An Engineer's Writing and the Corporate Construction of Knowledge

Abstract

Previous research on the writing process in the workplace has given inadequate attention to the collaborative nature of work in an organization. Examination of the processes an engineer goes through as he writes a routine and a non-routine document shows that those processes are strongly affected by the degree to which his company has previously accepted the claims he makes as given or as knowledge. Claims are established as knowledge in an organization by being “inscribed,” that is, by having a series of increasingly general symbolic representations assigned to them by a series of writers at work. The inscribing process both resembles the writing process and affects it.