The effect of organizational metaphors on writers' stylistic choices.

Most research on the effectiveness of written business and managerial communication has focused on factors within documents (organization, document design, sentence structure, etc.) that effect readers' cognitive ability to process texts efficiently. Although understanding these cognitive constraints

This study examines how an organization's root metaphor determine the way writers think about readers and compose written reports. This research works off the assumption that researchers can "read" organizations. Also it is heavily influenced by Pepper's (1942) and Kuhns' (1970) work on root metaphors and cognitive paradigms, Axley's (1984) and Reddy's (1979) research on communication metaphors, and Morgan's (1980, 1983) work on organizational symbolism and images.

The Organizational Setting

This study was conducted at a medium-size organization that daily gather and disseminates large amounts of information. (Specific details about the organization and its members will remain somewhat vague because of the proprietary nature of the organization's tasks.) The study focused on two key groups: information gatherers (IGs) and report assessors (RAs).

The IGs work in various offices across the United States. One of their principal jobs is to interview people and to convey information via written narrative reports to RAs located in several offices in a large East Coast city. The RAs assess the reports and, on the basis of their information, draw conclusions and make recommendations about the people interviewed. Organizational policy demands that the IGs' and RAs' job roles remain separate - IGs gather information and RAs evaluate it.

A typical IG spends approximately 2 hours a day writing up results from interviews; the typical RA reads reports 5 to 6 hours per day. The reports average 7 to 10 pages; however, at times they can be as long as 20 to 25 pages.

Depending on the size of a field office, an IGs immediate supervisor is a term leader or a section area chief (SAC). This supervisor reviews the narrative report for content and style before having the report sent to the RAs.

Data Gathering Methods

I used both participant observation and protocol analysis to gather IG data at two field sites: one on the West Coast involving four IGs, another on the East Coast involving seven IGs.

To gain the IGs' trust and cooperation, I attended, at the West Coast site, a one-week IG training program conducted by a highly respected senior IG. This training allowed me to speak "IG language" and thus build rapport with the IGs as well as to begin to understand the organization's dominant metaphors and language constraints.

At the West Coast site, I spent a week accompanying four IGs on their information-gathering interviews. During this week, I observed each of the four IGs while they interviewed subjects and gathered information. In addition, I asked the West Coast IGs descriptive, open-ended questions about their information-gathering methods, perceptions of their communication role, writing processes, revision strategies, audience awareness, organization's rules governing style and organization, perceptions of relations with superiors, and so on. These responses were taped. Finally. I conducted talk-aloud protocols of four IGs while they wrote their narrative reports.

At the East Coast site, I asked a group of seven IGs the same open-ended questions as the West Coast IGs. Their responses were also taped.

I interviewed twelve RAs to determine whether they had difficulty processing the IGs' reports. Also, to understand the RAs' reading processes, I collected talk-aloud protocols from four as they read reports.

Preliminary Results

IG Results. The central metaphor that emerged from IGs' protocols and their responses to descriptive questions was the IG as an information conduit or cipher. The IGs described their organizational role as that of transcribes, transmitters , or conveyers of the information they gathered during the interviews. The following comments, taken from several open-ended questions, capture this dominant or root metaphor:

* I want to transfer exactly what I've heard into my report.

It's like they [RAs] have to be there in the room

when they're reading. Kind of like looking over my

shoulder . . . making sure I'm delivering what I'm

supposed to.

* I write what I hear. I have to keep myself out of the

report, not get in the way of recording information.

Get it right, exactly right.

* This isn't creative writing. I'm not writing a short

story here. I'm more like a scribe in the classical

sense. Sometime who copies what's given to him.

These comments clearly reveal that the IGs' goals were to "transfer," "record," "convey," or "copy" information from one person to another. In short, they functioned as conduits of information f or their readers.

Because the IGs perceive themselves as information conduits or ciphers, they pay little attention to the readability or comprehensibility of their reports. The result is narrative reports characterized by long paragraphs (often more than a page long); lack of headings lists, bullets, bold print, or underlining; long, convoluted sentences; passive verbs; and lack of internal previews of information to follow.

Furthermore, the IGs perception of themselves as information conduits causes them to have a very passive relationship with the information they gather and the text they "transcribe." For the most part, the IGs believe that the subjects who are providing them with information control the order of that information and the way it is to be conveyed. Consequently, the way information appears in their notes (IGs do not use tape recorders during interviews) generally determines how information will be presented in the "integrity" of the information they gather, IGs maintain the "integrity" of the information they gather, IGs avoid using organizational and stylistic strategies that could help report readers map information and comprehend it more easily. These techniques are perceived by IGs as interpreting the subject's information rather than accurately conveying that information.

