Abstract
Winner of the National Council of Teachers of English 2011 award for best book in technical communication, Carol Siri Johnson’s monograph makes a valuable contribution to the history of technical communication. Analyzing documents from the archives of the Lukens Steel Company, The Language of Work provides a stimulating overview of the rise of modern technical communication in one manufacturing company. Johnson traces the transmission of technical information from an oral, face-to-face process to an asynchronous one using pictures and written words, and she argues persuasively for the way in which technological development and technical communication spurred each other. Provocatively, she claims that “the industrial revolution would not have been possible without the attendant—and intrinsic—evolution of complex technical communication” (p. 1). Her central claims, archaeological approach, and attention to the physical properties of documents lay important groundwork for future scholarship in our field.
In the introduction, Johnson presents her theoretical influences and method of reading. She emphasizes four major precursors: Michel Foucault, Charles Bazerman, Elizabeth Tebeaux, and JoAnne Yates. Foucault’s conception of documents as part of a network allows us to read them “as statements from a discourse environment” rather than as isolated texts whereas Bazerman’s attention to the emergence and evolution of the scientific article inspires our attention to new genres and their development in a discourse environment such as Lukens. Both Tebeaux’s and Yates’s work moved scholars beyond literary studies to analyses of technical and business communication. These authors, Johnson explains, inform her “contextual” reading method (p. 4). Because her study looks at the archival organization and physical properties of documents as well as their illustrations and handwritings, she calls her approach archaeological. She argues for the value of the “great stories” embedded in technical communication; unlike literary fiction, she argues, these narratives are embedded in real-life discourse communities and solve concrete problems in the world.
After this introduction, Johnson’s book divides into two sections. Chapters 1 and 2 provide background on early American technical communication and on Lukens Steel whereas Chapters 3 through 6 provide a brief account of technical developments at the Lukens mills during a given period and then examine characteristic documents. The book ends with a brief conclusion and a glossary of iron and steel terminology.
In Chapter 1, Johnson focuses on three stages in American technical communication, especially on metallurgy. The first works, she explains, were “incidental,” written largely “to gain personal knowledge and not part of a social dialogue” (p. 20). Almost all of her examples support the conclusion that technical knowledge of iron working resided within workers’ minds and bodies; thus, visits and discussions with workers were important sources of knowledge. The industry did keep “furnace journals,” in which financial data (and sometimes daily events) were recorded. Johnson comments, “throughout the world, accounting practices predated other forms of writing, and it is visible in the iron industry as well” (p. 21). By the 1850s, however, metallurgy publications proliferated and took on new forms. Johnson discusses state geological reports, popular technology books, professional association publications, and trade newspapers. She closes the chapter by looking at technical communication in the early 20th century, which saw the rise of product guides, advertising, reports, proposals, and requests for proposals. As my summary suggests, Johnson provides a nuanced prehistory of technical communication, and her focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries will be extremely useful to those interested in this period and in longer, more subtle histories of our field.
In Chapter 2, Johnson takes up the history of Lukens Steel. Although a company may be a problematic protagonist, Johnson has found a sympathetic and memorable one in Lukens Steel. Several features of the company rendered it unusual. It remained family owned for five generations, from 1810 until 1925, and its owners preserved many of their papers, making the company highly useful for longitudinal study. In addition, “it was run more like a family than a corporation” (p. 37). Johnson explains that until the 20th century, the company had relatively few employees, many of whom came from local families and sat on its board. Finally, the company had a unique “mixture of conservatism and progressivism” (p. 38). On one hand, it was slow to update its communication technologies and management practices, but on the other hand, it made innovative products such as boilerplate and shaped steel covers. In addition, the firm’s longtime works director and vice president, Charles Lukens Huston—a “pivotal figure” in Johnson’s account—was committed to scientific testing and quality control. Johnson also discusses Rebecca Lukens, the company’s namesake, whose portrait graces the book’s cover and who owned the firm from 1825 to 1847. Widowed with small children, Lukens took on responsibility for the company, assured its financial stability, and left it to her daughters.
