Research problem: In Ireland, technical communication has developed as an academic and occupational field since the late 20th century. Research on the field in Ireland is limited. Research questions: (1) To what extent do technical communicators in Ireland operate as a community of practice? (2) What steps are Irish technical communicators taking toward professionalization? Literature review: This study uses a theoretical framework that combines symbolic interactionism and communities of practice theories. While traditional professionalization theory uses a structural functionalist approach to the study of occupations, characterizing disciplines as professions depending on whether they meet certain traits (including autonomy, market closure, license to practice, and service orientation), symbolic interactionism prioritizes interactions among individuals. In this sense, it overlaps with the concerns of communities of practice. A community of practice involves a group of people working together, and creating meaning through their interactions. Studying an occupation through this lens foregrounds individual and community identity, and how that is formed and informed by work. Methodology: Mixed methods-a survey, focus groups, and interviews-were used to explore Irish technical communicators' perceptions of aspects of their field: practice, education, value and status, and professional and community structures. Results: The findings indicate that Irish technical communicators exhibit traits of communities of practice (such as joint enterprise and shared repertoires). They also identify with their job title and practice. A key finding is that some Irish technical communicators have a keen appetite for community involvement. This enthusiasm notwithstanding, barriers to professionalization include low visibility of the role in Ireland, limited evidence of professionalizing activity, and the potential for career stagnation.

Research problem: This study investigates the factors influencing students' intentions to use emergency notification services to receive news about campus emergencies through short-message systems (SMS) and social network sites (SNS). Research questions: (1) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SMS to receive emergency notifications? (2) What are the critical factors that influence students' intention to use SNS to receive emergency notifications? Literature review: By adapting Media Richness theory and prior research on emergency notifications, we propose that perceived media richness, perceived trust in information, perceived risk, perceived benefit, and perceived social influence impact the intention to use SMS and SNS to receive emergency notifications. Methodology: We conducted a quantitative, survey-based study that tested our model in five different scenarios, using logistic regression to test the research hypotheses with 574 students of a large research university in the northeastern US. Results and discussion: Results suggest that students' intention to use SNS is impacted by media richness, perceived benefit, and social influence, while students' intention to use SMS is influenced by trust and perceived benefit. Implications to emergency managers suggest how to more effectively manage and market the service through both channels. The results also suggest using SNS as an additional means of providing emergency notifications at academic institutions.

Background: This teaching case describes the evolution of a course on content strategy aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the digital and professional writing programs at Michigan State University. The course has gone through three major shifts to reflect corresponding shifts in focus among professional and technical communicators: from developing content for the World Wide Web (original focus) to single sourcing; from single-sourcing to Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS), and from ECMS to content strategy. The case primarily focuses on the most recent shift. Research questions: How can a course on content strategy be useful to both advanced undergraduates preparing to enter the job market in industry and graduate students interested in learning theories in technical communication? In turn, how can a course on content strategy reflect current practices in industry while maintaining grounding for the course in academic research? Situating the case: Three emerging themes relevant to teaching content strategy emerge in the literature. The first is the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, who creates a repeatable system for designing and managing all aspects of a website [1, 2, 3]. The second is the need to develop strategies for addressing stakeholders, especially clients and users, whose goals are to learn more about why they should invest in an organization and its broader vision. The third is adapting content for reuse, which involves designing content that can be easily accessed through various platforms and formats. How the case was studied: This is an experience report by the four faculty members who, together, have taught every section of the course in the last 15 years. Two of the instructors also participated in the course as students. About the case: The most recent version of the course is a one-term course that teaches theory and best practices for managing dynamic and distributed web content, while also incorporating assignments that help students practice content strategies with real clients. It addressed these issues with the previous version that focused on content management by collaborating with industry practitioners to help students understand the real-world implications of developing strategies for and creating web content with clients and organizations. It specifically addresses three themes identified from the literature-emphasizing the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, differentiating the needs of clients and users, and designing for reuse. Course assignments include a landscape analysis of content-management systems and strategies used by various companies, designing content templates for specific clients, and developing a content strategy for a client selected by student groups. Key issues to address when developing the most recent version of the course included creating a course that was useful to graduate and undergraduate students aiming to enter content strategy professions, developing a balance between theory and practice in course readings and assignments, and revising a course to reflect current industry demands for skills in content strategy. Results: Anecdotal evidence from students is that the course was successful and acts as a defacto capstone for the program. Through their course evaluations and unsolicited follow-up emails, students exiting the most recent version of this course became valuable assets who help organizations develop big-picture strategies for adaptable content to be shared through various platforms. Conclusion: A course on content strategy that incorporates current industry perspectives helps graduate and undergraduate professional writing students become more adequately prepared for their future professions working with organizations.

