Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

Even as business and technical communication professionals and educators are beginning to address these shifts (refer to, for example, Barton & Barton, 1993; Bazerman & Paradis, 1991; Doheny-Farina, 1992), we too often undertake these rethinkings on a symptomatic and ad hoc basis.

Thinking about collaboration in the workplace, for example, continues to struggle with the baggage of individual authorship (refer to, e.g., Doheny-Farina, 1992; Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985). We trail behind not only literary and cultural theorists such as Lyotard and Baudrillard (1983) but also, perhaps most importantly, business and management experts such as Peter Drucker (1992). Drucker's "post-capitalist" organization, for example, can be easily seen as postmodernist tactics applied to the workplace.

It's easy to shrug off Baudrillard's proclamations about the death of the real. It's a little more difficult to ignore Peter Drucker's advice to managers that freelance and contract workers save a company money by not burdening retirement and healthcare funds (a position not appreciated by the many technical and business writers who have seen permanent jobs evaporate to be replaced by less desirable, temporary contract work).