--people often suck at communicating in general, but they often REALLY suck when it comes to their company/department trying to talk/work with another company/department.
--also, there's shit for research on this topic (according to Spilka; that was not my commentary on Spilka's piece!)
2) the solution:
--Spilka does some primary research of her own (thus beginning the solution to the latter of the two problems)! She observes some water/soil department of a state government try to work within their division (the different levels of workers, from professionals to specialists to technicians....I also found it interesting that she ranked them like that, especially considering that she includes secretaries as an upper level professional...but moving on), with other divisions with the overarching natural resources department, and lastly, with outside local/state/federal agencies. Specifically, she looks at two situations. 1) the soil people are working with the outside agencies to make a document agreeing on different responsibilities of states and districts for some save-the-earth plan. 2) the professionals are working with the technicians and outside agencies to agree on a 5-yr plan on what the soil people's goals should be. this results in CHAOS! sort of. In actuality, people were not totally content. But what else is new, right?
--Spilka then proceeds to tell us some pretty obvious information about pros and cons to cross-boundary communication. For instance, a good thing about doing it is that you can combine the skills/strengths of two different organizations. You can also gain a good rep by being nice to other people which will help you get stuff in the future. Status, power, and authority are yours for the taking! Bad things: inefficiency, bias, distortion, tension in conflicting goals. This is especially scary for people when they realize that they might have to lose some power while working with others, even though they want to be rather independent. this results in selfish actions, like encroaching on others' territory or creating bathroom goals (essentially a goal that you don't want the other "bad guys" to know you have as a priority). Another super sketch one is trying to preserve your own identity while adapting to interactions with partnerships. According to Spilka, this resulted in always having to reexamine your organization's roles and responsibilities, and who has authority, and who people are in general. In other words, cross-boundary communication is actually just inter-personal communication on a broad scale, and you have to deal with people you might not get along with. Welcome to life!
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--Spilka leaves us with implications for the future. she gives 4 concrete suggestions: 1) use her hints. 2) concentrate on ethics. 3) we should think more about the complexities of cross-boundary communication. 4) give more thought to their external audiences/partners when creating documents for them. Spilka also says we need more research. she says teachers should stress this more as a possible rhetorical situation students will have to deal with.
3) questions:
a) why do you think there is a dearth of research on this topic? I know I'm kind of being a hater here, but honestly, a lot of this stuff seemed really obvious to me. Like, the bottom line is remember to incorporate everyone and share your feelings. Is maybe the reason there's not a lot of research because we shouldn't have these problems at all? Can we really get anything beyond "use common sense during this communication"?
b) do you think that perhaps instead of approaching this research in the way spilka did, there would be a better way, such as, "WHY do people suck at cross-boundary communication?" instead of "how can we fix the problems we have with cross-boundary communication?" I think it might get us a more nuanced answer than the one-size-fits-all solution she gives.
c) what are some examples of how you would teach cross-boundary communication in your class? Spilka suggests, that courses could require "them to produce documentation for actual clients, reviewers, and multiple audience segments situated in a variety of on- and off-campus settings". ...I dont see how this would work for someone who is not already working. And how do we grade this? whether it makes sense to US? or would we have to get the commentary of the audience they write to? because i feel like the former would result in a lot of pseudotransactionality, and wouldn't be very user-centered....
d) what happens when you start out as the very obvious underdog in cross-boundary communication? like, you're just a tiny little company that doesn't want to get screwed by the big, old company. Do you really act the same as each other? like...obviously, some of the strategies suggested by spilka should stay, like understand how your partner communicates and functions and what their goals are, but this seems like it was written from a perspective of a company that is used to getting its way all the time. for example, "acknowledge that external goals of partnerships may need to take precedence over internal goals" sounds as if youre explaining to a child, "hey, you can't ALWAYS get your way." do the little guys need to stand up for themselves MORE, or LESS? I just see a serious power differential getting in the way of these overly-simplistic strategies that Spilka offers.
4) A couple of connections:
The Berkenkotter and Huckin article argues that genres are a result of its community's needs, and a good author knows when to stick to the rules and when to tweak them. I think this is similar to Spilka's because essentially, you need create documents (and just communicate in general) for your NEW community, which is your organization and another. You need to know when to do things the old way (your way) and when to change things because your NEW community needs it. Genres can be seen as a reflection of the actual community in this sense, because they (both the original community and the genre) will be forced to evolve when the community changes. your communication and goals will have to change too when you bring in another organization. ....i feel like that could have been condensed a lot. my bad.
The Freeman/Adams and Spinuzzi articles both talk about the problem of university-oriented writing, and this made me question the implications Spilka gives us. She suggests teachers attempting to expand the rhetorical situations students write for to include this. she explicitly says that itd work better in internships. so i think it is important to take into consideration these two other articles when following spilka's advice.
The Redish article talks alot about making documents user-centered. Defining her topic, she says, "information design is what we do to develop a document (or communication) that works for its users." She also stresses the planning aspect. I thought that it was interesting because it seems like what Spilka is talking about is good information design, except that it deals with the user being your partner and you. Essentially, Spilka is saying that for good cross-boundary communication, we should be doing the same things we need to do for documents that are meant to end up farther from home.
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