Technical communicators often employ user-centered design approaches to design textual artifacts that mediate workplace activity. The artifact... Show moreTechnical communicators often employ user-centered design approaches to design textual artifacts that mediate workplace activity. The artifact’s designer is positioned as an expert who knows what is best for the artifact’s user (worker). I argue that those methods discount the role of the worker. I apply activity theory as the conceptual framework and genre tracing as the research method to analyze a corpus of documents that mediated the training evaluation activity at ABC Pharmaceutical (a pseudonym for the company’s name) to explain the evolution of those artifacts and theorize the reasons for their historical development. My findings show that their evolution – whether in the form of new genre selections, modifications, splicing, or even abandonment of genres – was influenced by worker efforts that challenged the official expert solutions. The implications of these findings to the fields of technical communication and business research are that even though design experts and business leaders may want to control the organizational strategies, work processes, and mediating artifacts/tools that accomplish those actions, workers will challenge official positions. There are dialectical forces at work that reflect official centripetal efforts that seek organizational stability from formal, normal, and regular structures versus centrifugal efforts that are disruptive and ad hoc in nature. The genre battles Idiscuss in this dissertation reflect a process that should be accepted as healthy and normal by both leadership and design experts, rather than feared or overly regulated. Ph.D. in Technical Communication, May 2017 Show less