Then in Chapter 3, Johnson moves to more historically organized close readings of specific documents from the Lukens Steel archives. In her conclusion to this chapter, she notes that although this chapter “covers the longest period,” 1810 to 1870, “almost nothing changed” (p. 72). Generally, technical expertise passed from person to person unrecorded. Johnson defines this “prediscursive technical communication” as “that which takes place without written language—it can occur with spoken words or with body language alone” (p. 59). Nonetheless, Lukens did use two types of workplace writing: accounts and letters. Not until 1849, however, did the company save copies of its own letters; before that date, the company and suppliers operated on a system of mutual trust. The account books “provide a foundation for record keeping,” and although accounts were kept for many years, they were rarely balanced (p. 66).
In Chapter 4, Johnson focuses on the period from 1870 to 1900. Although Johnson finds few contemporary examples of technical communication, she witnesses the emergence of a culture of record keeping. As Lukens expanded “from a semi-pastoral to an industrial setting” (p. 81) after the Civil War, it needed to collect increasing amounts of data. The company now recorded materials arriving and leaving by train (car-record books), the daily work and outputs of individual furnaces (puddle-mill records), physical and chemical properties of the steel produced (tonnage records), problems with their steel (defective-plate records), and inventories and payroll sheets. Chapter 4 also explores the firm’s early testing, prompted by public concern about steamboat and locomotive explosions. Although the mill started testing its products in 1875, and Huston published two articles on the topic, early test data were not kept. Records of defective plates originated in 1894 and prepared the company for later, more systematic testing. This period also witnessed preprinted forms, initially in the form of stamped templates, and Lukens’s first typewriter.
In Chapter 5, Johnson discusses the period from 1910 to 1915, which brought what she calls “an explosion of technical communication.” This explosion was not only quantitative and generic but polyphonic; in this period, the voices of employees begin to be heard. Johnson begins the chapter by noting that as the company expanded and modified its mills, technical communication proliferated. She then examines “intraplant technical communication” (p. 112) via informal folded notes sent through the plant, concluding that “written technical communication was alive but not systemized” (p. 116). The stamped templates of an earlier period were giving way to forms ordered from professional printers. This chapter also devotes a section to drawings and blueprints. After giving a general account of the importance of drawing in engineering and the ways in which it was practiced at this time, Johnson turns her attention to Lukens. To sort out the many drawings she finds of various shapes, types, and sizes, she refers to Eugene Ferguson’s categories of “talking,” “thinking,” and “prescriptive” drawing. What makes Johnson’s account original, however, are her informative discussion of Lukens’s attempt to index its drawings and her examination of their index book (p. 119). A third section in this chapter covers the expanding documentation of the four types of testing: periodic tests of plant equipment, tests of the steel plates produced in the factory, more scientific tests of steel ingots, and tests designed to help set national standards. The last section of Chapter 5 considers the new genres of advertisement and public relations, analyzing a 1912 product guide that combines both functions.
In the final chapter, which covers the period from 1915 to 1925, Johnson examines the continued evolution of Lukens Steel’s major genres of workplace communication—correspondence, record keeping, drawings, testing, and advertising. Early in the chapter, she argues that these forms became more sophisticated, but some of her detailed analyses complicate this picture. Records, for example, continued to proliferate, but for organizing them “there was no overall system, just a hodgepodge of pieces” (p. 163). One poor production engineer needed 23 different types of daily, weekly, and monthly reports to create the annual audit. Letters, which accompanied everything, were also long and complex, serving both to connect people and to transmit other documents. As a result, letters form most of the written technical information in the archives. These letters also provide insight into the crucial role of the company’s stenographer typists as “mediators” and “midwives” of technical communication (pp. 162–163). But the increasing use of typists meant that drawings were less integrated into letters and became separate, specialized attachments. The company used graphs and charts for the first time, and the quantity of blueprints grew quickly. Testing and public relations also continued, with testing generating significant volumes of technical communication. Johnson notes that even in 1925 the steel-making process could not be entirely controlled. Although the company did send out price cards and publish trade journal articles about its history, advertising received much less emphasis.
