Journal of Technical Writing and Communication Jan 2018

Failure Matters: Conflicting Practices in a High-Tech Case

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder Oregon State University

Abstract

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

Journal
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Published
2018-01-01
DOI
10.1177/0047281616662984
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Topics
discourse analysis technical communication professional writing qualitative research
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Pflugfelder et al. (2023)
    Expanding the Scope and Scale of Risk in TPC: Water Access and the Colorado Riv…
    Technical Communication Quarterly
  2. Brizee (2020)
    What Happens When We Fail? Building Resilient Community-Based Research
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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CrossRef global citation count: 3 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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