Opening the Aperture: Research and Theory on Collaborative Writing

Abstract

Readers of any major professional journal like the Journal of Business Communication put the articles they read to this test: How does the article extend research and theory in the discipline? The two articles that follow respond quite successfully to this test, broadening our appreciation for the complexity of theory and research on collaborative writing and stimulating our engagement with the subject. As you read When Discourses Collide: A Case of Interprofessional Writing in a Medically Oriented Law Firm (When Discourses Collide), consider the following issues: the conflicts that people trained in very different professions--in this case, law and nursing--face when attempting to write collaboratively, the causes for the conflicts as they may be linked to the power relations and differing assumptions the two groups hold about writing and knowledge-making, the costs and benefits of conflict, and the roles that professional writers may take to assist the two groups in developing discourse that serves the organization's goals. Note, too, how all these issues are carefully situated in the context of earlier research and theory on discourse communities, conflict, power relations, and narrative, and how the author, Jason Palmeri places his analysis of collaborative writing in the activities of three key organizational groups--the complaint team, the litigation team, and the training team--whose work is vital to the firm's success. Palmeri's work contributes to a line of qualitative research that uses the concept of discourse community to explain some of the difficulties--and even failures-that business people can experience when their training, assumptions about discourse, and patterns of interaction learned in one discourse community interfere with their ability to establish effective collaborative writing practices in an organization that they join subsequently. Earlier research on the topic of collaborative writing and discourse communities includes studies of the difficulties faced by technically trained people collaborating on problem-solving reports (Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985), non-strategically trained business people writing group strategic reports (Forman, 1989), engineers working on proposals (McIsaac & Aschauer, 1990), and lawyers composing specialized briefs requiring an understanding of social services (Locker, 1992). Palmeri's article helps to fill an acute gap in our knowledge of collaborative writing within specific local conditions, such as the legal practice that Palmeri describes. In reading Building a and Nomenclature of Writing to Improve Interdisciplinary Research and Practice (Collaborative Writing Taxonomy), think about the huge challenges that researchers and practitioners of collaborative writing face for lack of a shared lexicon and common taxonomy for collaborative writing. To compound the challenges, most issues (e.g., group conflict, writers' roles, groupware choice and use) cut across disciplinary boundaries, bringing into play the mix of theoretical perspectives, assumptions, and lexicons that can lead to confusion when researchers from one discipline import from other disciplines. What's more, the individual disciplines with an interest in research on collaborative writing, like composition or information systems, are themselves interdisciplinary. For instance, composition scholar Kenneth Bruffee's pioneering work on collaborative writing in the 1970s and 1980s depended on theoretical work from scholars in several other disciplines, including Geertz from anthropology, Vygotsky from psychology, Fish from literary theory, and Kuhn and Rorty from philosophy. It is these large challenges that Collaborative Writing Taxonomy addresses, offering an interdisciplinary taxonomy for collaborative writing and charting the dominant configurations in which it is conducted. Consider, too, the case that the authors, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Aaron Curtis, and Michelle Rene Lowry, make for the usefulness of the taxonomy by showing its application to the production of a collaborative-writing technology. …