Defining the “rhetoric of technology” encounters the challenges scholars have identified when defining both “rhetoric” and “technology,” and it raises issues about how to demarcate the rhetoric of technology from media studies and other cognate fields. One distinguishing feature of both rhetoric and technology is the focus on invention. Giving priority to invention highlights the liminal positionality of a rhetoric of technology, which lies betwixt and between science and commerce, and novelty and familiarity. Considering invention further encourages interdisciplinary reflexivity about the decisions made in technological development and dissemination.

This essay argues that to an unprecedented degree the practices of contemporary science and technology are embedded within complex institutional systems. This embeddedness problematizes received views of rhetorical action and agency, which must be reformulated to locate these principles within larger systems of power/ knowledge. Three sets of resources are identified for this reformulation: theories of organizational rhetoric, Foucauldian studies of knowledge-intensive organizations, and Foucauldian approaches to the philosophy of science.

(1996). A “fusion” of interests: Big science, government, and rhetorical practice in nuclear fusion research. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 26, The Rhetoric of Science, pp. 65-81.