Problem: Standards provide a substantive, internationally supported framework through which information can be managed, developed, reviewed, tested, maintained in a content-management system, and published in a variety of forms. Research question: Why are standards and standards development important for information development and management? Key concepts: (1) The International Organization for Standardization defines a standard as “a document that provides requirements, specifications, guidelines or characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes and services are fit for their purpose.” (2) Several types of standards exist, such as unit standards (which describe measures), private standards reached by consensus and that most participants in an industry agree to, and public, de jure, or legally mandated standards. Standards exist for authoring and publishing tools. (3) Using a standard managed and controlled by a standards organization means gaining the insights of experienced individuals working through an internationally recognized body. 4) Standards are developed by consensus under the auspices of a major organization, such as IEEE, ISO, or OASIS. (5) Major standards affecting information development include technical standards for authoring and publishing, including portable document format, eXtensible markup language, Hypertext Markup Language, and content standards, such as Darwin information typing architecture (DITA), DocBook, and S1000D. Key lessons: (1) Use standards to manage content development. (2) Use standards to acquire services to support the development of content. (3) Use standards to review and test information. (4) Use standards to manage agile information development. (5) Use standards to manage the development of documentation through the software-development life cycle. (6) Use standards to select and implement a content-management system. (7) Hire information developers who understand the importance of using standards. Implications to practice: Standards provide a means for information developers to ensure that they are managing and developing content effectively. Implementing standards in an organization helps to ensure that technology choices made today will not restrict future technology developments.

The papers in this special section focus on effective content strategies. As a unifying vision and action plan, content strategy brings together various specialized writing communities, including professional and technical communication, marketing communication, and web development, ideally breaking disciplinary silos and biases and promoting convergence of these four key dimensions of practice Component content management—an interdisciplinary area of practice that focuses on creating and managing information as small components rather than documents has brought significant changes to professional and technical communication work since 2008. One major change is the move toward integrating organizational and user-generated content as well as disciplines and departments, expertise and roles, and business processes and tools. As stakeholders with various backgrounds across organizational units increasingly work together to create and publish content components, they need a unifying approach that fulfills business goals, organization requirements, and user needs. Content strategy has been proposed as that unifying approach.

Research problem: This study investigates the phenomenon of user-generated content strategy in an open-source, wiki-based content-management system (CMS) for the repair of technological devices (http://ifixit.com). By “user-generated content strategy,” we mean processes for developing systems for producing, moderating, and encouraging user-generated content. Research questions: (1) What strategies, or holistic means of organizing content, are used to manage repair manual content via an open-source, wiki-based content-management system that relies on content generated by a wide variety of users? (2) What content rules, or logical premises for how and where content is developed, emerge from a qualitative case study of such a CMS? Literature review: Though a wealth of empirical research has been conducted into user-generated content, few studies have focused on the explicit strategies employed by organizations to develop and encourage such content. At the same time, several recent calls by researchers in both academia and industry have indicated a need for such content models. Some of the challenges these thinkers have noted with creating user-generated content strategies include the difficulty of maintaining a consistent strategy across content generated by users who don't necessarily understand what strategies are in place, as well as maintaining a modicum of quality assurance without squelching user participation. Methodology: We conducted a content audit of iFixit's main educational initiative, the Technical Writing Project (http://edu.ifixit.com) to identify strategies iFixit uses to organize content in this initiative. iFixit is an open-source wiki to help users repair their own devices. We supplemented the audit with interviews with student participants in the project and iFixit technical writing staff to find out what technologies and other affordances affected users of the iFixit Technical Writing Project. Results and conclusions: The main user-generated content strategies used by iFixit include allowing users a wide range of means to participate (such as posting comments or developing their own repair guides), using a content moderation queue (or simple interface for seeing all updates to the wiki), ensuring quality assurance of all repair guide content through redundancy (such as making sure experienced users vetted every published guide), and staging (or arranging information in a linear sequence) information in a multimodal fashion (using multiple modes of communication to reinforce the same information). Such strategies represent a commitment by iFixit to opening up practices that are central to creating content, such as repair documentation, to any interested internet user. Lessons for organizations who wish to encourage user-generated content include developing strategies that protect users from the worst consequences of their actions, that encourage participation, and that allow for experienced users to vet new content.

Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.

Research problem: Our study focuses on how students collaborate online to produce specific written genres, using particular collaborative technologies to work together productively, and how instructor feedback and student perspectives on collaborative work influence those activities in online classrooms. Research questions: When composing using collaborative web-based writing applications, do students focus primarily on the interface or the text space? What kinds of expectations about collaborative writing do students bring to the interface and text space? To what extent can we characterize students' acknowledgement of a third space, what we have identified as “communicative interaction?” Literature review: Workplace collaboration is important because organizations increasingly demand effective collaborators, team members, and team leaders, and technologies for sharing, cobuilding, and feedback are readily available to support these activities. Student preparation for workplace collaboration is important because students struggle when they are asked to write together, particularly when the collaborative process involves new technologies, and yet knowledge of collaborative writing strategies and experience with collaborative technologies, such as Google Docs, are the very competencies that organizations expect of them. Methodology: Thirteen groups of 3 to 4 technical writing students and science communication students enrolled in online professional writing courses at a major research university wrote feature specifications and reports on the globalization of the sciences, respectively, using Google Docs within Google Drive. Sixteen of 37 students responded to a set of questions asking them to reflect on their experiences working collaboratively, learning new genres, using the collaborative environment, and revising with instructor feedback. Results and conclusions: We found that students struggled most with adapting their already established collaborative strategies grounded in face-to-face learning situations to an online learning environment, where they felt their means of communication and expression were limited. The results suggest that effective collaborative experiences, properly executed, represent a repertoire of competencies that go well beyond only technical considerations, such as being able to effectively assign roles, set milestones, and navigate the numerous tasks and processes of writing as a team. The small number of students and the single instructor with her own particular feedback style limit the study. Future research includes looking at how different feedback styles influence student collaborative writing.

Research problem: Most technical documents rely on a combination of text and visuals to communicate their messages. To achieve the desired effect of improved processing and comprehension of operating instructions, the text must guide readers in a clear way to the relevant visual information in order to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation, and to ensure that the reader optimally benefits from the available information.Research questions: (1) How are textual and visual information combined in operating instructions in order to guide the user's attention precisely toward the relevant parts of a household appliance? (2) In what ways can ambiguity arise, and what kinds of strategies can be used to avoid miscommunication and conceptual problems? Literature review: Operating manuals are usually procedural instructions that tell the user how to set up an appliance, how to operate and maintain it, and how to solve any problems. The vast majority of operating instructions are multimodal in that they include visuals of some kind. But previous research has shown that visual representations of instructions can be just as difficult to interpret as textual instructions-especially if the visuals come without textual elaboration. A combination of text and visuals provides opportunities for taking advantage of both by balancing the other mode's limitations. Methodology: Our exploratory qualitative study of a small set of operating instructions identifies and classifies types of references to visuals in the documents, enriched by interviews with the technical writers of these manuals. Besides showing patterns of reference types, we examine the potential ambiguity of some types of references along with strategies to avoid communication failure. Results and conclusions: We identified 10 distinct ways in which links from text to visuals can be established. Line drawings were referred to more than visuals showing display content. The clarity of the link between text and visuals may be affected by the use of spatial expressions (such as left/right) that presuppose an underlying perspective, as well as by the use of semantic and functional information that is not readily accessible to laypersons. Ambiguity can be avoided by using clearly defined labels, specific perceptual information, and by repetition of visual elements in the text. Also, overspecification can be useful for enhancing communication. We conclude that technical writers need to attend to the links between text and visuals in order to support users effectively, avoiding ambiguity by purposeful strategies. Because our study is qualitative and analytic, implications are limited by the scope of our study, and by the lack of empirical user comprehension studies.

