Response to Kline and Barker

Kline and Barker’s examination of communities of practice within technical communication provides a nice complement to Carliner’s discussion from last week. Their ethnographic analysis of the Society for Technical Communication’s (STC) Technical Communication Body of Knowledge project added a more relatable human element to Carliner’s more abstract, theoretical discussion of divisions within the profession of technical communication. Also, Wenger’s model for establishing a community of practice was a useful framework for analyzing those divisions.

In discussing the success of one aspect (the personas), the flagging commitment to another (content population), or a philosophical standoff (intellectual property concerns), I was struck by the important role that identity, of both users and contributors, played in these scenarios.

In the case of persona development, “each TCBOK participant could imagine [himself or herself] as a user of the knowledge portal.” This certainly contributed to the success of that initiative, and leads to a sense of communal identity. Contributors were eager to participate because of this shared professional identity.

When that communal identity broke down, the tasks were less successful. When engagement diminished during the content population project, one participant noticed that there was “less to share, less glamor, less kudos….sometimes not fun.” When participants were at an impasse over a paywall for the TCBOK, the line of division matched the line between academics and practitioners. Both of these instances illustrate a breakdown of any sense of shared identity within the profession. In the first example, an assumption was made that content population was someone else’s job, and the work diminished. In the second, academics and practitioners were at odds over ideology.

Even though Kline and Barker mention that Wenger shifted his research focus “to explain how people learn in organizations and how community and identity affect the transfer of knowledge during collaboration,” I think much more can be said about the role individual professional identity played in the three collaborative scenarios discussed.

The communities of practice framework was a helpful tool to explain the scenarios, but it does not describe the sufficiently describe the why as much as the how. I do not see how Kline and Barker’s proposed model for collaboration can work without solving how differences in professional identity inform one’s approach to work. The authors conclude that their model of collaboration “is essential for a negotiated meaning of professionalism because professionalism rests on accepting and then transcending academic or practitioner identity.” I would argue that practitioner vs. academic identity should not be transcended after the fact but mediated and negotiated before collaborating.