excerpt from
Migrations:
Strategic Thinking About the
Future(s) of Technical Communication
Published in Reshaping
technical communication:
New directions and
challenges for the 21st century.
(Ed. Barbara Mirel &
Rachel Spilka) Mahwah, NJ:
Brenton Faber
Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Clarkson University
Clarkson University seems to be an appropriate place for the series of discussions we have had that led to the creation of this chapter. Located in St. Lawrence Country in upstate New York, we are about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border, about 90 minutes from Canada’s capital city, Ottawa and a nearly the same distance from the metropolitan center of Montreal. An hour south lays Lake Placid and the Adirondack National Park, which still holds the lodges of some of America’s wealthiest families. The park has recently enjoyed a renaissance of tourism, hosting numerous business conferences, two international triathlons, a marathon, numerous hockey tournaments, and figure skating competitions. Last spring, bird watchers from across the world came to the park to see the three-toed woodpecker, a rare species in North America.
Clarkson’s faculty is comprised of researchers from nearly every continent on the globe and the school is a world leader in numerous scientific and engineering fields. Like most universities, we enjoy the latest technological innovations, our students come from all over the world and many bring with them even more expensive automobiles than those located in the business school parking lot. The local college town, Potsdam NY boasts Mexican, Indian, Chinese, and Italian restaurants, and until her recent move to Switzerland, Canadian country music star Shania Twain was occasionally sited at the local grocery store.
At the same time, “The North Country” continues to be the poorest region in New York State and St. Lawrence County, where Clarkson in located, is the third poorest county in the north. Per capita income in St. Lawrence country in 1996 was $15, 994. Per capita income in the North Country was $17,110, $58.5 percent of the State ($29,221). In 1990, single parents headed 14.3 percent of the county’s households and 47 percent of these families had annual incomes below the federal poverty line. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of mobile homes in the county increased by 62 percent.
Thus, in many ways, Clarkson embodies the best and the worst of globalization. On the one hand, globalization has created a uniquely diverse and advantaged community in this relatively remote outpost. It brings tourists from all over the world to the area, supports cutting edge research, and provides residents with access to nearly every consumer product the globe offers. At the same time, unemployment in this region has remained stubbornly high, rural poverty is endemic, few people actually born in the area ever graduate from one of the three universities here, and fewer university graduates stay in the area after graduation. The gap between “town” and “gown” continues to grow as the gap between rich and poor, cultured and illiterate, mobile and trapped also widens.
What do we mean when we use the term globalization and what does this have to do with the future of technical communication? First, to be clear, our purpose in this chapter is not to suggest that unless technical communication as a field embrace globalization we will end up on the wrong side of the globalization duality. Such an argument would be callous and ill-conceived. It would also work against many of the things we are currently doing to try to obviate the many problems associated with globalization in our community. Nor is this chapter a critique of globalization. Despite recent attempts to reduce the impact of globalization into simple categories, we see this to be a much more complex and diverse process that does not lead to obvious answers. Instead, we hope to present some of the key ways this new phenomenon is changing patterns of work and economic value and how these changes may influence the ways technical communicators are positioned in the workplace and in the economy. We hope that this chapter prompts a larger discussion within the field of technical communication of issues like organizational value, knowledge-value versus product-value, and the global effects of our work on both growing and struggling economies.
Globalization, as described by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, columnists for The Economist, refers to the integration of the world economy into one large market (xvi). According to this model, products will have a global audience and distribution and financial decisions will respond to and influence economic conditions far beyond any single country’s borders. As demonstrated by our brief introduction to the economic conditions surrounding Potsdam NY, globalization is commonly seen to bring with it great financial advantages for some people, but tremendous burdens and hardships for others. Increasingly, these gains and losses are the result of two fundamental changes in modern economic markets: the decline of labor value and the accompanying rise of intellectual capital. This shift in value has occurred because in a global context, industrial work can be outsourced to the country or the community that offers the lowest wage and production cost—thereby devaluing the process of production. Whereas this process was typically associated with low-skilled labor, in a global context, even high skilled labor can be exported and sold to the lowest-bidder.
As outsourcing drives down the value of production, products can no longer compete solely on price. They must compete on design, function, usability, and the value they add to the consumer. In such a context, what becomes valued is not the actual product, or the ability to make that product, but the ability to imagine, design, innovate, and teach new products and new methods of production. In the context of global competition, the ability to create and access new knowledge, share that knowledge throughout the company, and then leverage that knowledge into new products and services becomes more valuable than the ability to simply manufacture a product. Whereas production is the key feature of the industrial economy, knowledge is the key feature of the information economy. In the discussion below we will elaborate this distinction and demonstrate how it applies to the ways technical communicators position themselves within organizations.
This switch in the ways the economy derives value has several troubling implications for technical communication. As a practitioner-based field, much of our knowledge-creation and use has been directed towards the development and creation of products. More problematically, oftentimes, our products simply support other products. Thus, we have defined our value through the products technical communicators produce: our manuals help files, interfaces, web pages, courses, and tutorials
Even though the transition to an information-based economy has certainly spurred overall growth in technical communication and improved on the overall situation of most academics and practitioners in our field, in this chapter, we argue that this growth is expectant but not sustainable. What we mean here is that people outside our field have predicted the potential value technical communication as a knowledge-based-resource can bring to a project. However, we predict that because the field itself has been less willing to take-on the role of knowledge producers rather than product-producers this current growth trend will not continue interminably. Thus, we argue that in order for technical communication to thrive in an information-age economy, our field as a whole must develop an entirely new way of understanding the relations between school and work and between what is knowledge production and knowledge use.
Strengthening the ties between academia and industry would provide important avenues for developing a more powerful and valued role in the emerging knowledge-economy as knowledge creators and innovators. Although our field has debated the nature of the relationship between industry and academy for decades, we have done little in a systematic way to build better relationships based on knowledge creation rather than on process efficiency or product creation. Our field’s prejudice towards product knowledge and away from creative or innovative knowledge building is evident in the many practitioner calls we have heard for academic research to recommend most efficient font types, color coding schemes, or usability tests rather than calls for more innovative ways for technical communicators to add value to companies, build the knowledge-base of an organization, or develop more effective problem solving and consulting skills within the field.
A centerpiece of our argument in this chapter will be what we are calling a corporate-university hybrid. Here, we are referring to mutually supporting institutions that together enable each other to be stronger players in a knowledge economy.. Rather than position academics and practitioners in theory/practice, knowledge/product, or creator/user dualities or rather than view us as competitors for scarce resources, we see academics and practitioners as currently occupying distinct and separate professions tied by a common insight into the value communication brings to organizations and workplace processes. But by working together to reinforce our strengths and our common visions, we can provide the best learning and workplace experiences for future technical communicators in both industry and academia.