The Power of Writing in Organizations

From Letters to Online Interactions

Anne-Laure Fayard, Anca Metiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136241505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

This book demonstrates the power of writing in informal and formal organizations in the past and the present. It shows how writing, despite long lasting criticisms that can be traced back to Plato, and in spite of its frequent definition as a mere recording medium is in fact a creative mode of communication that supports the expression of emotions, the developing knowledge, and the building of strong communities among faraway individuals. The first part of the book illustrates how this has been true historically. The focus on writing as a fundamental mode of communication – the other being speech or the oral mode – is still important in our technology-infused world, where writing seems to have been reduced to short cryptic text messages or tweets. Precisely because of their heavy reliance on technology, current practices are in need of a deeper understanding that focus on deep as opposed to surface features and unveil the four essential mechanisms – objectification, reflecting, specifying, and addressing – that give writing its creative powers. In the second part of the book, we use contemporary case studies and interviews to illustrate how shifting our focus from the media to the mode of communication and focusing on the mechanisms of writing allows us to go beyond current debates about the capabilities of various communication media and to understand better today's communicative practices. This book is an attempt to unveil the powers of writing as well as to highlight the implications for organizations of the potential loss of these powers in today's world where writing-based distributed collaborations, interpersonal relationships, and online communities are key sources of innovation and support for individuals and organizations.

Part 1

The Power of Writing

Evidence From Letters

CHAPTER
1
Writing as a Fundamental Mode of Communication

What would a world without writing look like? It is hard, even impossible, to imagine. It would be a world without novels and literature as we know it, without administrations and complex organizations, without science, philosophy, and history. It is easy to see then why writing is widely considered one of the most important inventions of mankind: It provides a foundation for our societies as well as for our ways of thinking. In fact, oral cultures (those that rely purely on oral tradition, such as the Homeric Greeks, the Lakota Sioux in North America, or the Mande in West Africa) are nowadays difficult to imagine because purely oral cultures¹ no longer exist, and when we think of words, we visualize them as written symbols to be decoded.

This book is about writing and its powers, and about how this mode of communication has allowed us—it still does!—to express emotions, develop knowledge, and build communities. While many scholars focus on the changes introduced by the new media and their constantly evolving features and engage in debates about whether these new media allow the expression of emotions, the development of knowledge, and the building of communities, we suggest stepping back and focusing on writing as a mode of communication (the other mode of communication being oral). Our analyses of historical correspondences and of more recent communicative practices in organizations and distributed communities follow in the footsteps of literacy scholars and psychologists who have shown that writing is intrinsically creative. We identify and examine four mechanisms—objectifying, addressing, reflecting, and specifying—that are at the core of the writing process and give writing its powers: the power of expressing emotions, of developing knowledge, and of building communities.

Before providing a detailed outline of the book, and to provide context for our argument, we examine the role of writing in organizations and society as well as highlight opposing views on that role. We show that while writing has been central to the development of organizations, scientific knowledge, and communities, people tend to consider it as limited compared to face-to-face interaction, which is often seen as the ideal form of communication. We provide a brief review of different opinions about writing and use contemporary examples of reliance on writing to introduce the idea that writing is a powerful mode of communication, not to be mixed up with the various media in which it is performed. We then outline the main arguments and structure of the book.

THE ROLE OF WRITING IN ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIETY

Writing and organizing have always been intrinsically linked. Indeed, writing was invented approximately 5,000 years ago in the earliest cities and states of Mesopotamia, where leaders’ governance was challenged by population growth: Their societies had escalated from a few hundred villagers to tens of thousands of city dwellers. Such communities could not be run by word of mouth, and most of these new leaders found that, besides maintaining consistent political ideologies and strong militaries, they needed to write things down. Thus, the first examples of writing (such as on tablets in Mesopotamia) did not offer poetry (early literature was oral and learned by heart) or science but rather records of state goods. People wrote what they could not remember: records, for instance—such as which workers had been given their allotment of beer and other accounting matters.² King Hammurabi, who ruled Babylon in ancient Mesopotamia, is famous for being the first king to write laws that could be referenced and known by all. Thus, early writing was not about emotions or science, but about money, laws, trade, or employment. Its development changed the nature of state control and state power from one based on military might to one based on bureaucracy and economy. As recently noted by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, in a BBC program, The First Cities and States: A History of the World, by 3000 BC, managers of Mesopotamian city-states were able to use written records for administration purposes such as keeping large temples running, managing goods, and so forth.³

Ever since its invention, written communication has played a crucial role in organizations’ growth and expansion across the globe (King & Frost, 2002; Yates, 1989). Because it leaves a trace, writing enabled record keeping, knowledge sharing, and the coordination of complex activities spanning a range of specialties and regions (King & Frost, 2002). In particular, writing fixed meaning, which enabled members of an organization or a community to share information and ideas they could refer to without having to endlessly frame the messages (King & Frost, 2002).

