Almost two decades after the transitions of 1989/90, the political transformations in Central/Eastern Europe continue to attract scholarly interest. Although the sense of novelty and drama has larg...

Although the concept of community has been advanced in technical communication as a moral reference point for civic rhetorical action, this concept is typically used in romantic, redemptive, and essentializing ways. This article argues for a radical and symbolic/rhetorical view of community, regarding it a discursive construct purposefully invoked by technical writers for strategic reasons.

Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction by M. Lane Bruner. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 143 + pp. Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Young by Maureen Daly Goggin, ed. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2000. 457 pp. Collected Works of Richard Claverhouse Jebb by Robert B. Todd, ed. 9 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002. An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature by Louis Mackey. Lanham, New York, Oxford: University Press of America, 2002. 283 + viii pp.

An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa by Philippe‐Joseph Salazar. Mahvah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. 226 pp. + xx. The Insolent Slave by William E. Wiethoff. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. 223 pp. Conceiving Normalcy: Rhetoric, Law, and the Double Binds of Infertility by Elizabeth C. Britt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique Series, 2001. 206 pp + xi.

(2002). Techne and Politeia: Langdon Winner's Political Theory of Technology and Its Implications for Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 230-234.

This article suggests a perspective on rhetoric of technology as discursive exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy affecting the development of technologies and technical artifacts. It examines such margins by examining the development of an aircraft auxiliary engine in a California aerospace company, focusing especially on how engines are tested. It examines technical documents associated with testing as arenas for rhetorical transactions involving various factors and interests vested in a technology and as residua of compliance and negotiation. It suggests that margins of indeterminacy in technology development provide critical rhetorical spaces for agency and decision making, spaces that engineers and technical communicators must be trained to appreciate and exploit appropriately.

Many teachers of technical and business communication consult in business, industrial, and governmental organizations. To make the consulting experience successful and to understand the communication problems in an organization, the consultant should be aware of how the organization's culture may affect communication practices of members and should learn to read the various signs of organizational culture. Effective reading of cultural signs may be critical to the consultant's success or failure.

Traditional textbook rationales for the technical writing course locate the essence of technical writing in objectivity, clarity, and neutrality, and the need for teaching it in its usefulness to employers. Such rationales, however, are unable to accommodate a notion of ethics and responsibility: if the writer merely serves the interests that employ her by reporting facts in an objective way, how can she exercise choice when ethical problems arise? An alternative view is to see technical writing as always rhetorical and involved with potentially conflicting agendas and interests, with objectivity, clarity, and neutrality serving merely as stylistic devices in the writer's rhetorical toolbox. Technical writers are rhetoricians who continually make ethical choices in serving diverse interests and negotiating between conflicting demands. The recognition of the fundamental rhetoricity of technical writing is the first step towards accommodating a meaningful notion of ethics into the technical writing curriculum.