The West Virginia University Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences will host the English Department’s Jackson Distinguished Lecture Series, featuring a presentation by Clay Spinuzzi, professor of rhetoric and writing at The University of Texas at Austin.
His discussion, “All Edge: Understanding the New Workplace Networks,” is scheduled for Friday, Feb. 7 in 130 Colson Hall from 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
Work is changing; and not just in the obvious ways: the fact that everyone now has a mobile phone in their pocket and a tablet�in their bag, or that they can instantly pull information off the Internet, or that they’re more likely to Google for answers than open a�software manual, or that they spend considerable and increasing amounts of time on social networking sites.
These changes are not simply that�we can videoconference or that we can do our work on laptops in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and airports. These changes have all�occurred, but they’re not the headline news. They’re not the fundamental change we’re facing.
That fundamental change, as Spinuzzi will discuss, is in�how we work together: how we communicate, coordinate, and collaborate; how we define our work, our�projects, and our products; how we set our goals and objectives; how we manage our time; how we learn on and off the job; how we�trust—and doubt—each other.
These changes mean that we increasingly work in�all-edge adhocracies: temporary, emergent�organizations that connect specialists to tackle complex projects.
In this presentation, Spinuzzi draws on three recent case studies to discuss the nature and the implications of this change, then describes ways to�support all-edge adhocracies.
Spinuzzi has written three books:�”Tracing Genres through�Organizations”�(MIT Press, 2003),�”Network”�(Cambridge University�Press, 2008), and�”Topsight”�(via Amazon CreateSpace, 2013).
Free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
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