Contemporary genre theory contends that genres are flexible, dynamic, and deeply embedded within the institutional cultures that created them. In this examination of the learning history, an emerging genre of organizational research writing, genre theory is used to examine the ways in which the learning history serves the rhetorical aims of the writer. Understanding the social image, rhetorical dynamics, and formal features of this genre will help organizational writers and researchers use learning histories within a qualitative research methodology. Furthermore, this research serves to demonstrate that genre analysis itself can be a rigorous research methodology.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

The marginalization of business writing as a discipline has been traced to a lack of research and to the that many in the field teach in business departments that do not value the work of scholars in English studies. One way out of this position may be an act of disciplinary border crossing—aligning the field of business writing with progressive voices in business and management. This article describes a framework structured around key theoretical concepts from Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1995). Senge’s text is surprisingly rhetorical, and I examine the associated framework in terms of its potential for invigorating both teaching and research in business writing, thereby building ethos for the profession.

Because communication specialists often lack the power and prestige of other knowledge workers, such as engineers and product designers, managers who direct the work of communication specialists face unique challenges. This study, based on interviews with 11 communication managers, found that their agency and identity were determined both by the structure of the organizations in which they worked and by their use of genres, technologies, and regulatory techniques. With their work undergoing transition because of globalization, outsourcing, and rapid technological change, the stories that these managers tell demonstrate the importance of studying management as it specifically applies to communication specialists.

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