The most interesting part of this final chapter, however, is Johnson’s account of Lukens’s transition to a corporate structure. The Lukens family had never been “innovative managers” and preferred to operate the firm like a small business, even with 1,500 employees (p. 177). As a result, the company had a multitude of problems. It had two heads, Charles Lukens Huston, who managed the technical end, and his brother, who handled the business end. There appear to have been rivalries between the brothers and, more generally, between departments; the company lacked a chain of command, and it had no clear idea how many people it employed. As the company lost money after World War I, this situation became untenable. In response to a series of management consultant reports in late 1920 and early 1921, the company’s board of directors named a comptroller, and the Huston brothers resigned. Johnson examines the company’s meeting minutes, reconstructing from them the sound of actual voices in debate over the company’s future: “You can hear the cadences of the participants” (p. 179).
Overall, Johnson’s book represents painstaking archival and historical work that has much to teach the reader not just about Lukens Steel but about 19th-century manufacturing, precursors of technical communication, and the transition from artisanal firm to modern corporation. Her conception of “prediscursive” technical communication is innovative and plausible, and her attention to the role of stenographers adds to existing work on women in the early history of technical communication. Also exemplary is Johnson’s attention to the material condition of documents. She notes when they have lost their covers and are smeared with fingerprints or black with factory dirt; she also pays close attention to later users’ check marks, annotations, and corrections. Finally, her discussion of drawings is especially rewarding.
The Language of Work is not without small weaknesses. It lacks transcriptions of key documents, and quotations are occasionally left freestanding or awkwardly integrated. It would have been enhanced by a longer conclusion with more history of the company after 1925. Finally, as someone who teaches both technical communication and literature, I am slightly disappointed in Johnson’s comparisons of the two fields. Her arguments for the value of technical communication are powerful and eloquent, but her conception of fiction as individualistic and divorced from real-world problems seems more stereotyped than reflective of the realist, socially engaged novels of the 19th century. Nonetheless, Johnson’s book has much to offer literary scholars interested in the industrial novel, in technology and business in literature, or even in antebellum America.
Focusing on a single company can pose a significant danger—that of replacing the literary monument (author as great man) with a corporate one. Johnson’s thoughtful and wide-ranging book avoids some of the problems inherent in this choice, but future studies might focus on company documents at the expense of a larger industry, social, or environmental context. As critics of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) have noted, a corporate voice can too easily overwhelm the voices of ordinary people. Johnson herself cautions that only in the transcriptions of meeting minutes do some workers’ voices start to emerge.
As a result, The Language of Work—especially its final chapter—might have benefited from attention to labor history. Throughout the book, intriguing glimpses of the Lukens workers emerge, but the company archives give us only a partial view. For example, we learn that workers shared a linguistic background, but only later in the book do we find out that they were German. Johnson calls attention to racial and gender differences, but it is hard to get an overall sense of women’s or African-Americans’ roles at Lukens from the company archives. Finally, Johnson explains that the firm’s “patriarchial” and disorganized management structure badly needed modernization, but some of the older features sound, at least in her account, worker friendly. For example, workers could report to a variety of managers and could quit when work was slow and be rehired as it resumed. How did workers feel about the changes in 1925? Johnson never considers that question. If our field is to rely on corporate documents, we must consider the perspective of labor as well as management.
These concerns aside, The Language of Work offers an in-depth, scrupulously detailed look at the many precursors to and forms of technical communication in an innovative steel company. Its lucid account of the process of steel production will interest fans of technology, and its account of 19th-century industrial history is informative and grounded. The book well deserves its national award and a favorable review.