As a result, it is difficult to picture what an organization, let alone society, would look like without writing. Nowadays, we live in literate cultures (Ong, 1982/2002), with societies, states, and organizations all relying on writing for records such as birth certificates, diplomas, bills, invoices, and taxes. Our literature has become writing based, so much so that oral literature has become nearly an oxymoron. Even talks or speeches are first written to be later read in public. Furthermore, the complexity of our knowledge (the sciences, philosophy, social sciences) makes us dependent on writing, not only for preserving existing knowledge but also for creating it (Searle, 2010). While the medium has changed—from clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to papyrus in ancient Egypt, parchments during the Middle Ages, or letters in the Renaissance—we still write a lot: from short notes and e-mail (or even text messages on the phone) to long, formal, and complex e-mail that resembles the letters of a bygone era. In fact, the importance of writing for modern organizations continues unabated, with e-mail becoming indispensable (Byron, 2008; Gardner, 2008).

In the following two sections, we will first discuss the tension between writing and speaking and, more specifically, the long-standing contradictory imagination about writing and the presupposed superiority of oral communication. We will then explain how switching the focus of analysis (from the medium to the mode of communication) and the analytical approach (from exclusively contemporary developments to a more encompassing historical perspective) lets us identify the specific mechanisms underlying the powers of writing.

Contradictory Imaginations About Writing: The Tension Between Writing and Speaking

Despite claims that establish writing as one of the greatest inventions of mankind, and despite its central role in the development of our societies and our daily reliance on it, a tacit assumption persists: that face-to-face interaction is the ideal, richest form of communication and that nothing can replace it when it comes to creating knowledge, expressing emotions, or being part of a community. Although we spend a lot of time typing on the computer (reading newspapers, books, papers, e-mail, or searching the Web), and despite the fact that many of our oral interactions are not face to face but rather voice to voice (on the phone or voice calls on the Internet with software such as Skype), we tend to perceive face-to-face communication as “truer” and deeper, more authentic and more genuine. This assumption about face-to-face communication endures in spite of the general discourse about virtual organizations, virtual communities, virtual worlds, and distributed work, which claims that we can work across geographies and spaces as well as build relationships with people we have never seen and will probably never meet. In fact, this assumption led to huge investments during the 1980s in video conferencing systems that would recreate face-to-face interaction and overcome distance. Yet these investments led to mitigated successes, and many companies these days use teleconference calls and a massive amount of e-mail and other shared, text-based documents that are annotated and collaboratively modified. Even phones, first seen as representative of oral communication, are now increasingly used to send text messages instead. In 2009, more than 1.5 trillion text messages were sent or received in the United States.⁴ In the same year, in France, about 62 billion text messages were exchanged.⁵

Thus, we are faced with a tension between recognizing that writing is a key invention and that our cultures are literate and the belief that face-to-face interaction is ideal and that we should therefore try to reproduce it. This tension reflects a conflicting imagination about writing. We fantasize that we can move away from it, even as we do it more and more, as if we were condemned to write, while we dream of not writing and not reading, just talking, as if writing were second best to talking (or good for record keeping, at most), with face-to-face dialogue being the only way to convey or develop “true” knowledge, “true” emotion, or “true” bonds. The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” exemplifies that belief. Written words are seen as “dead signs” that freeze—even kill—creativity.

The contradictory imagination about writing and the presupposed richness of oral communication is not new. Since its invention, writing has been held inferior to the spoken word. Plato, who is considered the first philosopher to write, was a strong critic of writing, and he argued that words on a page are dead things that cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense (e.g., The Phaedrus 275e [Plato, 1940a]). Plato’s criticism of writing bears a striking resemblance to current objections raised by media-richness scholars (Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986). For example, today’s scholars criticize writing for its inability to provide immediate feedback, just as Plato criticized writing for simply being “dead signs.” He also criticized writing because he believed it prevented people from remembering the archetypal Ideas that constitute true knowledge.⁶ That is, because writing produces dead signs, it can only help those who already know to remember, but it cannot teach them anything. This criticism is similar to current objections about the side effects that Googling has on our memory capacities and is reminiscent of older objections that arose when the printing press and telegraph were invented. In fact, over the past 150 years, the advent of each new communication medium has elicited both enthusiasm and criticism (Gardner, 2008). (See the sidebar Historical Criticisms of Writing for a short overview.)

