Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center

by Dorothy A. Winsor

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.

183 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

About the author

Dorothy A. Winsor is originally from Detroit but now lives near Chicago. For about a dozen years, she taught technical writing at Iowa State University and served as the editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. Before that, she taught for ten years at GMI Engineering & Management Institute (now Kettering). She's won six national awards for outstanding research on the communication practices of engineers. She lives with her husband, who engineers tractors, and has one son, the person who first introduced her to the pleasure of reading fantasy. Her novels include Glass Girl (2023), The Trickster (2021), The Wysman (2020), The Wind Reader (2018), Deep as a Tomb (2016), and Finders Keepers (2015). Published by Inspired Quill.

Reviews

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for Tech/Prof/Sci Comm. As a pedagogical piece, this book is rather weak, since the author doesn't give a whole lot of recommendations. On the other hand, it's useful for observing the social movements and power dynamics of engineering corporations.