Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

The most famous example of the professionionalization of postmodernism is, of course, business and management (including the work of Peter Drucker [1992] and others, as well as Reich's [1991] work that I draw upon in the discussion of symbolic-analytic work). But we can find similar perspectives in cinema, computer science, physics, and composition and literature.

Greg Myers (1991), for example, gives review writers in the sciences this role of management and organization:

[The issue of review articles in the sciences] is a problem because the one characteristic that the handbooks agree defines a review article—which can be interpretive or merely bibliographical, short or long, popular or specialized, in a review journal or in a report journal—is that it does not report original work. So what does it do?

I will argue that the writer of a review shapes the literature of a field into a story in order to enlist the support of readers to continue that story. At any moment in the development of the field, the past has a canonical shape, recorded in the historical introductions of textbooks, in citations of "classic" articles, in eponymous terms. But the present is still a scattering of articles reporting various results with the various methods aimed at various immediate problems. (p. 45)