This article extends current thinking about the rhetoric of technology by making a preliminary inquiry into what a feminist rhetoric of technology might look like. On the basis of feminist critiques of technology in various disciplines, the author suggests three ways in which feminist approaches to building a rhetoric of technology might differ from current nonfeminist approaches to this task. First, feminist scholars should adopt a more expansive definition of technology than that which informs current rhetoric of technology research. Second, feminist scholars should ask research questions different from those being asked by current rhetoric of technology researchers. Third, feminist scholars should move beyond the design and development phases of technology, which most of the current research on the rhetoric of technology emphasizes.

What is the primary focus of business communication teachers in classrooms in which English is not the native language of students? Do they concentrate on strategies for improved professional and interpersonal communication skills, or do they direct most attention to purely language issues? These questions have become more important because the number of nonnative English students in business communication classrooms in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and so forth is increasing and because English is becoming more important for business and education in many Asian and African countries. This article outlines some of the language-related problems that occur when teaching nonnative speakers business communication and calls for a drive to address the issue of acceptable language usage in this context.

Focusing on the case write-up within the Harvard case method of instruction, this study provides historical and empirical evidence for the theory of genre systems. The Harvard case literature and interviews at a case-based business school in the Harvard tradition show that the purpose of this largely ignored written genre is to prepare students to participate in the primary genre, oral classroom discussion of the case. The case genre system provides highly conventionalized conductor-choreographer roles for instructors and blunt, detached consultant roles for student writers/speakers who repeatedly enact decisive, adversarial personae affirming practices and values of the business school.

This article examines the Work for Hire Doctrine and its importance to technical communication instructors who prepare students to create intellectual products in workplace settings. The author explains how the Work for Hire Doctrine operates in practice, charts the progressive legal treatment of work for hire through case law, and calls attention to the developing trend in the courts to support a more protectionist stance regarding creative products.

To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition.

Narrative has been neglected in the education of professionals. The persuasive power of narrative is essential to all the sense-making activities that govern the lives of professionals, for in sense making, they are regularly using narrative. The central example here is the O. J. Simpson legal defense that was organized within the narrative frame of Simpson's story. The authors compare his story with a famous Norwegian folktale to illustrate the role narratives play in amplifying the values of a community. Using Propp's structural analysis of the folktale, they deconstruct the Simpson trial, which reveals implications of the narrative paradigm for the professional.

Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.

Despite the prevailing assumption that narrative and scientific discourse are incompatible genres, in this article the authors show that scientific texts typically follow a narrative pattern. This simple observation that narrative and scientific texts are similar is not all that surprising when we recognize that scientific discourse, like all narratives, describes what happened and what it meant. Indeed, scientific texts are almost always accounts of scientists' experiences in reality. After developing a vocabulary of narrative, the authors analyze the works of Newton and Einstein, using narrative analysis to illuminate scientific texts as stories.

This article calls for a rhetorical perspective on the relationship of gender, communication, and power in the workplace. In doing so, the author uses narrative in two ways. First, narratives gathered in an ethnographic study of an actual workplace, a plastics manufacturer, are used as a primary source of data, and second, the findings of this study are presented by telling the story of two women in this workplace. Arguing that gender in the workplace, like all social identities, is locally constructed through the micro practices of everyday life, the author questions some of the prevailing assumptions about gender at work and cautions professional communication teachers, researchers, and practitioners against unintentionally perpetuating global, decontextualized assumptions about gender and language, and their relationship to the distribution and exercise of power at work.

Institutions familiar to the public are defined by master narratives that describe their activities and imply who is invited to take part. For art museums in this country, a master narrative of elitism was established in the last century, when museums organized and began building their collections. Because art museums were designed by the rich and subsequently forced to depend on the rich for financial support, the stories of elitism and exclusion have been perpetuated over the years. Whereas little narratives, or local stories, defining the daily operations of museums do not receive attention, stories of exclusive social events and obscure art exhibitions take prominence and discourage the participation of the general public. With diminished funding for museums and fewer courses devoted to art appreciation in public schools, museums will likely be unable to attract wider audiences to support them, and the master narrative will continue to define museums' image.