Given this passive relationship with their texts, it is not surprising that IGs spend a little time revising and editing. Protocols revealed they spent only 9% of their time editing information (micro-level changes in word choice and sentence structure) and @% revising.The protocols clearly show that the IGs are trying to duplicate in written language what they heard during the interviews.

Because IGs focus almost exclusively on the subjects whom they interview and the information they obtain, the IGs are almost never aware of the report assessors (RAS), the readers of the reports, when composing. When IGs were asked, "When you are writing your reports, whom do you see as their reader?" only one of the IGS indicated that he took in to account the need of the RAs when writing. This agent had developed this RA-based mindset because he was a former RA himself. Interestingly, 9 of the 11 IGs seemed puzzled by the question; the notion of reader awareness suggested an area of concern they previously had not considered. Furthermore, none of the talk-aloud protocols revealed that the IGs were considering their readers' needs when drafting their reports.

The IGs perception of their role as that of information conduit makes reader awareness an inconsequential issue. If information is needed a commodity that can be transmitted accurately from one individual to another, then the reader of the document is not of major concern as long as that information is accurately encoded in the channel. In short, the metaphor does not seem to allow IGs to view the RAs as equal partners in the communication process or to recognize that RAs don't merely "pull out" meaning from reports but construct meaning based on language codes they share with the IGs.

RA Findings. Open-ended interviews with RAs revealed that through they had some suggestions for improving the IGs reports, they were only somewhat dissatisfied with them. Their dissatisfaction level may have been muted because they too viewed the IGs as information conduits; in fact, they were vocal in affirming that role. Furthermore, the IGs' reports reflected dominant organizational language customs that the RAs - most of whom were organizational veterans - have long been accustomed to.

Consequently, extreme dissatisfaction with the language customs would be tantamount to dissatisfaction with the organization; prior research had shown that the RAs were very satisfied with their jobs, they believed them to be meaningful, and they had very positive perceptions of the organization.

Finally, the RAs had difficulty separating he content of the reports from he way the content was presented. As a result, many of their suggestions about report improvement had to do with better-quality information in the reports.

Although the RAs were only somewhat dissatisfied with the IGs' reports, the protocols of RAs reading the reports revealed they had difficulty reading them.

The RAs' comments while reading clearly indicated that they were attempting to mentally map information, classify it, and integrate it into a decision template so that they could draw conclusions about the subjects interviewed. Often, though, the RAs had to reread sections of a report and to take fairly careful notes to sort and classify report information previews, lack of headings and lists, and convoluted sentences.

This classifying and note taking - in essence a report reconstruction process - was time consuming and drained energy. The RAs' information-processing time was at least doubled, and the RAs often complained of mental fatigue and eye strain.

The RAs' struggles to mentally map and classify information could also result in their processing the same report content differently. Theoretically, these inconsistent interpretations of report information could cause different RAs to draw different conclusions and thus make inconsistent recommendations about the subjects interviewed.

While conducting the RA protocols, I also read through the reports the information. Roughly 30% of the time I discovered that I and the RA read or processed basic information in different wasy. These differences were not in matters of interpreting the significance of information, but merely in accurately processing it.

Final Observations

Organizational metaphors have a significant effect on the way writers compose documents and assess readers. Although qualitative date obtained from this research are still being assessed, these preliminary results show that technical and managerial communication researchers need to better understand the role that "outside-the-text" factors such as organizational metaphors have on organizational writers' thinking and composing processes and readers' perception of communication effectiveness.

More specifically, the fact that the RAs seemed satisfied with the IGs' reports yet had great difficulty in reading them raises important questions about possible differences between readers' perceived effectiveness of a document and their ability to process information efficiently.

What remains as a question for further research is the degree to which organizational metaphors create or shape the composing processes and language customs of an organizations' members.

REFERENCES

Stephen R. Axley, "Managerial and Organizational Communication in Terms of the Conduit Metaphor," Academy of Management Review, 9 (1984): 428-437. T.S. Kunh, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1970). G. Morgan, "Paradigms, Metaphors and Puzzle solving in Organization Theory," Administrative Science Quarterly 25 (1980): 605-622. G. Morgan, P. Frost,and L. Pondy, "Organizational Symbolism (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1983), 3-35. S.C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942). M. Reedy, "The Conduit Metaphor - A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language," in A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 284-324.