Abstract
When I began to flip through Spinuzzi’s newest book, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations, one of the first things I noticed was its unassuming, accessible tone. For instance, in the foreword, Spinuzzi states that Topsight provides a means for individuals to escape their everyday “ant-vision” so that they can uncover how “information gets stuck” in organizations (p. iv). Moreover, the genres Spinuzzi traced toward this end in prior scholarship were now “information resources” (p. 10). He even brought wisdom from Scooby Doo and Homer Simpson to bear on common inquiry scenarios (pp. 7, 165). By the time I finished reading Topsight, I agreed with Spinuzzi that this engaging style makes the text appropriate for “undergraduate students, graduate students who are looking for a gentle introduction to research methods, academics, consultants, and people who need to solve complex problems in their own organizations” (p. iv). But the book is not merely entertaining. Readers from this impressive scope will find a theoretically informed guide to research practice that supports an organizational field study crafted to expose breakdowns in knowledge work processes. JBTC readers will also want to keep an eye on how Topsight adopts emerging publication networks and practices to reach industry and consulting audiences.
The framing concept, “topsight,” may not be familiar to all readers, but Spinuzzi explains that it is a systematic view of the “big picture”—a useful perspective for solving “wicked” organizational problems (pp. 2–3). Developing topsight, he argues, is possible by following practical inquiry steps that uncover “systemic issues” (p. 5), a process akin to diagnosing an illness and prescribing a cure or collecting clues toward solving a mystery. Spinuzzi walks readers through this process in five major sections called “phases,” which span the chronology of a field study from its planning to reporting stages. Each phase builds on theoretical frameworks that Spinuzzi’s academic readers will find familiar from his prior scholarship, including the idea that organizational work activity develops and can be studied at three distinct levels (i.e., the macro level of culture, meso level of practice, and micro level of habit) and that information resources (i.e., genres) circulating through organizations mediate and organize this work. Chapters within each phase end with exercises that support readers as they create tangible materials for their own inquiry projects. In addition, chapters conclude with example documents that Spinuzzi (2010) adapted from his own prior research study focused on how analysts negotiate continually changing work in search-engine optimization (p. 18).
Spinuzzi carefully positions Topsight as an introduction to one particular kind of organizational inquiry rather than a comprehensive guide to qualitative field research (p. v). Thus, it is fitting that he tailors information organized across phases to this particular case study methodology and shares veteran knowledge that practitioners might otherwise learn the hard way. For example, Phase 1, “Planning a Study,” not only discusses ethics behind standard research documents such as consent forms but also recommends obtaining documentation particularly important for organizational fieldwork, such as a signed “site letter” that defines agreed-upon terms of inquiry between researchers and organizations. The focus on effective communication continues in Chapter 4, in which Spinuzzi instructs readers on how to explain their research through a 30-second “elevator pitch,” a 3-minute extended pitch, and a one-page written description that can be handed to organizational stakeholders (p. 61). Chapter 6 even discusses how researchers can introduce themselves to potential participants in ways that affirm their role as researcher and avoid common workplace research misunderstandings (i.e., assuming that the researcher is an “efficiency expert” or represents management, p. 76).
Case study approaches typically require multiple forms of data; chapters in Phase 2, “Conducting the Study,” describe how to collect relevant materials to analyze through observing, interviewing, and gathering artifacts. Although each chapter contains general advice about the method being discussed (e.g., understanding observation and the Hawthorne effect, p. 83), Spinuzzi contextualizes each method by describing how a macro-, meso-, and micro-activity framework should guide a researcher’s attention while practicing. Once again, the text excels at providing useful, practical, and honest advice often drawn from past experience. For example, Chapter 8, on interviewing, not only instructs readers in how to frame questions but also advises them about how to overcome nervousness and use body language appropriately.
Phase 3, “Navigating the Data,” explicates qualitative research concepts of triangulation (Chapter 11) and coding (Chapter 12). Again these chapters not only offer general advice (e.g., definitions of starter codes, open codes, and axial codes) but also delve into practical and material concerns such as advantages and disadvantages of coding on paper, with a spreadsheet, or via databases (see Appendix B for how to create an open-source qualitative analysis database). Spinuzzi concludes Phase 3 by suggesting that researchers write an interim report informing stakeholders of next steps while convincing them to delay action until the analysis is complete.
