Proposal Writing and Leadership: Taking a Hermeneutic Approach Toward Professional Communication as Social Action

Abstract

DEFINING LEADERSHIP DISCOURSE as a subset of communication, this essay positions technical and business communication as potential sites for leadership. Pointing to ways philosophical hermeneutic theory is useful for exploring ethical dimensions of proposals and proposal teaching, and assuming expanded roles for professional communicators in the future, the essay analyzes student-instructor interaction over proposal projects. In the process, it lays the foundation for more reflective theory and practice that may encompass not only professional communication expertise, but also more active citizen leadership on the part of professional communicators. Theory and practice in our discipline of professional communication (and in its sub-specialties of technical and business communication) do not yet fully reflect a world view in which the role of the professional communicator is that of a proactive, reflective practitioner, or citizen-agent of change. Consider, for example, the opportunities for leadership implicated in some business proposal writing, in which writers, as business leaders or as technical experts, but also as citizens, may respond to management, social, and technical problems as they try to improve conditions for business in a downtown shopping area, propose changes in public school financing, or evaluate risks associated with environmental clean-up projects. Despite such increasingly complex social contexts for proposal writing, the prevailing tendency is still to see proposals as rather limited responses to requests for quotes for products and services [RFPs], and to view writers as mere technicians. In the latter instance, the professional communicator need only employ technical expertise and/or persuasion, and is seldom expected to look at ethical implications or social results generated by the success or failure of individual technical documents. As well, proposal writing is often perfunctorily presented in technical and business communication texts, encouraging little reflection on the part of students or teachers about the complex relationships that may be implicated in some proposal research and writing processes.