Case #1
A small division of the state government, the Soil and Water Division (SWD), wants to create a memorandum with other agencies to define duties of different levels of government on a urban conversation program. Difficulties they encountered included an unwillingness of other organizations to (a) collaborate in the first place and (b) trust them during the collaboration.
Case #2
The upper-level management of the SWD of the state government is forming their plans for the next five years and asks for input from lower-level workers. However, they only listen to lower-level workers during early meetings, and very few of their suggestions are incorporated into the final plan, breeding resentment.
Bottom Line:
The inability to effectively communicate across boundaries is bad.
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Thus, it is surprising that little research has been done in the past 15 years, especially by scholars in rhetoric and communication. The article suggests that it is perhaps because qualitative studies within organizations are still relatively recent.
Spilka's observations from these two cases suggest groups should share a common goal or attribute in order to be successful, but also have dissimilarities to ensure that the groups need one another. The SWD benefited from relationships with other organizations through access to their resources and an association that helped increase their status, but had problems balancing internal and external goals and values, which caused tension. The SWD also had to deal with incompatible internal goals (empowering others vs. becoming indispensable to districts) and a rapid turnover of personnel.
Strategies Employed:
Social
1. Consider goals and needs of other organizations involved
2. Try to fulfill all goals, but acknowledge that external ones may need to come first
3. Accept that some internal goals may not be productive
4. Always display public loyalty to other organizations
5. Learn as much as possible about other organizations and context
6. Don't act on a problem until you know all the information
7. Always work to maintain power of individual organizations working together
8. Be proactive
9. Volunteer for leadership roles and be involved
10. Determine which organization has ultimate authority
11. Educate others about their social roles
12. Display solidarity in some circumstances
Rhetorical
1. Make sure documents are clear, accurate, and detailed
2. Ensure that organizations in partnership are visible and acknowledged
3. Use reports and evaluation checklists to justify work and accomplishments
4. Repeatedly explain the organization's responsibilities
5. Use visual mapping
6. Change wording in later documents (negative outcome)
7. Watch timing of information and what facts to present
8. Express gratitude, but make your organization very visible
9. Cite information from other organizations to increase own authority
Spilka concludes with implications for other organizations that are thinking about cross-boundary communications; her suggestions include trying some of the above strategies, analyzing the goals and communication tactics of the partnership organization early on, and considering ethics and complications.
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"Educators could make a stronger effort to diversify and expand the types of rhetorical situations their students encounter in courses, particularly in terms of providing them with the experience of communicating with varied, complex internal and external audience with different, possibly conflicting, goals" (389).
Questions
1. When readers are first introduced to the case studies, a lot of the costs are emphasized (tensions, mistrust, etc.). However, Spilka later lists a plethora of effective strategies they employed. How effective were these relationships in reality? How do the other organizations feel about the collaboration? What was the result of the divide between lower-level and upper-level management? Should you ask other organizations or organizational units to be part of the process in the first place, if you know you are not going to value their input?
2. Should newly formed organizations use cross-organizational collaboration in the same way as older or more powerful organizations? Similarly, how does size influence this dynamic?
3. How do we decide what represents an "organizational unit"? (Spilka talks about the importance of related questions on 389.)
4. Do workers have more practice with cross-boundary communication than we might think? For example, is collaborating on a paper a cross-organizational activity (e.g. order of author's names, acknowledgements, etc.)
5. Are some of these strategies common sense and, if they are, do we really need to study them?
6. Is communicating only within the department or even a departmental unit the exception instead of the norm (quote on 373) now?
Connections
It is fairly easy to connect this article with others, because it covers a great deal of social and rhetorical strategies for communication that may also apply to users and members within an organization. In addition, many of these articles bring up cross-boundary communication. For example, "What is Information Design?" by Janice C. Redish suggests that it is important to consider goals for the product early in the process, and Spilka expands on that idea to consider the goals of all the organizations involved. Furthermore, Redish states: "We may specialize or call on colleagues who specialize in helping us with aspects of the process, such as user and task analysis, usability evaluations, copyediting, and proofreading" (215). This is likely to involve collaboration between organizations or organizational units to produce a technical document and may require consideration of who has authority etc.
The next article by Mirel, "Following User-Centered Design Practices", states that any project that considers usability has a variety of objectives, such as enjoyment and ease of learning, and that development teams "choose to build for some dimensions while neglecting others based on project deadlines, resources, and other constraints" (221). Though Spilka asserts that that an organization should to attempt to fulfill all goals, she also admits that external goals may have to be given priority, given the constraint of conflict. Overall, it is a lot about prioritizing. The following article by Kramer and Bernhardt emphasizes general rules about style, and I feel like Spilka attempts to do the same for cross-boundary communication, though both admit that the 'rules' can be expanded and refined.
"The Rhetoric of Design: Implications for Corporate Intranets" also indicates that goals should be conceptualized and considered early, connecting it to Redish and Spilka, and stresses the importance of simplicity and clarity (274). This directly aligns with Spilka's first rhetorical strategy. I find it interesting that Spilka does not directly mention the need for consistency within communications with the same other organization(s) or even in cross-boundary communication in general, and I wonder what she would have to say about that. Foreshadowing the next section, should there be a genre for cross-boundary communication, for example?
As aforementioned, the next article by Berkenkotter and Huckin discusses the sociocognitive view of genres. They state that genres are not just static but flexible and changing. "Genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of what content is appropriate to a particular purpose in a particular situation at a particular point in time" (294). This relates to Spilka's realization that organizations need to be careful of what information to present and when (rhetorical strategy #7) and also that they need to consider content (e.g. rhetorical strategies #1, #4 and #9) as well as form (e.g. rhetorical strategies #2 and #5).
The next article by Freedman and Adam discusses the differences between participation in the classroom and participation in the workplace. They talk about issues of authority (interns not taking the advice of newcomers, for example, or simply referring to it as her or his opinion), and authority is also something that needs to be dealt with in cross-boundary communication. By taking away the teacher-student evaluation framework, issues of collaboration and who plays what role are bound to occur. The dismissive interns remind me of the upper-level management who removed the comments of the lower-level workers, though the situation is, to an extent, reversed.
To generalize, the last two articles before Spilka also address how the classroom and the workplace should interact. Spinuzzi suggests considering the integration of activity networks into classroom practices, and Blakeslee talks about classroom-workplace collaborations, their issues, and their value. Audience also comes up in Spilka's article when she says, "Students might encounter his type of complex audience in internships [Spinuzzi], but they could also encounter it in courses requiring them to produce documentation for actual clients, reviewers, and multiple audience segments [Blakeslee]..." (389). It is interesting to note that she mentions that adapting to varies genres and activity networks have been well studied, though their methods seem to be what she suggests for the classroom (see above quote).
Awesome post! Great connections!
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