Learning to Do Knowledge Work in Systems of Distributed Cognition    

Within work sites that engage in knowledge work, newcomers have particular difficulty acquiring knowledge because knowledge keeps changing. Newcomers have to assimilate currently accepted knowledge while remaining open to learning and even generating new knowledge. Such acquisition and generation of communal knowledge are examples of distributed cognition. In workplaces engaging in knowledge work (where knowledge is the primary product), distributed cognition aims at a less stable goal than the one that Hutchins describes for ship navigation. A study of six summer interns in an engineering development center shows that, for them and their more experienced colleagues, learning did not precede activity but rather was the means by which they remained attuned to activity and able to function. Cognition was distributed not only among people but also among people and their tools. Communication tools were particularly important because communication was the means by which the system functioned as a unified whole.

Winsor, Dorothy A. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2001). Articles>Workplace>Knowledge Management

Recommended Texts for Research Methods Classes

A list of recommended texts for use in a research methods class, accompanied by brief reviews. The list was generated in a discussion on attw-l in February 2000.

Winsor, Dorothy A. Iowa State University. Resources>Bibliographies>Methods

Using Writing to Negotiate Knowledge and Power

In Language and Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates how the language practices of institutions can generate symbolic violence and relations of power. At the same time, these language practices make existing power relationships seem natural and thus hide the symbolic violence from both more and less powerful inhabitants of these sites. Research has only recently begun to examine critically these practices as they function in corporate America. This talk will examine textual practices within a large manufacturer of agricultural equipment to show how they require subordinates to document their work in forms determined by management. Such documentation represents work in terms acceptable to managers and prevents subordinates from developing alternative understandings of the possibilities of their labor.

Winsor, Dorothy A. University of Illinois (2001). Presentations>Writing>Streaming>Video

What Counts as Writing? An Argument From Engineers' Practice  

My argument attempts to add to the kinds of documents seen as worth studying in the discipline loosely known as English. Over the last twenty years, we have moved from thinking that only literature is worth studying to including student writing, business writing, technical writing, and so on as part of our field of study. I think we have to extend our attention to documents which are even less literature-like. Calling these documents 'writing' has consequences for our understanding of both writing and the various fields in which it occurs. As Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford point out, 'We name in order to know, but that naming inevitably limits our knowing. . . . Definitions of writing, of course, reflect a set of ideological assumptions that we ignore only at our peril' (15). The ideological assumptions we ignore here have to do with how knowledge is created and how much control individuals have over their own knowing. Ideology leads both us and engineers to deny that writing has occurred in much engineering practice.

Winsor, Dorothy A. JAC (1992). Articles>Rhetoric>Engineering