Clay Spinuzzi

Working Alone Together: Coworking as Emergent Collaborative Activity

Mobile professionals can choose to work in offices, executive suites, home offices, or other spaces. But some have instead chosen to work at coworking spaces: open-plan office environments in which they work alongside other unaffiliated professionals for a fee of approximately

Guest Editor's Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work

250 a month. But what service are they actually purchasing with that monthly fee? How do they describe that service? From an activity theory perspective, what are its object, outcome, and actors? This article reports on a 20-month study that answers such questions.

Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies

In this introduction, I review the topic of the special issue, distributed work: coordinative, polycontextual, cross-disciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts that characterize such work. After reviewing the literature on distributed work, I introduce the articles in this special issue.

Secret Sauce and Snake Oil: Writing Monthly Reports in a Highly Contingent Environment:

Genre theorists agree that genres work together in assemblages. But what is the nature of these assemblages? In this paper I describe four frameworks that have been used to describe assemblages of genres: genre sets, genre systems, genre repertoires, and genre ecologies. At first glance, they seem to be interchangeable, but there are definite and sometimes quite deep differences among them. I compare and contrast these frameworks and suggest when each might be most useful.

Losing by Expanding: Corralling the Runaway Object

At a search marketing company, each search engine optimization (SEO) specialist writes up to 10 to 12 complex 20-page monthly reports in the first ten business days of each month. These SEO specialists do not consider themselves to be writers, yet they generate these structurally and rhetorically complex reports as a matter of course, while negotiating a constantly changing landscape of a contingent, rapidly changing business sector. Under these conditions, how did the SEO specialists manage to write these reports so quickly and so well? What is the standing set of transformations that they enact in order to develop and produce these reports? And given the multiple contingencies, rapid changes, and high individual discretion at this organization—seemingly a recipe for discohesive practices—how did they maintain and develop this standing set of transformations in order to turn out consistent reports? In this article, I draw on writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) to examine how Semoptco’s SEO specialists produced monthly reports, specifically in terms of their constant networking, audience analysis, and ethos building. Finally, I draw implications for applying WAGR to knowledge work organizations.

Visualizing writing activity as knowledge work: challenges & opportunities

Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.

Starter ecologies: Introduction to the special issue on social software

Digital environments enable distributed work. Though they pose challenges for research, they also provide affordances for addressing these difficulties including opportunities to capture and visualize writing activity in significant detail. This paper surveys sources of visualizations of writing processes and practices, focusing on attempts to deal with writing as a distributed activity. We then ask: what qualities of visualizations seem desirable and help to render writing visible as knowledge work for the purpose of providing mediational support to writers

Toward Integrating Our Research Scope A Sociocultural Field Methodology

In 2003, I wrote about a widely dispersed community of users who struggled with a specialty database of traffic accidents called PC-ALAS (Personal Computer Accident Location and Analysis System), detailing the ways that they made sense of the database. At the end of the study, I described what I thought was a way-out solution: an online space that functioned as a starter ecology for users to pose questions, answer each other’s questions, rate each other’s answers, deliberate on and submit requests for features, and even take part in light end-user programming. I called the fictional system Open-ALAS (Open Accident Location and Analysis System) to emphasize the fact that it was an open system, and I cautiously characterized it as utopian. After 5 years, this chapter on Open-ALAS seems embarrassingly naive—not because I was wrong, but because I was right enough that today the solution seems trivial. Someone could put together OpenALAS in a few hours on Ning, via a Facebook group, or via a FriendFeed room. The workers described in that chapter could easily pick dozens of channels for sharing their expertise. Such open systems are now commonplace and have taken on far more variety than what I envisioned in 2003. Here is a brief tour of that variety. Instructional videos are now on YouTube. Software documentation is on Scribd and Wikipedia, and actual-use cases for every imaginable configuration and instance of consumer software are everywhere, written by actual users and accessible via Google searches. Collaborative projects are on Basecamp, Wrike, and dozens of other Webbased project management systems. Web-based collaborative writing software is available for free from companies such as Google, Zoho, and Adobe. When you put a networked computer with a browser on every worker’s desk, suddenly it becomes feasible—easy, cheap—to use shared online collaborative spaces to perform all sorts of knowledge work, including professional communication. This social software drops the costs, increases the scale, and quickens the pace of collaborative work—for good or ill (Benkler, 2006, p. 6). But more changes are afoot, partially because social software has become so commonplace. One is that organizations themselves are changing. Organizational boundaries are blurring (Castells, 1996; Malone, 2004). Journal of Business and Technical Communication Volume 23 Number 3 July 2009 251-262 # 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/1050651909333141 http://jbt.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Lost in the Translation: Shifting Claims in the Migration of a Research Technique

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

Software development as mediated activity: applying three analytical frameworks for studying compound mediation

Research techniques are sometimes seen as the atoms or essential building blocks of research projects: invariant, inviolable steps that are applied the same way, no matter what the socioeconomic characteristics of the environments in which they are deployed. That is, they are often seen as arhetorical, and rhetorical choice and agency play a role only in how they are arranged and implemented. In this article, I draw on the notion of translation to provide an alternate account, one that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research techniques without overdetermining the influence of the environments in which they developed. To illustrate, I examine how one research technique—prototyping—has been translated to fit four different socioeconomic environments, undergoing significant changes in claims and implementation while maintaining enough coherence to be seen as a unitary technique. Finally, I argue that the notion of translation provides us with an account that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research and our agency as researchers while still acknowledging how techniques constrain our work.