Journal of Business and Technical Communication Jul 2019

The Infrastructural Function: A Relational Theory of Infrastructure for Writing Studies

Sarah Read Portland State University

Abstract

This article theorizes the term infrastructure as a framework for articulating how writing products, activities, and processes underwrite organizational life in technical organizations. While this term has appeared broadly in writing studies scholarship, it has not been systematically theorized there as it has been in other fields such as economics, computing, and information science. This article argues for a four-part framework that incorporates and builds on Star and Ruhleder’s relational theory of infrastructure. Fieldwork from a federally funded supercomputing center for scientific research operationalizes the theory for its contributions to writing studies scholarship and its applications for industry and writing pedagogy.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
2019-07-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651919834980
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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Cited by in this index (22)

  1. Carradini et al. (2026)
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  2. Comi (2022)
    "It must be a system thing": information infrastructure genres as sites of inequity
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  3. Rouge et al. (2022)
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  4. Itchuaqiyaq et al. (2022)
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  5. Read et al. (2022)
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  6. Adams (2022)
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  7. Weber (2022)
    Making infrastructure into nature: how documents embed themselves into the bodi…
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  8. Lee (2022)
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  9. Frith et al. (2022)
    Introduction: communication and design infrastructures
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  10. McMullin et al. (2022)
    Building ethical distributed teams through sustained attention to infrastructure
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  11. Ranade et al. (2022)
    Infrastructural support of users' mediated potential
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  12. Sherrill et al. (2022)
    Automated infrastructures: participation's changing role in postindustrial work
    Communication Design Quarterly
  13. Davis et al. (2022)
    Writing infrastructure with the fabric of digital life platform
    Communication Design Quarterly
  14. Richter (2021)
    Writing With Reddiquette: Networked Agonism and Structured Deliberation in Netw…
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  15. Read (2020)
    How to Build a Supercomputer: U.S. Research Infrastructure and the Documents Th…
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  16. Frith (2020)
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  17. Russell (2020)
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