Static to Dynamic: Professional Identity as Inventory, Invention, and Performance in Classrooms and Workplaces

Abstract

Although self-assessment is an important genre in both the academy and the workplace, it is often static. The resulting fixed identities are problematic in a creative economy that requires fluidity. Drawing on the work of Carruthers and Goffman, among others, we argue that memory and meditation, encompassing inventory and invention and coupled with rhetorical performance, constitute dynamic self-assessment.

Keywords:

• identity
• invention
• inventory
• meditation
• memory
• performance

Notes

Scholars dedicated to examining memory as an inventional act are few. Carruthers (1998) acknowledged her debt to Yates's (1966) scholarship and pointed out that Yates “believed that the goal of the art of memory was solely to repeat previously stored material” (p. 9). More recently, Bolzoni and Corsi (1992) edited a book on the “culture” of memory. Because Carruthers theorizes memory as “creative tension” (p. 15), her work primarily informs ours.

Eastern traditions have long explored meditation as a spiritual practice (e.g., teachings of Pema Chödrön and Thích Nhất Hanh). And women living and working in premodern convents (e.g., Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila) studied and practiced meditation as well. Attempting to incorporate their work here, however, would do it an injustice. We thus limit our scope to Western and monastic traditions.

Whereas recent scholars—for example, Judith Butler, Natalie Wilson, Susan Bordo, and Carole Smith-Rosenberg—have analyzed gender as performance, we are interested in the performance of professional roles played out in the workplace and thus focus on the theorizing of Erving Goffman, Richard Schechner, and Peggy Phelan.

Inventory and invention, as means to rhetorical performance, are introduced to first-year Tech students and woven through subsequent courses as they move toward graduation.

“Champion” is a term used in both Lean and Six Sigma management systems.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Ann Brady

M. Ann Brady directs the Scientific and Technical Communication program at Michigan Technological University. Her research focuses on the intersections of technical communication and technology studies, rhetorical theory, interdisciplinary studies, and feminism.

Joanna Schreiber

Joanna Schreiber is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Technological University. Her research explores how standardization practices, particularly scientific management systems, affect and are affected by technical communication.