This study uses examples from a case of everyday technical and professional communication (TPC) at a small multinational company on the Mexico–U.S. border to illustrate how coordinating analytical frameworks commonly used in TPC analyses—activity theory (AT) and actor-network theory (ANT)—can help TPC scholars and practitioners negotiate interpreting others’ asynchronous communication fairly and justly, even in complex, intercultural contexts. The examples illustrate why developing normative ethics for the 21st century requires attention to the ways that goal-oriented activity and the flat, networked interaction of the human, nonhuman, and black-boxed forces intersect in everyday TPC practitioners’ lives and work.

This study examines 50 business responses to negative reviews on Amazon.com in order to identify common genre moves for responding to negative online reviews. To complement the genre analysis and assess the effectiveness of these common genre moves, the author conducted a survey seeking consumers’ feedback on three typical business responses to negative online reviews. This investigation not only provides feedback on how businesses can publicly respond to negative online reviews but also presents an empirical case on how we can balance genre stability and variation and go beyond just teaching typified genre features in our genre pedagogy.

Many expected federal public health agencies to provide timely and accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic. That did not happen. In response, physicians and epidemiologists have explored new ways to educate the public about COVID-19 and protect against misinformation. One genre that has received significant uptake is the tweetorial, threaded tweets that educate followers on technical matters. This article builds on prior genre studies of the tweetorial to explore how #MedTwitter and #EpiTwitter communities have refashioned the emerging conventions of the tweetorial as part of efforts to protect the public from COVID-19 misinformation.

The Eating Well With Canada’s Food Guide (CFG), which represents Canada’s official dietary guidelines, is designed to address high rates of obesity and diet-related chronic disease in Canada. This article presents a qualitative study of the social and ideological actions that the CFG performs. The study draws on the concepts of antecedent genres and uptake from rhetorical genre studies, applying them in a multimodal analysis of the CFG and interviews with the CFG’s producers and registered dietitians (RDs) who work with vulnerable populations. Findings reveal that scientific representations play a profound role in the social and ideological actions that the CFG performs. The author demonstrates how representations of scientific evidence from nutrition science, as exemplified in the concept of the Food Guide Serving, are taken up by the CFG and, in turn, how these scientific representations influence RDs’ use of the CFG and dominate, rather than facilitate, discussions about healthy eating. The study suggests that the CFG, instead of being an enabling resource, is a limiting document: It limits who can make healthier food choices and how such choices can be made.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

Professional writing scholars have often turned to activity theory (AT) as a rich framework for describing and theorizing human activity. But AT-based studies typically emphasize the uniqueness of activities rather than examining how certain types of activities share configurations. Consequently, these analyses often miss the chance to examine activities’ internal contradictions that are a result of interference between different configurations of activity. This article argues that a typology of activities can deepen our understanding of these internal contradictions. Drawing from a range of literature, it describes the general characteristics of different types of activities, providing examples from other AT-based studies. It concludes by discussing how this typology can help such studies to better analyze internal contradictions in activities.

Despite the legal and social ramifications of presentence investigation reports, little is known about them outside the legal community. The author uses the frameworks of genre theory and activity systems to analyze the documents, the criminal justice system’s ideology of sentencing, and the statutes and regulations that govern the reports. What emerges is an ambiguous and contradictory genre at odds with the philosophy of individualized justice underpinning its origins, a genre that has eschewed narrative for the sake of objectivity. The article further underscores the value of employing a flexible theoretical framework when studying workplace genres.

Mobile professionals can choose to work in offices, executive suites, home offices, or other spaces. But some have instead chosen to work at coworking spaces: open-plan office environments in which they work alongside other unaffiliated professionals for a fee of approximately $250 a month. But what service are they actually purchasing with that monthly fee? How do they describe that service? From an activity theory perspective, what are its object, outcome, and actors? This article reports on a 20-month study that answers such questions.

This article documents the evolution of the annual reports of the Danish company Danisco A/S from 1935 through 2007-2008. Compared to previous diachronic studies of annual reports, this study offers a finer grained description from a communicative perspective over a long period of time. Using genre theory as a framework, it analyzes the macrostructure and visual elements of these reports from a communicative standpoint paying equal attention to both of the genre’s subordinate communicative purposes: to give a true and fair view of the state of the company and to provide a positive image of the company. The findings indicate that the annual reports have four distinctive phases (1935 through 1958, 1959 through 1988, 1989-1990 through 2005-2006, and 2006-2007 through 2007-2008) that serve different communicative purposes. The study clearly shows that the annual report is primarily a statutory document and reveals that changes within organizations have a much greater and more immediate impact on changes in the annual reports than do other contextual factors.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

This article draws on activity theory, politics of the artifact, and speech act theory to analyze how language practices and technology interplay in establishing the social relationships necessary for globally networked teams. Specifically, it uses activity theory to examine how linguistic infelicities and the politics of communication technologies interplay in virtual meetings, thereby demonstrating the importance of grounding professional communication instruction in social as well as technical effectiveness. That is, students must learn not only how to communicate technical concepts clearly and concisely and recognize cultural differences but also how to use language and choose media in ways that produce the social conditions necessary for effective collaboration in globally networked environments. The article analyzes two case studies—a workplace and a classroom—that illustrate how the mediating functions of language and the politics of technology intersect as mediating tools in globally networked activity systems. It then traces the implications of that intersection for professional communication theory and pedagogy.