Effective case-study methodology depends on researchers’ ability to integrate collected and coded data toward conclusions. Thus, the heart of Topsight’s approach can be found in Phase 4, “Analyzing the Data,” which shares seven analytical models that facilitate this synthesis. This phase ends by describing “topsight tables” that ultimately achieve the systematic view that the book promises. These tables create a grid for visualizing and then connecting breakdowns that happen across micro, meso, and macro scales of activity. But in order to create topsight tables, researchers must first work through six prior analytical modeling techniques. At the level of practice, these techniques render models, including resource maps that visualize information resources, handoff chains that show how communication events are sequenced, and triangulation tables that compare how information resources and handoff chains intersect across relevant data points. Next, Spinuzzi introduces breakdown tables that help researchers identify how workers struggle during everyday routines; finally, researchers address macro-organizational concerns by mapping activity systems and networks. When researchers can answer why discoordinations and breakdowns happen across these scales in their topsight tables, they have achieved the systematic view that the methodology sets out to create and can articulate research results. Phase 5, “Reporting the Results,” offers suggestions for reporting these findings, including how to develop claims, reasons, and evidence and transition toward concrete recommendations for action that do not harm existing work flow (p. 256).
For students, consultants, and people working within organizations, this guidebook provides both theoretically grounded tools (i.e., analysis charts) and nuggets of practical wisdom that researchers are unlikely to find in other methods volumes. Research emerges through Spinuzzi’s guide as a complex, action-oriented activity depending on a range of performances, texts, and relationships that should be carefully considered. Thus, I imagine that Topsight will become an attractive textbook option for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses that either explicitly teach or make use of case-based research approaches. If instructors use this as a textbook, they might consider having students read the data analysis chapters in Phase 4 before collecting data, given that this modeling depends on having relevant interview responses, artifacts, and observational field notes to draw on or the ability to return multiple times to interview participants. In addition, graduate students from technical and professional communication and beyond who are beginning empirical thesis or dissertation projects will benefit from the tips and tricks that Topsight provides—especially the handy example material: institutional review board applications, coding examples, interview transcripts, and observation notes, to name a few.
Although Topsight will draw attention from academics who are teaching and learning research, the text is explicitly business minded. Topsight offers clues about emerging publication practices through which academic work may reach industry. Many of these practices involve drawing on the speed and reach of formal and informal digital publication and circulation channels. Spinuzzi has referred to Topsight as “part of a larger ecosystem” of self-published scholarship that includes his blog and other social media (Bosquet, 2013). Publishing the text through Amazon’s CreateSpace enabled an “accelerated timetable,” allowed control over tone and presentation of content, and made it possible to orchestrate a unique review process that included field testing in a knowledge-work organization (Spinuzzi, 2013). Each of these affordances departs from traditional academic publishing expectations in ways that may be particularly important for (and provoke future conversations and debates between) scholars looking to bridge the gap to nonacademic audiences. With the exception of a few visuals in which text is rather difficult to read (p. 4), this publication process has produced a text that looks polished and is easy to navigate in both paperback and Kindle formats.
Aimed toward such a broad readership, I did sense that Topsight occasionally ran into challenges typical of texts bridging overlapping audiences. For example, the framing concept of topsight is well positioned to appeal to business interests in knowledge management and worker training; however, from a methodological standpoint, this metaphor may obscure how the case-study approach produces a bottom-up, inductive portrait of organizational activity drawn from sampling the whole. In a useful passage discussing hedging in research claims, Spinuzzi suggests that “unlike a mystery writer, we don't get to take a bird's-eye view. We don’t see everything” (p. 134). The topsight metaphor, however, walks a fine line against the idea of a “bird’s-eye view,” and students adopting this sense of their perspective along with the stance of “cataloging the symptoms” and “using them to diagnose the illness” may lose sense of the particular form of systematic perspective that the methodology produces (p. 163). By contrast, other locations of the text more tailored to students’ or consultants’ needs may overlook situations in which industry audiences find themselves. For example, early portions of the book focus on ethics of permission, protection, and advocacy—each of which most explicitly addresses researchers entering an organization from the outside rather than researchers positioned within one. Undertaking this kind of field study as an insider to an organization could potentially range from action research to quality-control assessment, depending on the goals and power structures operating within it. In either case, researching our own colleagues or employees might require ways of thinking about research ethics and building stakeholder relationships that extend beyond what the book provides.
In spite of these challenges, Topsight is stocked full of useful advice to guide any reader through practicing this robust approach to organizational case study, and its appendixes extend opportunities to audiences who need more information about qualitative research or the theories behind this approach. In both content and publication strategy, the practical choices grounding this text were informed by the same nuanced understanding of the shifting, contingent, distributed contexts for work and textual circulation that Spinuzzi has contributed to technical and professional communication in prior empirical and theoretical scholarship. And in an age when we need to push boundaries of existing scholarly publication systems, Topsight serves as one model for how to take a carefully designed and articulated methodological system and position it to respond to clearly articulated exigence in ways that can potentially benefit both academia and industry. Creating a transferrable research approach and positioning it to be quickly, cheaply, and widely available to a vast global audience is noteworthy even if it is—in Spinuzzi’s own words—“an exciting experiment” (2012).