During our first ENGL 605 meeting we were asked to raise some questions regarding what goals we had for the class, how the class will hopefully help us meet some of our academic and professional expectations. I remember asking something similar to, “How can we research and examine cultural concerns through the eyes of a technical communicator? Can technical communication and culture coexist in an academic, practical, and useful way?” (I have previously considered the two exclusive). As someone interested more in the ‘communication’ rather than ‘technical’ element of our enterprise, I was mightily pleased with this week’s readings.

Certainly Greg Wilson’s “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism : Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy” was no exception. Examining the capability of agency within the professional capacity and discourse of technical writing, Wilson depends on Robert Reich’s three-tiered hierarchy of the postmodern working world to help transplant and sustain the technical communicator’s role in an industrial position out of the world of rote practice onto the shores of local and global change (We are again under the reich of Reich. I am coincidentally going through a Reich phase. Go figure).

Though Wilson’s article was uplifting in a few ways, there appeared a deeply tacit classist ring underlying Reich’s hierarchical system as used by Wilson. When Wilson claims, “At times when a company is overtly trying to change the way it does business, employees have opportunities to articulate themselves as symbolic analysts,” I’m sure he speaks only of those employees who have the opportunity to metamorphose into symbolic analysts—those mired in routine production service, and to a much lesser extent an in-person service, are not equipped to mobilize themselves (85). In this light, is Reich’s model apt for class criticism? Or perhaps, the reality is that harsh, that we will, and have, worked in an economy whose rewards are mirrored by one’s class and Reich’s model reasonably follows.

Classist or no, a perhaps more apposite question might sound something like, ‘When do we know when a company is ‘trying to change the way it does business’?” That is, when do we know to assert ourselves to a symbolic analyst position if we are currently not occupying one?

Wilson points out that, “The obvious implication of Reich’s classifications is that if workers want job satisfaction (and if not job security, perhaps lasting market- ability), they either need to train for a job in the symbolic-analytic category or rearticulate their job in terms of symbolic analysis. In other terms, meaningful agency is most available to workers in the symbolic-analyst category” (84). So when do we recognize change to enact a rearticulation?

I would argue that instead of waiting for the company to “overtly [try] to change the way it does business” (emphasis mine), technical communicators with hopes of being symbolic-analytic workers (or technical communicators already in that position and hoping to register themselves in its higher echelons) should -and here’s where this comes full circle- use systems thinking to distinguish when to (re)articulate (85). To not wait for the overt overhaul, but rather, the micro and local change. Depending upon how an industry/corporation is organized, maybe this quiet, not overt, change is departmental. But by, “learning to see the world not as discretely compartmentalized units but more as a web of interrelated and overlapping elements,” we can distinguish from Modernist notions of linear and hierarchical change to Postmodernist notions (87-88). Growing webs spinning with opportunities for agency (by way of Reich’s four principles) giving rise to dynamic, system-analytic behavior, not maps.