(Re)Appraising the Performance of Technical Communicators From a Posthumanist Perspective

Abstract

Composition and rhetoric's attention to writing as cultural performance is expanded to analyze writing as organizational performance. A Foucauldian understanding of discourse enables the diagnosis of a technical writer's annual performance appraisal as grounded in 20th-century Taylorized management principles. Tenets from posthumanism—including a discarding of the liberal humanist subject in knowledge production and a leveraging of distributed cognition for enhanced performance of humans acting in concert with intelligent machines—enable a theoretical framework for repurposing this genre.

Notes

1. Pete (a pseudonym) is a career technical communicator in his mid-50s, at the time of this writing. He has saved his performance appraisals throughout his active career, beginning with his work in a variety of technical writing positions in the Navy, followed by employment in the private sector at an environmental engineering firm, a major aeronautics firm, a Web development company, and then at a commercial software firm, in the capacity of senior technical writer. The performance appraisal included in this article, completed in 2001, is from that position. (He has since held two other jobs, as a quality assurance advisor for an engineering firm and as a strategic communications writer for another military organization.) His participation in this research on performance appraisals has been approved by the IRBs at two institutions where I have worked over the course of this longitudinal research project. (This research project spans 7 years of data collection and analyzes performance appraisals across a variety of professions for both men and women, in the public and private sectors, with an effort at diverse ethnic representation, in various regions of the country, and for entry-level and midcareer employees.) Pete's participation entailed submitting a performance appraisal and participating in a 1-hour, open-ended interview discussing the appraisal instrument, the appraisal review process that produced it, and a one-page questionnaire on his workplace culture that he completed at the beginning of the interview. Pete has also responded by e-mail to a number of queries and requests for further information since then and he has reviewed analyses of his appraisal as a part of informed intersubjective methodology that seeks to enrich a researcher's perspective by enlisting subjects in the analysis.