| Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center Contributor(s): Winsor, Dorothy a. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0791457575 ISBN-13: 9780791457573 Publisher: State University of New York Press OUR PRICE: $90.25 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: July 2003 Annotation: Adds to our understanding of the powerful nature of texts and writing. 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Technology & Engineering | Engineering (general) - Language Arts & Disciplines | Communication Studies - Language Arts & Disciplines | Writing - General |
| Dewey: 620.001 |
| LCCN: 2002030481 |
| Series: Suny Series, Studies in Scientific and Technical Communicati |
| Physical Information: 183 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |