| Discourse, technology & change New York & London: Continuum 2007 click here for sample text Early essays from this project: Technologizing change: Rhetoric of software implementation at a university campus (2003 Sigdoc) Description Discourse, Technology and Change presents a detailed analysis of discourses that initiate, enable, and stabilize social change in organizational contexts. Focusing on everyday texts used to create technical and social change, the book offers a detailed study of the intersections of discourse, technology, and persuasion illustrated through an empirical case study of technological change in an academic institution. The book seriously engages the claim that texts dually construct and reflect social networks and social action. Working at both the mirco and macro textual level, the book examines the functions of change discourse providing a framework for understanding how change is constituted within social networks. "Faber brings together a theoretically sophisticated account of technology, language and change with a detailed ethnography of one university's experiences with corporate outsourcing of campus technology services. Faber's analysis is ingenious, combining several functional linguistic tools from synatx, presuppositions and modality, to politeness theory. The book shows how an adept organizational rhetor uses institutional language to define a situation and organizational reality despite audience, material and social constraints." Professor Charles Bazerman, University California, Santa Barbara Community action & organizational change: Image, narrative, identity Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP 2002 Brenton D. Faber’s spirited account of an academic consultant’s journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change. Blending Faber’s firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative book is among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell. Faber argues that an organization’s identity is created through internal stories. When the organization’s internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization’s identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization’s identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization’s discordant narratives. “This is an excellent book! It is well conceived, beautifully written, and compelling in its case for using narratives to reconnect universities to their communities. . . This book has potential to be considered an important, ground-breaking study in the area of community studies and organizational studies.” H. L. Goodall Jr., author of Casing a Promised Land: The Autobiography of an Organizational Detective as Cultural Ethnographer |
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