Thralls Essay Collection Receives Award

Charie Thralls's recently published (2007) collection of essays, Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse in Organizations (coedited with Mark Zachry, University of Washington), just received a prestigious research award. The award is from the National Council of Teachers of English for the 2008 Best Original Collection of Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication. The collection investigates how discourse is regulated and how it regulates when human activity is organized for such purposes as work or belonging to a profession. The workplaces or professional sites used as illustrations in the collection are diverse, covering such organizations as an Internet start-up company, an international energy company, an urban hospital, a university, and a telecommunications corporation. The studies draw upon such prominent thinkers as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Bruno Latour, Gayatri Spivak, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke.