Theorizing Structure and Agency in Workplace Writing

Abstract

This article proposes ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach for resolving the structure-agency binary and for treating the activities of writers in organizations as simultaneously embedded in and constitutive of organizational context. Structure is defined as those elements of social circumstances that writers orient to as relevant to their immediate writing task. In orienting to these elements, writers reproduce them as external and constraining social facts. The value of ethnomethodology is illustrated with data from a study examining the social practices that surrounded the writing of an evaluation report by two managers in an educational institution.