1,721,012 research outputs found
Introduction to Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurship
Full text linkIntroduction to a special issue of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication on the rhetoric of entrepreneurship. The author introduces basic definitions and concepts from the field of entrepreneurship, then identifies three issues linking rhetoric to entrepreneurship: rhetoric and identity; rhetoric, culture, and community; and rhetoric and persuasion.IC2 Institut
“I Think You Should Explore the Kinky Market”: How Entrepreneurs Develop Value Propositions as Emergent Objects of Activity Networks
Full text linkFinal published version available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2017.1294606Successful value propositions can be productively analyzed as emergent cocreated objects: co-created at the intersection of multiple activities with varying interests and cycles, and thus incrementally revised to address cross-activity tensions. These objects are also represented across multiple genres; entrepreneurs must keep these different representations coherent during the co-creation process. Drawing on a nine-month qualitative study of 50 firms enrolled in entrepreneurship training, I illustrate this process of co-creating value propositions and keeping them coherent. The author concludes by suggesting necessary theoretical extensions to improve how we study emergent cocreated objects.Writin
Secret sauce and snake oil: Writing monthly reports in a highly contingent environment
Full text linkAbstract- 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, the author draws implications for applying WAGR to knowledge work organizations
Compound mediation in software development: Using genre ecologies to study textual artifacts
No full textTraditionally, technical communicators have seen the texts that they produce-- manuals, references, instructions-- as "bridging " or mediating between a worker and her tool. But field studies of workers indicate that the mediational relationship is much more complicated: Workers often draw simultaneously upon many different textual artifacts to mediate their work, including not only the official genres produced by technical communicators manuals but also ad hoc notes, comments, and improvisational drawings produced by the workers themselves. In this chapter, I theorize these instances of compound mediatiation by drawing on activity theory and genre theory. I describe an analytical framework, that of genre ecologies, that can be used to systematically investigate compound mediation within and across groups of workers. Unlike other analytical frameworks that have been used in studies of technology (such as distributed cognition's functional systems and contextual design's work models), the genre ecology framework highlights the interpretive and cultural-historical aspects of compound mediation that are so important in understanding the use of textual artifacts. The analytical framework is illustrated by an observational stud
Compound Mediation in Software Development: Using Genre Ecologies to Study Textual Artifacts
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