of users in known contexts
- System Thinking (rhetorical & social context)—technical communicators work above discrete problem-solving approaches to technology use to recognize broad, conceptual, even sociopolitical issues that drive current practices and reveal opportunities for constructive change
Let’s take a look at a few distinct roles that researchers—just in the past decade—have identified for information-age technical communicators since Johnson-Eilola’s groundbreaking repurposing of Reich’s symbolic-analytic work concept, and let’s see if these roles indeed map to the four-part heuristic they established for the highest valued work of the post-industrial age.
Arbiter of Complexity in Product Development (2001)
Although Greg Wilson’s (New Mexico State University) suggestion for an important role for technical communicators in the postmodern (aka post-industrial) world is offered on a more abstract level than that done by most of the other researchers we will sample, he does draw heavily upon the Reich symbolic-analytic paradigm, and he references some real-world scenarios. The term arbiters of complexity in product development is ours for the role he articulates technical communicators seeking to add value in the dizzying, fast-paced technological milieu of the twenty-first century. Wilson’s article was actually aimed at addressing the need for technical communication pedagogy to better help tech comm students acclimate to the demands of the new information economy by adopting Reich’s paradigm of work value, but his recommendations are equally applicable to practitioners—the ones whom he would like to see better prepared by their education. The role we see Wilson ascribing to what potentially could be a large segment of future technical communicators comes out of two particular passages from his article. In the first one he insisted technical communicators (presumably as part of a development team) need to…
…articulate themselves as invaluable to the function of the company, explaining that the company’s product is information, in that today the product is secondary to how people understand the product.
And in the second one he indicated that the desired outcome for technical communicators who exert that kind of influence in their organizations is to start…
…[changing the] corporate culture, elevating the role of the technical communicator in the product development process and reducing their company’s tendency to tack more and more complexity onto products as the products [mature].
The image of the post-industrial technical communicator and the work she does that Wilson painted could be assumed to encompass all of the symbolic-analytic traits, but collaboration and system thinking (as there is a strong user empathy component in the role described above) stand out the most.
Knowledge Creator (2002)
Michael Hughes (an instructional technology consultant) examined what actually takes place when technical communicators intervene and intercede for both producers and users of technology—they don’t simply transfer information, they create (new) knowledge, which is viewed by both sides as an asset they didn’t have before. The knowledge creator role Hughes detailed is built on some of the most rich and meaningful real-world scenarios given in the literature we are examining. It fits every one of the four components of Johnson-Eilola’s heuristic for symbolic-analytic technical communicators. Here are some representative excerpts from Hughes’s article to demonstrate:
- Knowledge creators must be collaborators so they can “help design teams arrive at consensus about what the product is or does … they are facilitating knowledge creation at the group level (or at a minimum, escalating individual knowledge to the group knowledge level).”
- Knowledge creators as experimenters “make tacit knowledge explicit … by using the product to understand how it works—a technique called reverse engineering … entails interacting with the various screen elements and noting what actions result.”
- Knowledge creators as abstract thinkers make one very important contribution to the organization—“they help experts make their tacit knowledge explicit … only then can that knowledge be codified into artifacts such as documents and made available to others.”
- Knowledge creators are system thinkers when they “think beyond the concept of documentation and think in terms of knowledge management systems … ways to distribute that knowledge to all the stakeholders—for example, marketing, operations, engineering, and so forth.”
Finally, when Hughes summarized his new value proposition for technical communicators and answered the question—“What do technical communicators do?”—by offering his own definition of that professional label, he quite aptly rearticulated the role Johnson-Eilola (and Reich) envisioned in the symbolic-analytic worker:
Technical communicators negotiate meaning within development communities and between those communities and user contexts, and they capture the resulting consensus as knowledge assets.
Textual Coordinator (2005)
As technical communicators, are we all part of a trade or a guild, if you will? Or are we all professionals? That debate has taken many forms. The technical communication field has for years debated the relative importance of a practitioner possessing technical skills—that is, his experience with using information technology tools for producing communication products. On the heels of that discussion, a controversy has prevailed regarding the ramifications to the professionalization of the field should we accede to the importance of those tools. It seems to be a “catch 22” situation. With that debate as a backdrop, one author during the past decade, Shaun Slattery (at DePaul University in Chicago), stated the rather surprising premise that a practitioner’s skillful use of technology tools is indispensable (in the context of the post-industrial age) to his “literate activity of technical communication” and “directly impacts his ability to perform” the totality of his role. He therefore seemed to propose a causal link between skill with information technology tools, which on the surface look like those possessed by Reich’s routine production service worker, and the realization of one’s potential as a symbolic-analytic professional.
Make no mistake; Slattery appeared to appreciate the intent of Reich’s paradigm of the symbolic-analytic worker. He affirmed the importance of “higher-order competencies” which he describes generally as “cognitive skills or areas of knowledge needed to do technical communication.” But he maintained there is an undeniable need for a technical communicator to wield his “technological repertoire”—i.e., the whole spectrum of tools required for the textual coordination role (e.g., finding, retrieving, staging, producing, modifying, sharing, disseminating information)—if he is to “control the textual environment of symbolic-analytic work.”
