| My interpretive ethnographic research investigates the influence of social context upon editorial decisions involved in the collaborative ghostwriting of a two-page executive letter of an annual report, a process that took 77 days. The data for the study comprise transcriptions of open-ended and discourse-based interviews (Odell and Goswami 1981) as well as notes and executive letter drafts collected during my five-month participant observation. Data was analyzed with qualitative methods detailed by Miles and Huberman (1984). The language theory of M. M. Bakhtin (1981) was also employed to identify centralizing and decentralizing forces at work in the group-writing process.; The production of the document began with a period of group stability; the dominant forces that encouraged agreement among participants included tight deadlines, a lack of clear direction, and participants' suppression of conflict. Next, forces encouraging conflict dominated the longest phase of the process. Although they were not aware of their different perceptions, at least seven of the eight editors perceived different composite audiences of the executive letter. What is more, editors prioritized individual audiences differently. Other causes of conflict included idiosyncratic conceptions of Standard Edited American English imposed by high-ranking editors, and extended serial communication that caused editorial suggestions to be modified, replaced, or filtered out. In addition, the organizational culture's expectations of the letter were in flux.; My study contributes to our knowledge of "real-world" writing in at least three ways. While most published studies of group writing have focused upon successful collaborations, in describing a largely unsuccessful collaboration, my dissertation presents important drawbacks of peer and hierarchical editing. In addition, although the findings of Selzer (1981) and Broadhead and Freed (1986) document business writing processes that are chiefly linear, my study traces a business writing process that is recursive, although largely unsuccessful. My study is also the first detailed description of the editing of the executive letter, a document with widely acknowledged problems of production and credibility. |
