Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center (Suny Series, Studies in Scientific and Technical Communications) - Softcover

Winsor, Dorothy A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791457583 ISBN 13: 9780791457580

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2003

Synopsis

Adds to our understanding of the powerful nature of texts and writing.

Winner of the 2004 Distinguished Publication on Business Communication presented by the Association of Business Communication

Writing Power examines the way that texts, knowledge, and hierarchy generate and support one another within a for-profit corporation. By encouraging us to see texts and writing as powerful operators in the corporate world, this book presents a case study focused on how one engineering organization uses texts to create and maintain its knowledge and power structure. Based on over five years of observations, the book describes the co-generation of power/knowledge/text from several points of view, including that of managers, engineers, interns, and blue-collar workers. These groups of people use texts to build knowledge within their own areas and establish control over their work when it is passed along to the other groups. Employing Bourdieu's notion that people possess different kinds of "capital" that can be converted to one another under the right circumstances, the book demonstrates that text is one of the major ways that this conversion of capital takes place, and is thus one of the major ways that power and knowledge are generated and accumulated.

About this title

About the Author

Dorothy A. Winsor is Professor of English at Iowa State University. She is the author of Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791457583
• ISBN 13: 9780791457580
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 186