Product versus process: the occupational rhetoric of academic work

Abstract

My dissertation argues that occupation is a rhetorical construct aided and impeded by cultural binaries such as scientism/humanism, intellectuals/managers, product/process. The product/process binary is frequently used within the field of rhetoric and composition to describe the contention between those who assess writing as a discrete, quantifiable performance and those who do not. I adopt this dichotomy as a metaphor for the tensions associated with the ¿corporate turn¿ in academic culture marked by a growing emphasis on forms of accountability, management, and curricula that appear to privilege short-term, quantifiable gains and consumer expectations over the principles and practices of liberal learning. In academic institutions the curriculum is an occupational metaphor, a way of seeing the true work of the organization in terms of a system of learning experiences. Extending the theories of twentieth-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke, I develop a methodology called ¿occupational criticism¿ to identify and interpret contradictions between academe's rhetorical ideals (as professed by college and university mission statements) and the institutional structures used to reify those ideals (such as the use of web-based education to fulfill the aims of academic accessibility). Through an analysis of such contradictions, this dissertation becomes a cross-section of the dilemma Burke calls the bureaucratization of the imaginative , ¿the vexing things that happen when men try to translate some pure aim or vision into terms of its corresponding material embodiment, thus necessarily involving elements alien to the original, ¿spiritual¿ (¿imaginative¿) motive¿ ( Attitudes Toward History ii). While many types of academic occupation are explored in this study, I conclude that the most significant is that of academic bureaucrat because of the changing nature of this role and because of what those changes may ultimately signify for academe's culture and rhetoric. In a period when marketplace culture is undeniably permeating the academy, bureaucratic roles are being performed by everyone¿not just by titled administrators¿and those roles (those occupations ) are being altered by post-capitalist terms and conditions of productivity that attempt to synthesize ideals of intellectual and managerial work.