Tracing Genres Through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi, 2003.
Reviewed by Ramsey G. Tesdell
As user-center designed and human-computer interaction (HCI) have become more intimately involved with technical communication, the environments that many professionals work in have been greatly improved by centering the user in the design process. User-center design (UCD) has been seen as the sole alternative to system-center design (SCD) until now.
In Tracing Genres Through Organizations, Clay Spinuzzi identifies an alternative design process where the talents of information designers create an open environment where user innovations are valued in a decentralized system. The method the author employs to identify this alternative process is the subject of this book and is called genre tracing.
In the following review, I summarize the content of the book; I discuss the relationship of the book to the larger body of theoretical work in TC and offer how I found the book valuable to those interested in HCI and technical communication.
Genre tracing utilizes a multilevel and integrated- scope analysis that is able to trace genres and identify destabilizations that occur across multiple levels of activity: macroscopic (activity), mesoscopic (actions) and microscopic (operation). Spinuzzi examines the how the worker interacts with genres and their innovations "in which workers routinely engage as they use information systems to accomplish their activities." Despite genre tracing being steeped in activity theory, Spinuzzi offers very little explanation of activity theory and its limitations in HCI.
Through genre tracing, researchers are able to view and analyze when workers face a problem or destabilization, and as Spinuzzi discovered, the worker innovates and locates a tool set, customizes it, and continues with their task. The worker is not simply waiting around for a designer to fix the system.
Genre tracing provides researchers with a critical tool set to identify these destabilizations, review their causes, and most importantly, follow their effects across multiple levels. In other words, this multilevel view and integrated scope offers the researcher a view of how workers are engaging genres, the problems that occur and how solutions can be found.
Two key concepts in genre tracing are genre and genre ecology. Drawing on work from David Russell and Mikhail Bakhtin genres constitute a world-view of a community and "emerge from cultural-historical activities and represent, reflect, stabilize, and help constitute that activity."
Placing genre within the metaphor of an ecology, allows the understanding of the genre ecology (Spinuzzi, Zachry: Genre Ecologies, p. 170) to be fluid and affected by changes made across various levels of genres. This interconnected and fluidity of the ecology is necessary to understand how various activities negotiate within the body of genres.
An open system approach, transforms the dichotomy of UCD and SCD into a new way of viewing information design. Spinuzzi's study of the Iowa Department of Transportation's Accident Location and Analysis System (ALAS) offers a new design approach to the fast-paced field of technical communication and human-computer interaction.
In this book, Spinuzzi argues that open systems will, and to some extent already do, play a growing role in relationships of power between designer and user. He offers examples of open systems that allow the user to manipulate their environment and innovate solutions. In one such example, the author argues that in a spreadsheet that allows user-end programming, the designer has created an environment that facilitates work, but the user has freedom to create functions, macros and automated tasks that allows her to innovate solutions to destabilizations that occur.
As described above, this book offers an alternative to user-centered design where worker-as-victim and agency is located in the information designer and not with the worker. The author explicitly states empowering the worker as a specific goal of the research. As described in chapter 6, an open system is the most empowering design to the worker.
Genre Tracing in many ways, is a response to Robert R. Johnson's User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts, which argues that user-centered design has accepted the trope of user-as-victim, and as Johnson convincingly argues, centering the user in the design process allows the worker to control his or her own working environment.
Spinuzzi takes aim at his trope by suggesting the power, despite centering the user in the design process, remains with the information designer. Despite the worker participating in the design process, beta-testing versions and suggesting improvements, Spinuzzi argues that Johnson's position articulates the worker's agency as limited by that of the information designer. Spinuzzi envisions the open systems where the worker has agency to control the environment.
While Spinuzzi's genre tracing is a fresh and much needed (often provocative) methodology to understanding information design, it is a method that stands firmly on a bedrock of theory widely used in the technical communication conversation. His arguments contribute significant meaning to activity theory in HCI, genre theory and genre ecologies. Open systems also tackle issues of power and agency of workers. Through this seminal work, he also raises issues among the use of genre in activity theory.
Surrounding these books is an on-going debate as to whether activity theory is the most appropriate framework to discuss genres within. Bonnie Nardi argues that one of activity theory's main goals is to "Understanding the interpenetration of the individual, other people and artifacts in everyday activity"�". (2007) Carolyn R. Miller argues in a recent book review, that Spinuzzi wrongly emphasizes genres as "instruments, mediation and artifacts" that "slights the symbolic." Miller argues that the concept of exigence is entirely absent from Spinuzzi's discussion of genre, which is central to her very own definition. (2007)
I would argue that the weakest point in Genre Tracing is the lack of explicitly connected the research of the ALAS system to theoretical framework and well-adopted theories used in technical communication. While subtly connecting the research to some theories and explicitly to others, his readers are expected to have accepted certain claims that the author takes for granted.
While not explicitly addressing Kenneth Burke's dramatic pentad, I find that the issues of scene-agency and power ratios in Spinuzzi's change depending on the positioning of the pentad. For example, in user-centered design, the scene is an environment where the agency is located with the information designer. In an open system as Spinuzzi describes it, the scene changes from an environment of control where the designer maintains agency, to a scene in which both designer and worker have agency.
In other words, manipulating the scene affects the ratio of power between the designer and worker. As Burke describes them, the power ratios change as the agent, agency, act, scene and purpose are changed.
Applying the dramatic pentad in the fieldwork-to-formalization, the author explicitly discusses the power ratio with the user positioned as the victim. Borrowing language from articulation theory, the power ratio empowers the designer as the hero, and dis-empowers the user.
In examining this book, we see that this book has fulfilled the three basic tenets of cultural studies as laid out by Charlotte Thralls and Nancy Blyler. Spinuzzi successfully complicates and more rigorously contextualizes issues of genre, genre ecologies and activity theory in both a rhetorical tradition and within HCI. He positions himself clearly within an understanding that he, as the researcher is already positioned, and accounts for that in his research.
Tracing Genres through Organizations has already had a profound impact on genre theory, genre ecologies and rattled those encamped behind the previous dyad. While some influential scholars have pointed out limitations to Spinuzzi's work, this book has sparked a much-needed debate.
While genre tracing has already proven itself useful in sparking a thoughtful and engaging conversation, this, however, is not the main contribution that Spinuzzi has placed before scholars in technical communication. He has offered us a powerful tool set with which to analyze destabilizations and their impacts throughout entire organizations. The significant time commitment of genre tracing can be worth much to organizations and scholars interested in conducting in-depth research on worker environments.
This book has also spurred questions that will no doubt lead to more research in fields that are important and influential to technical communication, HCI and information system design. For scholars interested in any of these topics, this book provides sound and relevant information.