(Re)Appraising the Performance of Technical Communicators From a Posthumanist Perspective

Jim Henry University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Abstract

Composition and rhetoric's attention to writing as cultural performance is expanded to analyze writing as organizational performance. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse enables the diagnosis of a technical writer's annual performance appraisal as grounded in 20th-century Taylorized management principles. Tenets from posthumanism—including a discarding of the liberal humanist subject in knowledge production and a leveraging of distributed cognition for enhanced performance of humans acting in concert with intelligent machines—enable a theoretical framework for repurposing this genre.

Journal
Technical Communication Quarterly
Published
2009-12-29
DOI
10.1080/10572250903372975
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Cited by in this index (7)

  1. Computers and Composition
  2. Technical Communication Quarterly
  3. Technical Communication Quarterly
  4. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  5. College English
Show all 7 →
  1. Technical Communication Quarterly
  2. Technical Communication Quarterly

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