Abstract
Abstract In the communications of modern organizations, text sharing and knowledge management are mainly digital. The digital systems that frame many types of communication consist of, e.g., intranets and document sharing software that are occasionally exchanged for new systems. Employees have to adjust to modified routines and learn new systems, and management has to make decisions about digital systems and how these are to be integrated with work processes and knowledge management. In this article, we contribute to research on work-life literacies by highlighting the increasingly frequent issue of digital text sharing in modern workplaces through the study of commercial companies, mainly through ethnographic observations and interviews. The theoretical framework comes from New Literacy Studies where literacy practices, i.e., common patterns of using reading and writing, form a key concept. Moreover, the sociolinguistic concept of metadiscourse is applied in order to uncover the reflexive orientation of participating professionals towards digital text sharing. The results show that these professionals relate the combination of digital text sharing and technological and organizational change to problems, obstacles and potential risks; ambitions of enhancing digital text sharing may exclude certain groups, and changes in digital text sharing systems per se may cause professionals to lose control. These risks are often associated with access to information: a person who cannot access information in their organization has a lower degree of agency or power over their situation. The results are discussed in light of theories concerning modern work life from New Literacy Studies.
Highlights
Digital text sharing is paramount in the work life of today
Employees have to adjust to modified routines and learn new systems, and management has to make decisions about digital systems and how these are to be integrated with work processes and knowledge management
Step 1 in the analytical procedure described above, i.e., coding the total data for instances where participants make digital text sharing relevant, resulted in over 2/3 of the data items including coding for digital text sharing
Summary
Digital text sharing is paramount in the work life of today. Writing a text in a modern organization often entails sharing it with others through digital tools, both during the writing process and when the text is completed. Since recurring activities involving reading, writing and texts can be conceptualized as literacy practices (Barton and Hamilton 2000), we regard digital text sharing here as a literacy practice, as defined by New Literacy Research (herafter NLS, see Barton and Hamilton 2000; Street 2003; Papen 2005). In doing so, compared to research on finished text products, NLS research sometimes brings previously backgrounded aspects of literacy to the foreground, e.g., the filling of forms in work life (Karlsson and Nikolaidou 2011; Tusting 2010) and the networking behind publishing academic texts (Lillis and Curry 2013). This article can be regarded as an attempt to bring to the foreground the aspect of digital text sharing in modern organizations (for the aim of the article, see below). The concept focuses on the actions and strategies of sharing as such, in a more narrow sense than the broader concept of digital communication (Blåsjö et al forthcoming)
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