Reading Clay Spinuzzi’s “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Technical Communication in the Age of Distributed Work” and excerpts from Tapscott & Williams’ Wikinomics gives the sense that the workplace is seeing paradigm shift from modular work model towards distributed work model i.e. from “the stable, rationalized, modular work structures that characterized the Industrial Revolution’ (266) towards “coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts that characterize such work” (266). The readings also present wonderful instances of distributed work model in action, such as in Geek Squad and Best Buy and few others where bottom-up and horizontal approach appears to be working more innovatively than conventional up-down or vertical approach. More interesting to see in these readings is the workers’ use of Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace and the administration’s exploitation of their rhetorical skills and analytical power for policy making and work execution as opposed to conventional up-down communication, executive and decision-making system.
Basically, the readings are highlighting the fact that the traditional hierarchical working system is collapsing and more egalitarian networked trend is emerging which has implications for both the industries/organizations and the workers including technical writers. A permanent staff, job and static/physical workplace is increasingly becoming the thing of the past and job switching, multiskilling/deskilling and virtual, collaborative work patterns are characterizing the workplaces and workers. Spinuzzi thus describes the emerging distributed work pattern in the workplaces:
Control over organizations is just as distributed as ownership is
in managerial capitalism; digital technologies play a vital role in
forming, interconnecting, and even dispersing nodes; consumption is
individuated,taking the form of the desire for unique identities and
unique experiences;relationships between customers and businesses
become more important,even as the distinctions between them become
unclear; and customers look for stable beneficial relationships among
consumers and producers that support these individual experiences (cf.
Sless, 1994). These needs are supplied not by large, vertically
integrated companies but by temporary federations of suppliers for
each individual transaction. These federations are endlessly
recombinant. Lifelong employment is replaced by what Zuboff and Maxmin
call “lifelong learning” —what Donna Haraway calls continual deskilling
and retraining, and Castells calls multiskilling—as workers cope with
continually changing arrangements" (271).
Similarly, Tapscott & Williams offering the case of Geek Squad whose employees use “blogs, wikis, and other new tools to collaborate and form ad hoc communities across departmental and organizational boundaries" (240) argue that “openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally [are the] fixtures of the future
workplace” (240). Another climactic moment for Robert Stephens, the CEO of Geek Squad that authors present here and that impressed me is his moment of epiphany at the discovery of the fact that his staff is not using Wiki that he set up as much as the Battlefield 2 Online game for sharing information and experiences in the workplaces: "Instead of trying to set an agenda," he said, "I'm now going to try and discover
their agenda, and serve it." (243). Stephens made Battlefield part of the Geek Sqaud.
No doubt that the work environment is in transformation and that integration of new technologies in the workplaces are indicating that distributed work model is sure to dominate the work places soon and TC needs to be ready to face the challenges but few questions are gripping my mind as I meditate over this transitional phase in the workplaces:
1. The authors have talked mostly about the service sector whose major target is customer satisfaction and profit-making and the distributed work model seems to fit them well. But I wonder if the same model works for military and similar cases where strong chain of command and physical presence of individuals in, for instance, camps/battlefield is required for the execution of their duties/work.
2. The authors project that the future workplace will see the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies, workers’ rhetorical/analytical skills and interpersonal communication skills. I here wonder again how realistic is it to expect every worker to be technologically proficient and rhetorically savvy?
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