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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies
A Rhetoric Of Boundaries: Living And Working Along A Technical/Non-Technical Split , David Paul Clark
A Rhetoric Of Boundaries: Living And Working Along A Technical/Non-Technical Split , David Paul Clark
Retrospective Theses and Dissertations
Historians and social scientists have long studied the construction and operation of conventional categories like "nature/culture." In this dissertation, I take a rhetorical approach to the study of a conventional category I refer to as the "technical/non-technical split," the arbitrary but powerful articulation of what is and is not "technical" that structures contemporary organizations. To accomplish this study, I conducted an ethnographic study of the ways that the organizational and individual belief in the separation of "technical" from "non-technical" structured daily work at an Internet startup company. I analyze the formation of the technical/non-technical structure, a formation ...
Communication In A Rhetorical Corporation: An Ethnographic Study Of Change From Hierarchy To Self-Managed Teams , Jane M. Perkins
Communication In A Rhetorical Corporation: An Ethnographic Study Of Change From Hierarchy To Self-Managed Teams , Jane M. Perkins
Retrospective Theses and Dissertations
Based on three years of fieldwork in a "spin-off" software development company, this dissertation describes and discusses the impact on communication of current corporate restructuring. The ethnographic study focuses on the corporation's attempts to move from a hierarchical organizational structure to team-based management and on the communicative interactions that played a critical part in this change and were altered as a result. Motivated by disintegrating boundaries between the corporation, its coustomers, and its suppliers; by the breakdown of internal functional divisions into project teams; and by the altered power relationships between management and "knowledge workers," the corporation's employees ...