HISTORICAL CRITICISMS OF WRITING

The numerous criticisms of writing formulated over time can be reduced to three main traditions that consider written words as dead signs on a page. (For a detailed review, see Bazerman, 1988, pp. 19–24.) The first criticism dates back to Plato and argues that meaning lies in primary referents, or a world of essences, outside the symbols used to clothe them in texts and that one can find meaning only in the philosophical dialogue. As noted by Bazerman, although we might disregard the idea of a world of essences, this criticism can resonate with our frustrating attempts to capture in written text our thoughts and feelings, only to be thwarted in our attempts to “reach” the meaning we’re trying to convey. This struggle highlights the creative and processual nature of writing through which writers try to match their ideas or emotions with the symbolic system of language.

The second criticism, developed originally by the Sophists, and more recently by structuralists and deconstructionists, purports that the meaning of the text is enclosed entirely within the text, which is an arbitrary cultural system. According to these critics, the text is a system that defines the meaning; without the socially defined constraints of our linguistic system, it could mean anything. This extreme relativism, where language can mean anything once the rules of the game are defined, is tested by examples of translations and collaboration across different groups and societies. Such examples indicate that some common elements of life have a similar meaning despite their expression in different linguistic systems.

The third criticism defines language as a socially constructed system and considers written language, which lacks social context, as an epiphenomenon, a pale reproduction of the living (spoken) language. This corresponds to the belief that communication and community arose from interactive, faceto-face dialogue. This criticism highlights the importance of the social context and specific situations to understand communication. However, as Bazerman notes, writing is far from a decontextualized process: “Writing and reading may take place in privacy and composure, and they may carry out distant social actions, but they are still highly contextualized social actions, speaking very directly to social context and social goals” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 23). This once again refers to the importance of writing as an interaction (between the writer and his or her audience) and as a situated process. Even if written letters or books appear to transcend geographies and times, they are still contextualized—intentionally written for someone and always interpreted.

These similarities between past and current criticisms of written communication suggest that contemporary debates about the capabilities of various media to convey ideas and emotions are but the latest iteration of the deeper tension between the oral and the written. They also hint that, if we want to understand the powers of writing and their underlying mechanisms, we need to bracket the medium of communication to avoid being caught in a battle about a specific technology and its features. We do this in our book by analyzing correspondences and by focusing on writing as a mode of communication rather than on its embodiment in various technologies.

This change in perspective may seem odd at a time when the development of communication technologies is accompanied by a belief in technology’s ability to surmount the shortcomings of distance and writing. This belief has led to a world inundated by videos and images, with people claiming they no longer have time to read and that no document should be more than a page long. Newspapers such as the New York Times or the Guardian increasingly use photo galleries, videos, and infographics to present their content in an attempt to attract “readers” who “don’t have the time” to read. Managers tell their employees to write no more than one page for project proposals because people won’t read more than that and to create PowerPoint presentations that rely on bullet-pointed statements rather than reports or documents filled with “bothersome” sentences. The increase in various forms of visual representations—videos, charts, and infographics—often associated with synchronous communication, has sometimes been described as “a second orality” (Bolter, 2001). This belief in a return to orality posits writing as a mere recording technology, a mode that is potentially outdated and can be replaced by images, videos, and sound.

The power of writing is intact, though, in our technology-infused world. A few years ago, as we were writing about the correspondences we describe in later chapters, we read an article in the New York Times (Seligman, 2009, p. A19) that perfectly illustrated the contradictory imagination that writing is an impoverished yet deeply powerful way of communicating. The article was written by the wife of a U.S. soldier, describing how her husband went away to war and left her alone with first one child, then two, and how after trying phone and Skype—because these technologies, they believed, would allow them to feel closer and share more feelings—they went back to the “good old letters.” She wrote:

We talked—sometimes twice a day—ignoring the popping and snapping on the line and the long delays between our voices on the Webcam. And I fooled myself into believing a two-dimensional image could transmit and sustain a three-dimensional marriage. After all, I could see his eyes, hear his laughter. But he knew nothing of what I thought about our marriage, nothing of my postpartum depression and nothing of my anger at feeling lonely in a life that he chose.

How could I look at him on the Webcam and tell his sad eyes that I felt abandoned? How would I live with myself if, God forbid, the last words he heard from me were painful truths? The pressure to keep our conversations light controlled me, and it brought our marriage to a halt. When he returned from Afghanistan, I almost left him.

The second time, when he left for Iraq, he said: “Let’s not make the same mistakes…. No secrets this time.” I nodded, even though I knew full well that, faced with the Webcam, I would again hide my fears and anger. (Seligman, 2009, p. A19)

As their relationship was draggin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• About the Authors
• PART 1. The Power of Writing: Evidence From Letters
• PART 2. The Power of Writing in Online Communication
• Notes
• References
• Index