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Special Issue of TCQ: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work spinuzzi 05/30/2005 - 04:34 Call for Proposals: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work

Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin are excited about it and see it as a moment of new liberation and choice for consumers and workers alike. Gilles Deleuze saw it as horrifying, even worse than the disciplinary society Michel Foucault described. It goes by many names: Distributed capitalism, the control society, the informatics of domination, the support economy. Whatever its name, the characteristics are the same: control over organizations is as distributed as ownership is in managerial capitalism; digital technologies play a vital enabling role; consumption is individuated, taking the form of the desire for unique identities and unique experiences; direct relationships between customers and businesses become more important; and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences. These needs are supplied not by large, vertically integrated companies but by temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly recombinant. Work is fragmented temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily. Lifelong employment is replaced by what Zuboff and Maxmin call "lifelong learning" -- what Donna Haraway calls continual deskilling and retraining.

We can see the early signs of distributed work in the service sector, in the outsourcing of technical support, and in places like eBay and Craig's List. But we can also see it in the rise of homeschooling, the weakening of unions, the shift from stable identity politics to unstable subsegments, and the popularity of automobile customization. We can detect it in the proliferation of time management methods, the popularity of distance education, the increasing importance of content management systems, and the early success of Howard Dean's campaign. We can trace its contours in Brenton Faber's discussion of corporate universities; Johndan Johnson-Eilola's explorations of dataclouds; and Teresa Harrison and James Zappen's development of online community spaces and attendant research methods.

What does distributed work mean to us as technical communicators? How is it changing our field? Should we adapt to it, critique it, or resist it?

In this special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, we will discuss distributed work's implications for technical communication theory, methodology, pedagogy, ethics, and practice. In particular, we will consider topics such as:

* How is technical communication practice changing, and how will it change in the future, as it adapts to distributed work? How will it accommodate, resist, or redirect? * How do we teach technical communicators who expect to go into the support economy? What are our political-ethical responsibilities and our logistical challenges? What changes do we need to make to pedagogical theory? * What roles will technology play in an economic climate in which knowledge, expertise, and intelligence are widely distributed? For instance, how can software documentation survive when users routinely Google for answers? * What theoretical frameworks are useful for theorizing the shift to distributed work? What case studies can be used to illustrate it and explore its implications for technical communication? * What research methods do we need to adapt or develop to apply to distributed work in technical communication research? What methods should we abandon? * Finally, what are the contours of distributed work? What are its promises and horrors?

Schedule:

* 1-2 page proposal for paper: March 15, 2006 * Full paper (if proposal is accepted): June 30, 2006 * Scheduled publication of issue: Summer 2007

Contact information: Send proposals in .DOC, .RTF, or .HTML to

Clay Spinuzzi clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu

Also, please contact the editor by email if you would like to be considered a reviewer for this special issue.

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