This article challenges the conventional approach to cross-cultural communication teaching that instructs students to adapt their communication styles to different cultures by providing them with details about the particular practices of these cultures. It argues for an approach that focuses on common principles of effective communication by pointing out some limitations of the current culture-specific approach and presenting a pilot study that indicates the commonality of communication needs. It suggests some ways to find a different approach for studying international communication and shows that some current research is, in fact, moving in that direction.

Distance education, broadly defined as instruction that is not bound by time or place, is bringing about fundamental changes in higher education. Writing in a recent online newsletter from the American Association for Higher Education, Ted Marchese describes the many "not-so-distant" distance competitors to traditional colleges and universities: the University of Phoenix, the for-profit university with some 50,000 students in 12 states; the Western Governors University, the competency-based consortium that was founded by 17 governors and is supported by 14 business partners, including Sun, IBM, AT&T, and Microsoft; and Britain’s venerable OpenUniversity, which has allied with several universities in the United States and will begin offering courses here this year.

The work for hire doctrine in intellectual property law is important to academics in rhetoric and technical communication. In this article, the author explains the doctrine and the way in which it works, explicates related case law, and suggests treatment of work for hire by instructors and administrators in rhetoric and technical communication.

This qualitative content analysis identifies 40 articles about women and feminism published in five technical communication journals in a period of nine years, beginning with the publication of Mary Lay's award-winning “Interpersonal Conflict in Collaborative Writing” in 1989. Along with numeric trends about the frequency of articles about women and feminism in technical communication journals, this study also identifies major themes, all of which concern inclusion: through eliminating sexist language, providing equal opportunity in the workplace, valuing gender differences, recovering women's historical contributions to technical communication, and critiquing previously uncontested terms and concepts. The study concludes that although research about women and feminism has been accepted as part of the scholarly purview of technical communication, the ways in which this research has influenced workplace or classroom practice are unclear.

Not only do students of technical writing courses need to learn how to prepare documents for translation properly, but students of translation need to learn technical and academic writing. This article gives the example of such a course taught at the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. The course covers writing instructions and manuals, documents for scholarly and professional societies and scientific conferences, scientific papers, reports, and abstracts.

This article summarizes the scholarly discussion about negative messages and reports the results of two pretests and two experiments using negative letters. The results show that buffers did not significantly affect college students' responses to simulated letters refusing credit and denying admission to graduate school and that strong resale was counterproductive. Students responded least favorably to rejection when they were surprised by it and when their other options were limited. On the basis of these experiments and the published literature, the author recommends that negative letters normally begin with the reason for the refusal. If the reason makes the company look good, then it should be spelled out in as much detail as possible. If an alternative or a compromise exists, then the writer should suggest it. Although a positive ending is not necessary, if one is used, then a bland positive is better than a strong one, especially in letters to clients or customers.

The increasing importance of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to the US economy makes understanding Mexico important. Because the histories and cultures of the United States and Mexico differ significantly, written communications also differ. Rhetorical strategies for written business communication in Mexico reflect the country's bloody, cyclical history and its resulting culture characterized by collectivism, high power distances, fatalism, and emphasis on building trust and relationships. Despite Mexico's economic problems, it is a country in transition. Because of the increasing presence of US business entities in Mexico, communication protocols are changing as US technology and ways of doing business infuse the traditional Mexican culture. Understanding how to communicate effectively in Mexico requires understanding its history and culture as well as changes occurring there. US writers must know where any Mexican company is situated along this changing cultural continuum and how the continuum shapes the design of written business communication.

This article examines the value added to the United States Lighthouse Service by the operator's manuals, which were issued to the lighthouse keepers by the Light-House Board in 1852. Subsequent reports of the board to Congress conclusively show that the manuals resulted in a significant savings in the operating costs of the service. In addition, annual reports of district superintendents show that the instructional information improved the appearance and reliability of the lights. Furthermore, the manuals helped to reduce significantly the number of marine disasters along America's shores in the years following the board's decision.