Journal of Business and Technical Communication Jul 2019

The Infrastructural Function: A Relational Theory of Infrastructure for Writing Studies

Sarah Read Portland State University

Abstract

This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article argues for a four-part framework that incorporates and builds on Star and Ruhleder’s relational theory of infrastructure. Fieldwork from a federally funded supercomputing center for scientific research operationalizes the theory for its contributions to writing studies scholarship and its applications for industry and writing pedagogy.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
2019-07-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651919834980
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
writing pedagogy
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (22)

  1. Carradini et al. (2026)
    Faculty and Administrator Perceptions of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Writin…
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  5. Richter (2023)
    Network-Emergent Rhetorical Invention
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  1. Bay et al. (2022)
    Remote TPC Internships: Infrastructures for Success
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  2. Comi (2022)
    "It must be a system thing": information infrastructure genres as sites of inequity
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  3. Rouge et al. (2022)
    Using situational analysis to reimagine infrastructure
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  4. Itchuaqiyaq et al. (2022)
    Citational practices as a site of resistance and radical pedagogy: positioning …
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  5. Read et al. (2022)
    Introduction: writing infrastructure
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  6. Adams (2022)
    A theory of infrastructural rhetoric
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  7. Weber (2022)
    Making infrastructure into nature: how documents embed themselves into the bodi…
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  8. Lee (2022)
    Languages, Infrastructures, and Ecologies: Toward Rematerializing Activisms
    Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
  9. Frith et al. (2022)
    Introduction: communication and design infrastructures
    Communication Design Quarterly
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    Building ethical distributed teams through sustained attention to infrastructure
    Communication Design Quarterly
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    Infrastructural support of users' mediated potential
    Communication Design Quarterly
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  14. Richter (2021)
    Writing With Reddiquette: Networked Agonism and Structured Deliberation in Netw…
    Computers and Composition
  15. Read (2020)
    How to Build a Supercomputer: U.S. Research Infrastructure and the Documents Th…
    Written Communication
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    Technical Standards and a Theory of Writing as Infrastructure
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  17. Russell (2020)
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