This article examines rhetorical patterns in claim letters from two universities, one in China and one in the United States, to see whether these patterns are convergent. A genre-based textual analysis of the claim letters, written by two different cultural groups of participants, found that both groups of letters display a similar rhetorical preference for directness and indirectness. The author explores how local contextual factors have contributed to these groups of participants’ preference for similar rhetorical patterns and calls for the integration of contextual factors in intercultural rhetoric research, practice, and pedagogy.

This article offers an example case of technical communicators integrating the social bookmarking site Delicious into existing work environments. Using activity theory to present conceptual foundations and concrete steps for integrating the functionalities of social media, the article builds on research within technical communication that argues for professional communicators to participate more fully in the design of communication systems and software. By examining the use of add-ons and tools created for Delicious, and the customized use of Rich Site Syndication (RSS) feeds that the site publishes, the author argues for addressing the context-sensitive needs of project teams by integrating the functionality of social media applications generally and repurposing their user-generated data.

This article examines the characteristics of collaborative work and overlapping activity systems in the popular online game World of Warcraft. Using genre theory and activity theory as frames to work out the genre ecology of gameplay, the article focuses on how players coordinate ad hoc grouping activity across and through genres. It articulates the related development of open systems in online gaming in a discussion of interface modifications (AddOns) and online information databases that players generate, drawing on De Certeau's formulation of strategies and tactics and Warner's discussion of publics and counterpublics. The article concludes by discussing implications of online gaming for an open-systems approach to information design in professional communication and for professional communication in general.

This article discusses the development of a unified social theory of genre learning based on the integration of rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and the situated learning perspective. The article proposes that these three theoretical perspectives are compatible and complementary, and it illustrates applications of a unified framework to a study of genre learning by novice engineers. The author draws examples from a longitudinal qualitative study of a group of novice engineers who developed their professional genre knowledge through both academic and workplace experiences. These examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the study of professional genre learning.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

This article investigates the contribution visual rhetoric and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) can make to health care education and communication genres. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of a patient record used in an optometry teaching clinic, this article illustrates that a genre's visual representations provide significant insights into the social action of that genre. These insights are deepened by an insider analysis of the patient record that highlights how content analyses of visual designs need to be elaborated by contextual considerations. A combined visual rhetoric and RGS analysis shows that clinical novices learn to interpret the record's visual cues to safely traverse the complex requirements of this apprenticeship genre. The article demonstrates that visual rhetoric research can meaningfully contribute to the understanding of genres by presenting an enriched contextual analysis achieved by consulting with context insiders.

This article explores the value of rhetorical genre theory for health care and professional communication researchers. The authors outline the conceptual resources emerging from genre theory, specifically ways to conceptualize social context, professional identity formation, and genres as functioning but hierarchical networks, and discuss the way they have used these resources in two separate but complementary health-care studies: a project that documents the ways regulated and regularized resources of the genre of case presentations shape the professional identity formation of medical students and a project that extends this theoretical work to observe that genres, especially policy genres, function to regularize or control other genres and shape the identity formation of midwives in Ontario, Canada. The authors also observe that the implications of rhetorical genre theory have impelled both of these studies to develop an interdisciplinary trajectory that includes members of health-care communities as participating researchers.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

A set of discourse-based methods—genre theory, genre analysis, and discourse analysis—can provide a descriptive basis for a critical analysis of the multiple connections between discourse practices and their underlying concepts and categories within professions. To illustrate this theoretical and methodological project, this article analyzes prognosis in the discourse of medicine. Using Goffman’s (1959) distinction between front-stage and back-stage discourse, the author suggests that a back-stage discourse of prognosis points to problems with prognosis in the front-stage discourse of medical encounters between oncologists and patients who have been diagnosed with cancer. The analysis shows that the oral genre of treatment discussion in oncology encounters is organized to allow practitioners to do, appear to do, or avoid doing difficult work like presenting a prognosis. The article suggests that discourse-based methods have the potential to become the basis for productive critical engagement between practitioners and researchers in professional communication.

In courses within technical disciplines, students are often asked to give oral presentations that simulate a professional context. Yet learning to speak like a professional in this academic context is a process often laden with complications. Using activity theory and situated learning as theoretical frameworks, this article explores the teaching and learning of one of the most common oral genres in technical fields—the design presentation. A study of the teaching and learning of this oral genre in three sequential engineering design courses reveals critical academic and workplace contradictions regarding audience, identity, and structure. Results of this study show that in the teaching and learning of design presentations, audience and identity contradictions were managed by a primary deference to the academic context whereas structural contradictions were addressed by invoking both workplace and academic activity systems.

Using activity theory as a supplement to genre studies, this article explores a case of the disintegration of a traditional engineering firm. It focuses on the causes of such disintegration and the role of different types of communication in serving as sites where contradictions can be brought to visibility and resolution. The authors’ goal is both to show the power of activity theory in illuminating issues of tension, contradiction, and dissonance that lead to the breakup of the original organization into two separate firms and point to fundamental differences in the cultures of traditional engineering firms and software design enterprises.

Discourse theories frequently emphasize the importance of understanding audience but seldom delve into how writers form conceptions of their audiences, especially in organizations. This study examines computer documentation writers’ tactics for conceiving of their audiences. Based on two ethnographic case studies and insights from activity theory, the author describes and evaluates technical communicators’ tactics for understanding audiences, constrained and supported by their organizations. She discusses the advantages and limitations of each tactic, looking at how each tactic might answer questions about audience. This research should be useful to technical communication educators as they expand students’ options for audience research in nonacademic settings. In addition, the findings of this study can enhance theories about the ways writers create images of their audiences.