Collaboration Through Writing: A Modality Perspective on Distributed Work

Abstract

Scholars of communication and organizations have portrayed written communication as poor at supporting the dialogues involved in distributed collaboration. They tend to focus on the features of the medium to the detriment of understanding the mechanisms that make writing, as a fundamental modality of communication, adept at supporting dialogues in distributed work. At the same time, distributed collaborations that rely heavily (and even almost exclusively) on written communication have existed for a long time and flourish today. Also, scholars in other fields (notably, literacy theorists) have shown how writing has dimensions that enable collaboration and knowledge creation. We examine the role of writing in two distributed collaboration contexts, an organization aiming to achieve coordination among different sites and actors, and a scientific collaboration seeking a new theory in physics. We identify four mechanisms of writing – objectifying, addressing, specifying, and reflecting – that support dialogic communication and the enactment of key practices in distributed collaboration: knowledge-sharing, the challenging of ideas, and the synergistic development of solutions. These mechanisms are critical to revitalizing scholars’ conception of the role of writing in distributed work and provide a deep understanding of the dialogic communication enabled by writing. They provide a constructive means of reconciling conflicting claims and findings about how written forms of communication can support distributed collaboration. The mechanisms also offer productive ways for analyzing current communicative practices and suggest implications for the study of distributed work.