In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge enterprises. Given their centrality, these genre assemblages function as essential infrastructure for the U.S. national laboratory system and for big science endeavors in general. In conclusion, this article argues that documentation that mitigates uncertainty serves an important infrastructural function for organizational life more generally.

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.

In this article, the authors report on findings from a survey of writing instructors who teach the multimajor professional writing course (MMPW) across diverse institutional contexts. The authors marshal these findings to advance a series of arguments about the situation of the MMPW course in U.S. higher education.

This study theorizes genre from within actor-network theory. The net work (spelled intentionally as two words) function of genre proposes a solution to the inherent incommensurability in applying the notion of genre as social action within the posthumanist and postsocial perspective of actor-network theory. The study proposes an approach to genre analysis informed by the net work genre function and demonstrates its affordances by analyzing two conventional workplace genres. Performing genre analysis from a net work perspective has value for assimilating writers, both students and workplace professionals, into a new professional domain or organization.

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing–professional writing (WAW-PW) course can look like.

This article demonstrates, by example, 2 approaches to the analysis of knowledge work. Both methods draw on network as a framework: a Latourian actor–network theory analysis and a network analysis. The shared object of analysis is a digital humanities and digital media research lab that is the outcome of the collective and coordinated efforts of researchers and other stakeholders at North Carolina State University. The authors show how the two methods are drawn to different objects of study, different data sources, and different assumptions about how data can be reduced and made understandable. The authors conclude by arguing that although these methods yield different outlooks on the same object, their findings are mutually informing.

Dorothy Winsor's induction as an ATTW Fellow in 2007 and the disciplinary moment of reflection invited by this issue provide the exigence for the story of how Winsor's scholarship, and ethnographic scholarship more broadly, has shaped the field. This story, told via the interpretive lens of three topoi (the mundane, power, and symmetry) that emerged from an interview with Winsor in 2009, suggests how the field's theory and methodology have matured over the past three decades and anticipates what it will become in the future.

Clay Spinuzzi. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 230 pp. With this book Spinuzzi has done the field a great service: He has “absorbed more literature from activity theory, actor-netw...