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Research problem: In light of the growing popularity of LinkedIn as a self-promotional tool for the job search process, this paper examines the rhetorical structure of LinkedIn Summaries. Research questions: (1) Which rhetorical moves are found in the Summary sections of LinkedIn profiles? (2) Do the Summary sections display similar patterns of textual organization? (3) What strategies do the writers of the Summary sections deploy to achieve these rhetorical moves? Literature review: This paper has a genre analytic theoretical orientation of approach, whose underlying assumption is that genres sharing the same purposes and context of use are likely to have similar organizational patterns and to deploy similar strategies to achieve these purposes. Previous research on LinkedIn has focused on characteristics of the service and its impact on interactions, but not as a medium used in the classroom. A much deeper literature exists on job application letters, which concludes that a job application uses similar rhetorical moves, or discoursal units that perform distinct communicative functions, to a sales promotion letter. The moves include: introducing candidature, establishing credentials, essential detailing of candidature, indicating value of candidature, offering incentives, enclosing documents, using pressure tactics, soliciting response, and ending politely. Methodology: It is a study that analyzed the rhetorical structure of LinkedIn Summaries of 50 professional résumé writers in the US from a genre analytic perspective. Results and conclusions: The LinkedIn Summary shares many moves in common with the job application letter. Moves that were found in all or nearly all of the texts were establishing credentials, identifying target market and detailing service; an additional move, not seen in job application letters, was also identified-that of personal branding. However, a rigid organizational structure was not seen. The results and the methodology used to obtain them will be of use to students and others wishing to use LinkedIn to promote themselves to potential employers. The study is limited to one particular professional group in one region, but there is ample scope for further research looking at LinkedIn profiles in other professions and other parts of the world.

Research problem: Deciding whether to accept or reject contract clauses in software purchasing contracts is a complex communication-related task, which is likely faced daily by a multitude of software purchasing professionals in a variety of organizations. Research question: What are the effects of viewing contract clauses as video clips, compared to viewing clauses as text only, in terms of cognitive effort, communication ambiguity, and correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts? Literature review: The literature on the Media Richness and Media Naturalness theories suggest that viewing contract clauses as video clips should reduce cognitive effort and communication ambiguity. However, while Media Richness theory suggests that correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts should increase with the use of video clips, Media Naturalness theory suggests a neutral overall effect. Methodology: An experiment was conducted in which student participants were asked to either accept or reject 20 clauses from a software contract, placing themselves in the position of buyers. Of the 20 clauses, 6 were intentionally deceitful and potentially harmful to the buyer. Approximately half of the participants reviewed the contract clauses as web-based text, and the remaining as web-based video clips. Results and conclusions: Viewing contract clauses as video clips was associated with significantly less cognitive effort and less communication ambiguity than viewing the clauses as text only. Counterintuitively, increases in perceived cognitive effort and communication ambiguity were associated with more successful identification and rejection of deceitful contract clauses. The combination of these competing effects led to an overall neutral effect of the medium on the correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses. These findings are consistent with expectations based on Media Naturalness theory, particularly its compensatory adaptation proposition, and inconsistent with expectations based on Media Richness theory.

