Spinuzzi, C., Nelson, S., Thomson, K. S., Lorenzini, F., French, R. A., Pogue, G., & London, N. (2016). How magnets attract and repel: Interessement in a technology commercialization competition. Written Communication, 33(1), 3-41.
Original research article. In the intro, we learn some of the key terms: standing sets of transformations, interessement, genre assemblages, etc. We also learn the problem that the representative anecdote case will be struggling with, that is, creating an argument that repels investors rather than attracting them. Now that I think about it, that resonates with the title. K6015's technology is magnetic, but will Spinuzzi et al be using that for a metaphor too?
Looks like we get a question too. "In such a complex,
contingent rhetorical activity, how do written genres mediate the firms’ work
and help them to develop a coherent argument? How do firms interest stake-
holders tactically while retaining the argument’s strategic coherence, producing an argument whose claims to different stakeholders are reconcilable?"
"This was bad news for K6015. Its magnet technology could attract ferro-
magnetic metals, but it also had to attract market stakeholders: licensees,
investors, partners, customers. And at this point, the argument implicit in its
technology description was actually repelling these stakeholders!" Look. There's Spinuzzi with the exclamation point again.
The background section distinguishes between arhetorical and rhetorical diffusion, the latter of which is translation (ANT).
Translation has four moments:
- problematization
- interessement
- enrollment
- mobilization
"Interessement differs from traditional, situated rhetorical analysis in at
least two ways. First, it is additive: Successful interessement involves tracing
a path that reconciles different stakeholder interests (Callon, 1986a). Second,
it is transformative: The focus is not on directed persuasion to an existing
view but on emergent cocreation, in which innovator and stakeholders mutually transform the innovation and the claims surrounding it (cf. Swarts, 2011,
p. 278)." Reconciles. Interesting. And then the co-creation thing is obviously opposed to the arhetorical view of diffusion. "How do innovations spread? As Akrich, Callon, and Latour (2002a) argue,
one explanation is diffusion. According to this model, good ideas spread by virtue of being self-evidently good: When (for instance) a farmer sees that a
new fertilizer can improve yield, she adopts it. In this arhetorical understand-
ing of diffusion, the innovation’s value proposition—its claim to value—is
understood as a property of the innovation itself (Lusch & Vargo, 2014)."
"both tactical and strategic interessement"??
Fig 1 says standing set of transformations (SST) on it, so I guess an SST is just how an argument develops across genres?
SST. "Each genre reuses and rerepresents arguments from previ-
ous genres (Spinuzzi, Nelson, et al., 2015; Swarts, 2009), but reorients those
arguments within the action to which the current genre is oriented, while add-
ing arguments as appropriate for that moment." "Specifically, SSTs
focus on transformations between genres."
"An SST’s results can be unpredictable and contingent (Spinuzzi, 2010),
but the SST itself is relatively stable and predictable, and consequently, so is
the process it mediates. Here, the SST governs moments of potential interes-
sement that translate the innovation, preserving the argument’s coherence
while progressively interessing different stakeholders. The resulting argu-
ments are more complex and nuanced" This is getting back to the idea that a cycle is a test.
Could a job application be an SST? There's the interview and the job application and the cover letter and... Probably for a TT job for sure.
"Yet, remarkably, the SST provides guidance to all of
these firms across their wildly different rhetorical challenges." It's a kind of portal mediated by genres.
So they analyzed the sixth year for Written Communication and the firth year for IEEE?
"Since our informants
identified the final pitch presentation as embodying key arguments for stake-
holders, we collected interviews, texts, and oral presentations that allowed us
to understand each stakeholder’s criteria and examine how arguments changed
during the program. Since we were interested in how firms transformed argu-
ments in response to criteria, our analysis focused on criteria-related data:
interviews, surveys, observations, judging sheets, and pitch decks. We then
used the corresponding documents to confirm and illustrate those primary
data. This approach is similar to other macro-level examinations of genre
assemblages that primarily examine reported and observed uses of genre, then
secondarily examine genre instances themselves (e.g., Ding, 2008; Teston,
2009)." Isn't this kind of like Bourdieu? The objective versus the subjective thing?
Schryer closely reads the primary documents then supplements those with interviews, whereas here it seems like they go from the abstract to the concrete. But that's the problem, isn't it: do you ascend from the abstract to the concrete or vice versa? Cf. Althusser.
In terms of method, it just seems like they collected all of the documents and interviewed the entrepreneurs and the trainers. I guess observations too since there are videos of the pitch competitions. Artifacts. Observations. Interviews.
Is data reduction just focusing? like how in the diachronic paper you're moving from all 10 slides to just five (problem, overview, competition, market, traction)?
"Coding. We limited coding to three data sets: (a) initial interviews of GIP
personnel, (b) observations of application deliberations, and (c) observations
of training and final pitches. Coding was nonexclusive. Author 1 coded
entries, initially using descriptive starter codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994,
pp. 57-58), then performing open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to induc-
tively identify recurrent themes. Since the data sets represented different
parts of the process, they involved different codes, but we maintained coher-
ence across codes when appropriate (appendix)." Didn't they interview the entrepreneurs? No, I don't think so actually. It was part of an archive, wasn't it? Year six. Plus, I feel like you had this same thought before.
The results section is broken into six sections.
- pretrials ("an uneasy alliance of stakeholders ")
- public sector
- private sector
- academic
- trial 1: application phase, These criteria
implied positive answers to two crucial questions:
- Was the innovation a good
bet—would it find a worthwhile market?
- multiple uses
- potential volume and margin
- intellectual property
- And was the innovator a good bet—
would the GIP want to work with this firm?
- trial 2: deep dive
- trial 3: quicklook
- trial 4: pitch training
- trial 5: the competition phase
In each of the results section, of which there are 5, they make a connection back to the theme or guiding construct, which in this case is interessement:
- interessement before the application process
- interessement during the application process
- interessement: the deep dive
- interessement: the Quicklook
- interessement: presentation training
- interessement: the final presentation
These would be equivalent to the future in the synchronic article. How does the strategy work to construct the future?
It all seems to focus around the trial of K6105. No, scratch that. Look to Table 8. There are three
Also note how the results parallel the Fig 1, which is the topsight figure as I'm calling it.
"often barely overlapping, objectives of GCG, GSBC, exter-
nal stakeholders, and the firms themselves"
"regularized
genres constituting an SST" different stakeholders, different genres.
https://utexas.box.com/s/jnh0uoc5qh8f3zocqvzwd0r8zez1b6jv
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