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Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center
Contributor(s): Winsor, Dorothy a. (Author)
ISBN: 0791457583     ISBN-13: 9780791457580
Publisher: State University of New York Press
OUR PRICE:   $32.25  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: July 2003
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Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
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: 0.41" H x 6.4" W x 8.94" (0.55 lbs) 183 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
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.