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Background: A content-management project that proceeds with an incomplete understanding of the views, reservations, agendas, and attitudes held by stakeholders could likely encounter problems in implementation. The vast majority of content-management implementation projects proceed with very little visibility into the cultural dynamics that will eventually play such a central role in determining the success or failure of the projects. This case study examines the usefulness of deploying a needs assessment questionnaire to gather qualitative data that could help content-management project leaders understand participant needs, attitudes, and perceptions, and that could potentially improve the implementation of content-management projects. Research questions: How might previously published research questions for assessing cultural dynamics be adapted for a questionnaire intended to gather input from participants in the early stages of the implementation of two separate content-management projects? What kinds of issues does the questionnaire elicit from participants? To what extent is the questionnaire useful in assessing content-management project participant needs and how might it be revised and adapted for other organizational contexts? Situating the case: Implementing a content-management project results in a change to organizational processes; careful attention to managing this change is essential to the success of the project. Specific change-management issues emphasized in literature that addresses organizational and technological change include organizational readiness, stakeholder input, communication of project goals and plans with stakeholders, and training and time to learn and practice new approaches to operations. Organizational culture-a set of beliefs and values that members of an company share in common-plays a role in implementations of technology. Assessing organizational climate and stakeholder values and attitudes-characteristics of organizational culture-as part of a change-management plan can ensure that the culture is addressed when implementing a content-management project. Methodology: This project consisted of three parts: designing a pilot questionnaire based on a previous published methodology for assessing cultural dynamics, conducting the questionnaire within two organizations implementing content-management systems, and assessing the extent to which the questionnaire was useful in the context of the content-management projects. Responses were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach. About the case: We developed a cultural dynamics needs assessment questionnaire and deployed it within two organizations with the purpose of gathering data about the attitudes and perceptions of project participants toward the impending content-management system implementation. The questionnaires informed the implementations of content management as anticipated. Conclusions: A questionnaire can help understand the cultural dynamics impacting the adoption of new technologies and processes; this method can be included as part of an overall needs assessment for a content-management project. This study also confirms the merit of the research methodology followed; the questionnaire design elicited thoughtful responses from participants and the analysis approach illuminated insights that were then used to engage participants and modify project implementation plans. The constructive outcome of this study suggests the need for more empirical studies and field evaluation studies that build on this one.

Background: The diffusion of component content management and structured authoring workflows and technologies in technical communication requires that instructors of documentation courses determine effective ways to teach component content management to students who may initially be intimidated by authoring environments and structures, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This teaching case describes how component content management and DITA were integrated into the Creating User Documentation course of an undergraduate professional writing program. Research questions: How can instructors of technical and professional writing best teach English and humanities students to operate within a structured authoring workflow? How can computational abstraction be combined with students' previously acquired genre knowledge to ease their adoption of the DITA to create technical documentation? Situating the case: The development of this course was informed by literature from a variety of scholarly and industry sources, which reveal connections between DITA, computational thinking, and Rhetorical Genre theory. Specifically, the concept of “layers of abstraction” guides the development of the course's structure, allowing students to separate and independently process the various aspects of a structured authoring workflow. How the case was studied: The case was studied informally through the experience of the authors as they developed and taught the course, through informal discussions and structured interviews with industry professionals, and through student reflections from discussion forum posts from Fall 2012 through Fall 2013. About the case: Initially developed with a focus on print manuals and online help, the course began teaching topic-based authoring in the mid-2000s; however, most enterprise-level editors and tools were cost-prohibitive for students and faculty. Furthermore, many computing concepts associated with structured authoring were intimidating for an audience of students in an English department. An affordable solution was adopting the open-source DITA standard, using free trials or open-source editors. The intimidation factor was minimized by designing the course around five layers of abstraction that draw on students' previous rhetorical knowledge: Layer 1: Developing quality documentation, Layer 2: Separating content from design, Layer 3: Authoring granular content with XML, Layer 4: Authoring and linking Component Content Management modules with DITA, and Layer 5: Single-sourcing and content reuse. This case discusses each layer of abstraction, the associated assignments for each layer, and the results of each layer based on student feedback. Results and conclusions: Although the course is not universally loved by students, it has seen many successes and provides a much-needed foundation in component content management and structured authoring for students who might become technical communicators. The teaching team has learned to avoid overemphasizing coding and automation in structured authoring, maintain a solid grounding on writing principles and good technical communication requirements, and draw upon students' existing knowledge of genres and their constraints.

Background: When an organization decides to adopt a technology, such as a content-management system (CMS), the choice affects writing styles and processes, and conversely, writing styles affect the implementation of the technology. This case study compares and contrasts the experiences of writers in organizations that implemented different types of CMSs: a web CMS (WCMS) and a component CMS (CCMS), with a focus on the different types of training given to each group to facilitate the implementations. Research questions: (1) What are the dependencies between technology choices and the corollary editorial constraints that writers must consider in order to realize the benefits that the technology can bring? (2) What types of training are needed to ensure that writers become fully productive in a collaborative, structured-authoring environment? Situating the case: When adopting structured information technologies, such as CMS, organizations seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies through the reuse and better management of content components, such as text and images, which can significantly reduce the costs of translation, reproduction, and maintenance of publications. Structured information technologies, such as a CMS, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA) affect technical communicators by changing writing styles to a more structured, topic-based approach, by introducing new tools and concepts for authoring and publishing, and by requiring more involvement in the selection, use, and maintenance of the technologies. Previous efforts to address these issues through training include works by Critchlow, who addressed the use of database systems to address challenges in developing documentation in collaborative environments; Edgell, who related how technical communicators proposed a CMS-based documentation solution to a software firm; and Lanier, who described how one organization overcame the resistance to new structured information technologies by writers. Methodology: The case was studied as an experience report by one of this article's authors (Bailie), in which the organizations engaged a consultant during their CMS implementation projects. The observations are qualitative and reflect consulting engagements with two teams over a period of almost three years. About the case: A common problem in implementing CMSs is interdependencies between content structures, on which the technology depends, and the editorial changes required to ensure that the content is best structured to take full advantage of the capabilities of the technology chosen. This case describes a four-phase training process provided to two clients: one with several contributors to the content-management effort in a single location; the other with more than a dozen contributors in several locations. Each client received four phase of training: (1) theoretical training-understanding pertinent theories behind good content development; (2) application of theory-how to apply the theories to their workplace; (3) software training-learning the new software to produce the content; (4) production-support immediately following training, during implementation. The results of the training were to increase the skill levels of the writers to understand how to leverage content in powerful ways using sophisticated technology. Conclusions: Determine the production needed for the content when choosing a class of CMS to address those production needs. Afterwards, match the training of the writers to the complexity of the system. Content strategists, project managers, technical communicators, and others involved in implementing a CMS need to allow sufficient time and training for writers to adjust their skills to the new technology and the new processes and techniques required to effectively use them.

Background: This case study examines the implementation of an early single-source (the reuse across documents and projects of content stored in a database) content-management system among technical communicators and how they influenced the decision to adopt the technology. Research questions: (1) Why was a component content-management system developed and what was the process of its implementation? (2) How did technical communicators, functioning as both adopters and change agents, influence the new system's adoption? What affected their perceptions of agency during the implementation? Situating the case: Diffusion of Innovations Theory defines innovation adoption as a communication process that occurs over time. When participating as change agents in innovation diffusion, technical communicators are uniquely qualified to support technological change because they are skilled in making technologies accessible to users. Technical communicators can also be the recipients of change, particularly when organizations adopt new technologies, such as content-management systems. Given their expertise at the interface of technology and its users, technical communicators are well positioned to impact the adoption of content-management systems. Methodology: A single, retrospective instrumental case design examined the early 2000s' implementation of a single-source content-management system in the technical communication group of a global company. Surveys, interviews, and document analysis were used to examine the case over a six-year period About the case: A single-source system was adopted to contain costly increases in document cycle time resulting from: (1) customized production of complex and varied products and (2) new European Union regulations requiring all product documentation written in the national language at the point of sale. The system stored product information in a central repository as numbered modules that could be reused in future deliverables. Doing so brought greater continuity to authoring, translation, and publication of content. The system eliminated retranslation of information and automatically recorded and applied any subsequent changes to all affected documents. Technical communicators functioned as change agents and adopters during the system's implementation. Technical communicators in the organization had the choice to adopt the system, and adoption rates varied among staff members. Despite preparation for possible resistance, several staff initially rejected the new system. Those who adopted it did so quickly and created a shared meaning about the system with change agents, a meaning not shared with resistors. The decision of whether to adopt was influenced by perceptions of the innovation and of agency (positive and negative) about the change agents. Conclusions: A pro-innovation bias can impede the creation of shared meaning between change agents and adopters. Emphasizing technical knowledge about the innovation over persuasive elements of empathy for the uncertainty it produces and identity of what it means to be a writer can also stifle adoption. As change agents, technical communicators influence adoption through their rhetorical understanding of situation and capacity for establishing contexts that allow for the construction of shared meaning between change agents and potential adopters. Also, a perceived lack of decisive leadership or a champion for the change risks restricting the power of change agents to influence adoption and can create a space for protracted resistance to it.

