Nonemployer firms—firms with no employees—present themselves as larger, more stable firms to take on clients’ projects. They then achieve these projects by recruiting subcontractors, guiding subcontractors’ interactions with clients, and coordinating subcontractors to protect their team performance for the client. Using fourth-generation activity theory, I examine how these firms stage-manage their ad hoc collaborations. I conclude by describing the implications for further developing fourth-generation activity theory to study such instances of knowledge work.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

Instructors in multi-major professional communication courses are asked to teach students a variety of workplace genres. However, teaching genres apart from their contexts may not result in transfer of knowledge from school to workplace settings. We propose teaching students to research genre use via activity theory as a way of encouraging transfer. We outline theory and research relevant to teaching genre and provide results from a study using activity theory to teach genre in two different professional communication courses.

Abstract Pseodotransactionality—writing that Is patently designed by a student to meet teacher expectations rather than to perform the "real" function the teacher has suggested—is a problem that has frequently troubled writing teachers, especially professional writing teachers. This article attempts to analyze the problem from a sociohistorical perspective by using two Russian theoretical exports: (1) M. M. Bakhtin's concept of genre and (2) Vygotsklan activity theory. The article concludes by suggesting how a sociohistorical perspective mlght help to counteract pseudotransactionality In the professional writing classroom.