What Slattery proposed in order for the technical communicator to deliver symbolic-analytic value from his work could be seen as a tall order. His textual coordinator role may prove to be a model for a technical communicator with a more technical, engineering bent to become a true symbolic-analytic contributor, but only if that practitioner doesn’t overlook the collaboration piece of that role, which Slattery was careful to include, but which is not known to be the strong suit of engineers:
Sharing texts … a critical part of … [the] collaborative writing process … developers [are] usually only comfortable using a particular method of feedback to which … writers would have to adapt … [requires] careful coordination of technological processes with awareness of a delicate social situation.
Software Development Evangelist (2011)
Among the authors whose research into technical communicators’ roles we’ve examined, Jennifer Maher (University of Maryland–Baltimore County) took perhaps the broadest view possible of the practitioner’s potential value add as a symbolic-analytic professional. She asserted that software documentation, like the code it describes, is “ideologically encoded,” and that technical communicators by giving “[a]ttention to the evangelisms of software” (whether they are furthering the ideology of hegemony, embedded in U.S.–originated, corporatized software or the ideology of resistance, embedded in the free, open-source software—i.e., the competing ideologies of domination versus freedom) can realize their role as powerful agents for furthering such competing ideologies. She contended that technical communicators as evangelists do, in fact, achieve the status they have long sought. She saw technical communication practitioners working in software development as being inseparably tied to larger societal and political forces whether they are fully aware of these rhetorical underpinnings or not. She believed these tech comm practitioners really typify Reich’s thesis about the symbolic-analytic worker (whether for good or for ill, depending on one’s ideological position), and she quotes these words of Reich to prove it:
[the symbolic-analytic worker] mediates the functional necessities of usability and efficiency while not losing sight of the larger rhetorical and social contexts in which users work and live.
Maher definitely proposed what could be either an emerging role for technical communicators, or strangely enough, a significant role that may have been played out already by some practitioners who did not realize they were performing it. It is a role that can be seen as significant enough in its effects to surely require the use of all four components of Johnson-Eilola’s heuristic for symbolic-analytic role. Maher’s evangelist role, if knowingly embraced, will likely move one out of the limiting role of scribe, translator, or wordsmith, and will develop “a rhetorical literacy as praxis through which they attend to the functional and ideological complexities of the much-needed documentation that they create.” But will it be a role that very many technical communicators will be comfortable with?
User Advocate (2012)
The team of Yvonne Cleary (University of Limerick, Ireland) and Madelyn Flammia (University of Central Florida) recently articulated a role for today’s technical communicators—the user advocate—that may be the most altruistic of all of the proposed roles we have looked at. They contended that digital technology, especially the Internet, has created a reliance on Web applications that has in turn led to a “self-service world,” with which many users struggle—especially discrete, often times disenfranchised communities of users such as older persons, the disabled, and non-native speakers of English. They have shown how the accessibility issue has risen in importance over the last decade, but how it is still in its nascent stage as a discipline because we truly do not know how accessible (or not) Web-based information is to these less privileged classes of users. In the face of the facts that “developing web applications for disenfranchised user groups presents many complex challenges,” and that currently many “barriers exist that prevent large segments of the population from accessing services and information online,” the role of user advocate that Cleary and Flammia suggested seems to us a highly symbolic-analytic one for the following reasons:
- it would involve collaboration on the part of practitioners between social service agencies (non-governmental and government alike), software firms, training firms, and computer manufacturers, and many more entities
- experimentation would be required not only “in designing online content, but in providing access routes to that content for all users” through studies of what social and cultural constraints exist that prevent populations from accessing or comprehending certain content and genres of information
- abstract thinking is definitely required for synthesizing all of the research into targeted re-design plans for more widespread accessibility
- system thinking, evidenced by a sensitivity to how rhetorical and social strategies can be used to bring makers of technology and formerly little-known user groups together to solve these problems, is equally inherent to this role
Twenty Years Later—Are We There Yet?
In this article, we’ve explored five examples of new roles for technical communicators offered in just the past decade and almost twenty years after Johnson-Eilola (building on the economic and work value theories of Reich) proposed the symbolic-analytic model of work as the surest route to status and job satisfaction for practitioners, and one that would be based on work that is more highly esteemed in the post-industrial age. It seems plausible after examining them, that most, if not all, of the roles suggested by these authors and researchers in the field deliver value to organizations correlating to at least one and usually several of the components of the heuristic Johnson-Eilola established for assessing symbolic-analytic value by technical communicators. Therefore, technical communicators still struggling with their role and potential value to their organizations would do well to study these and other newly articulated roles emerging in the digital age and see where their own portfolios of work and experience stand in relation to them. They may find that either less reengineering of their skills is needed to perform these roles than they might have previously thought; or they may be newly inspired to acquire some new technical or higher level competencies, having, now, a more clearly defined, role-based career plan in mind.
STEVE LEMANSKI, a member of STC’s Washington, DC–Metro Baltimore Chapter and a professional communicator in information technology for 20 years, enjoys writing/editing a variety of genres. His BA in communication is from University of Colorado, Boulder; and he is currently pursuing an MS in English/technical writing from Utah State University.