Research problem: The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such review was published in 2003. This integrative literature review is intended to fill the gap in the literature by describing the current state of component content management as presented in the current publications. Research questions: How is “content” currently defined, described, and approached in the component content-management literature? What processes and tools are organizations adopting to achieve the goals of component content management? Literature review: The theoretical orientation of this review is Rhetorical Genre theory, which allows for classifying individual components as a genre characterized by granularity, reusability, and potentiality. Component content management gained recognition in the mid-1990s when early adopter organizations were looking for more efficient and effective approaches to reusing information between similar products or versions of the same product. Developments in the 2000s include a surge of publications focused on defining and describing component content management; new best practices for implementing a component content-management initiative; evolving processes and technologies for creating highly engineered, modular content that can automatically adjust to specific user requests and device capabilities; and collaborative efforts to integrate content creation and management strategies across organizational units. Scholarly and trade publications increasingly explore different concerns; whereas scholarly publications tend to offer critical perspectives on component content management, trade publications tend to describe processes and technologies and articulate best practices. Both focus on the goals of component content management, such as single sourcing, content reuse, multichannel publishing, and the structured content components required to achieve these goals. Methodology: To answer the research questions, we reviewed the body of literature on component content management. To do so, we searched library databases, Google, and Amazon.com for articles and books in both the scholarly and trade literature; we also sought out publications by well-known voices in component content management who direct successful consultant and/or research organizations. We then classified selected publications in relation to research questions and identified themes within each research question. The review did not explore other types of content management. Results and conclusions: Current component content-management literature suggests that component content management has evolved from a practice focused on single sourcing and reuse strategies for product documentation to a mature discipline concerned with designing pre-sales and post-sales information products for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. In recent years, trade publications have led the way to standardizing the discipline's core concepts, methodologies, processes, and technologies, such as structured content, structured authoring, single sourcing, component-based content strategy, Extensible Markup Language authoring tools, and component-content-management systems. Scholarly publications, however, have had comparatively little impact on advancing the discipline of component content management because only a handful of publications have focused on the topic and almost no crosstalk exists between these publications and the trade literature. Several questions about the practices of component content management still need to be answered, particularly in the areas of multilingual communication and content quality and usability. Based on the results of the literature review, we call for a coherent, robust, and ambitious component content-management research agenda that addresses topics such as content quality and usability, the diffusion of content-management systems, and global content management and that leads to studies that both advance scholarship and improve component content-management practice.

The articles in this special issue focus on content management. Here, content management is used to refer to a particular type of content management: component content management. Component content management is an interdisciplinary area of practice characterized by methodologies, processes, and technologies that rely on principles of reuse, granularity, and structure to allow communicators to create and manage information as small components rather than as entire documents. An example of component content management is a product user guide that can be generated on demand. A customer who has questions on how to use particular product features, for instance, might select relevant topics from a menu available on a product support webpage or mobile application and, upon submitting a request, receive a just-generated customized guide that meets his or her immediate information needs. When information is created and managed as small components, these components can be assembled and published in myriad ways, as in the case of the above example. By shifting the focus of information development from entire documents to reusable units of information, content management has brought on a magnitude of changes to the field of professional and technical communication over the past 15 years. It has changed work processes and practices and, in doing so, redefined what it means to be a communicator. The promise of component content management

