Abstract

More than ever before, workplace professionals are facing the challenge of collaborating regularly and effectively with those situated in social contexts quite different from their own. Yet, knowledge of the rhetorical processes and social dimensions characterizing this type of collaboration remains scant and inadequate. This essay takes the stance that if rhetoricians hope to make significant strides forward in understanding writing that takes place both within and external to a single workplace culture, they will need to develop a much more expansive, complex, and sophisticated vision of collaboration across multiple organizational cultures. It suggests how, to accomplish this goal, rhetoricians might build on the strengths and overcome the limitations of past scholarship in organizational and related studies and in rhetoric, and it introduces new directions these scholars might take and new questions they might explore in future investigations in this area of inquiry.