The strategic technical communicator: A critical action inquiry of information architecture (Pierre Bourdieu).

摘要

A review of technical communication literature indicates, despite major advancements, many technical communication practitioners remain concerned the field is not receiving the recognition it deserves. Rhetorical scholars and technical communication teachers have been concerned about technical communicators' service role to industry interests that do not value practitioners' knowledge or rhetorical perspectives. Scholars have argued that critical theories provide essential disciplinary frameworks for practitioners and scholars because they lead to social action that can emancipate concerned practitioners from the dominant (and dominating) social structure.; Recently, some professionals and scholars have rejected rhetorical theory as the central framework and focused instead on how the “value added” by technical communicators and how their ability to be “strategic” within an industry or market segment heightens the perception of their work. This study examines why many practitioners believe learning to be “strategic” in business would raise the status of the field. It provides a case study of how a technical communicator's knowledge can be revalued through the adoption of a strategic posture, employing a rhetorical methodology to investigate the discursive mechanisms for raising the field's “status” within the marketplace. The terms “strategic” and “status” are examined and explained using Pierre Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital.; The site of my investigation was a Minneapolis, Minnesota, design firm where I worked, learned, and observed strategic thinking for three years while pursuing a doctorate of philosophy in Rhetoric, Scientific, and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota. In an effort to understand the issues surrounding strategic thinking, I used Pierre Bourdieu's philosophy of action to develop a rhetorical theory of how cultural capital is converted into economic capital in industry, specifically how technical communicators were able to raise their status within an organization. My method, critical action inquiry, not only provided a framework for investigating the discursive mechanisms whereby a field's status is raised but also acting upon my findings by affecting the investigation site. Three outcomes emerge from this study: (1) An illustration of how technical communication can function as a strategic field within an organization; (2) A theory of discursive practice that explains how a service field within a business organization can raise its status; (3) An extension to Bourdieu's work on fields, focusing primarily on cultural capital conversion in what he refers to as the economic fields and providing evidence that Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, although useful, requires revision.