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Research problem: Over the past decade, the popularity of fantasy sports games has grown dramatically. A fantasy sport is a simulation game in which game players act as owners to build, manage, and coach imaginary teams that compete against one another, based on statistics generated by actual players or teams of a professional sport. In line with this, we have seen the emergence of various forms of media content being produced directly for those who participate in fantasy sports games-the most prolific example of this is writing for fantasy sports. This study aims to establish an understanding of how fantasy sport articles are currently being constructed by assessing the contributions of professional journalists and amateur writers. Research questions: RQ1: If the standardization of written discourse genres stems from the reciprocity between generic conventions and the responses to situations, then what are the differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by their amateur counterparts in fantasy sports writing? RQ2: What are the writers' rhetorical goals and the reader-writer relationships they wish to establish through the fantasy sports texts? Literature review: This study is rooted in the notion of genre, a communicative event through which the writer and reader interact to make meanings in a particular context. Communication of fantasy sports involves the production of content that provides readers with news, analysis, and opinions about-and knowledge of-matters that concern the games, thus creating pools of intelligence which other fantasy sports players can use, add to, argue against, or ignore. This amateur-produced content and resulting knowledge communities formed by fantasy sports players have led to a genre development that professional communicators should examine because it reflects so much technical documentation and instructions have migrated into user-generated spaces. “The move” in genre analysis is a meaningful rhetorical unit that is related to the communicative purpose of a social activity and that contributes to the text's overall strategy within its situational context. Moves operate in coherence rather than isolation in a text. Methodology: A discourse analysis was conducted on 60 fantasy sports texts (30 by professional journalists and 30 by amateur writers) randomly selected from a few specific sources in 2012. A custom move scheme was devised for analyzing fantasy sports texts in this study. The results were analyzed using a chi-square test. Results and discussion: Results reveal significant differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by amateur writers. These differences include amateur writers differing to some extent in their rhetorical goals from professional journalists as they offer media consumers a more balanced spread of information, that professional journalists place a substantially lower value on making predictions, that amateur writers and professional journalists share similar regard in terms of the appropriate amount of casualness to include in their writing although amateur writers are more included to build casualness in their articles, and that the use of writing techniques to invite further connection or engagement from readers is being underutilized by both professional and amateur writers. The major implications for the professional communicators are the insights into user-generated content, an approach in which organizations increasingly rely on for their product and service documentation.

Research problem: The study attempts to study how an empowered Chinese public coped with and interpreted the environmental crisis of the ConocoPhillips oil spill and how ConocoPhillips reacted to the growing influence of social media. Research questions: In what ways did the Chinese public exercise its new power through social media in addressing the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident? How did a multinational company like ConocoPhillips act during the crisis and react to the voices of the public through new media? Literature review: Social media has caused a power shift in China by allowing the ordinary Chinese public who used to be the silent majority to expose scandals and express their opinions about crises with greater freedom. At the same time, pressure is growing on corporations to exercise social responsibility, through responding to economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has. Stakeholder theory indicates that only by meeting the needs and expectations of the individuals and groups who can affect or are affected by the firm's objectives can a firm survive and succeed. In developing countries, corporate social responsibility is characterized by a lack of systematic and institutionalized approach, with stakeholders, such as the public and community, being neglected for a long time. Methodology: Researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 932 microblog and blog entries about the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident in China that were published on leading Chinese social media websites between June 2011 to February 2013. Results and discussion: The study found that the oil spill sparked an uproar of anger and criticism in the Chinese online community. Most posts on microblogs and blogs engaged in finding the causes and laying the blame for the oil spill. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese public attributed the crisis to the faulty laws and inaction on the part of the Chinese government regulators, to ConocoPhillips, and the Chinese joint venture partner China National Offshore Oil Corporation's failure to undertake due responsibilities. In response to mounting online criticisms, ConocoPhillips exhibited little interest in engaging with the Chinese public and showed poor communication in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The study's theoretical contribution lies in combining CSR and Stakeholder theory with Discourse Power theory. Practical implications to multinational corporations seeking long-term business development in the developing country contexts, such as China, are that managers need to engage in responsive listening, actively participate in online conversations, and constantly scan the social media environment to manage its relations with the general public. Particularly, firms experiencing crises can gain the public's emotional support by communicating emotion-laden messages through social media.