Buch, Englisch, 261 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 521 g
Buch, Englisch, 261 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 521 g
Reihe: Baywood's Technical Communications
ISBN: 978-0-89503-801-2
Verlag: Routledge
Scholars, teachers, and practitioners of organizational, professional, and technical communication and rhetoric are target audiences for a new book that reaches across those disciplines to explore the dynamics of the Holocaust. More than a history, the book uses the extreme case of the Final Solution to illumine the communicative constitution of organizations and to break new ground on destructive organizational communication and ethics. Deadly Documents: Technical Communication, Organizational Discourse, and the Holocaust—Lessons from the Rhetorical Work of Everyday Texts starts with a microcosmic look at a single Nazi bureau. Through close rhetorical, visual, and discursive analyses of organizational and technical documents produced by the SS Security Police Technical Matters Group—the bureau that managed the Nazi mobile gas van program—author Mark Ward shows how everyday texts functioned as “boundary objects” on which competing organizational interests could project their own interpretations and temporarily negotiate consensus for their parts in the Final Solution.
The initial chapters of Deadly Documents provide a historical ethnography of the SS technical bureau by closely describing the institutional and organizational cultures in which it operated and relating organizational stories told in postwar testimony by the desk-murderers themselves. Then, through examination of the primary material of their documents, Ward demonstrates how this Social Darwinist world of competing Nazi bureaucrats deployed rhetorical and linguistic resources to construct a social reality that normalized genocide. Ward goes beyond the usual Weberian bureaucratic paradigm and applies to the problem of the Holocaust both the interpretive view that sees organizations as socially constructed through communication and the postmodern view that denies the notion of a preexisting social object called an “organization” and instead situates it within larger discourses.
The concluding chapters trace how contemporary scholars of professional communication have wrestled with the Nazi case and developed a consensus explanation that the desk-murderers were amoral technocrats. Though the explanation is dismissed by most historians, it nevertheless offers, Ward argues, a comforting distance between “us” and “them.” Yet, as Ward writes, “First, we will learn more about the dynamic role of everyday texts in organizational processes. Second, as we see these processes—perhaps inherent to all organized communities, including our own—at work even in the extreme case of the SS Technical Matters Group, the comforting distance that we now maintain between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is necessarily diminished. And third, our newfound discomfort may open productive spaces to revisit conventional wisdoms about the ethics of technical and organizational communication.”
Zielgruppe
Professional Practice & Development
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Preface by Mark Ward, Sr.
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1: Can Genocide Be Regulated?
An Ontological Shift
Revisiting the Final Solution
Sample, Method, and Chapter Organization
The Importance of the Study
CHAPTER 2: From Darwin to Death Wagons
Origins of European Anti-Semitism
The Rise of Racial Anti-Semitism
Development of the Gas Vans
Operational Challenges in the Field
CHAPTER 3: The People’s Community
Organizations as Open Systems
Unifying Principles of Institutional Culture
Aspects of SS Organizational Culture
Lines of Organizational Authority
German Bureaucratic Document Protocols
CHAPTER 4: The Participants and Their Motives
Personnel of the Gas Van Program
Individual Relationships and Motives
CHAPTER 5: Documents for Destruction
Setting Up the Analyses
Introducing the Documents
CHAPTER 6: A Community of Killers
Constructing the Rhetorical Community
A “Safety” Narrative and Protean Metaphors
Discovering Organizational Genres in the Texts
Rhetorical Community in Organizational Contexts
Visuality in the Rhetorical Community
CHAPTER 7: Discourse of Death
What Discourse Analysis Can Add
The Killers’ Use of Linguistic Resources
Reconstructing an Organizational Discourse
CHAPTER 8: Revisiting “Expediency”
Boundary Work in Action
Lanzmann and the “Why” Question
Implications of the Lanzmann Alterations
CHAPTER 9: Bridging the Boundaries
An Ahistorical Consensus?
Expediency Without Ethics
Protecting Rhetoric and Rhetoricians
Safeguarding Science and Civilization
Converging on a Comfortable Distance
What the Orderings May Reveal
CHAPTER 10: Some Ethical Implications
A Bias for Explanation
Prescriptive and Descriptive Ethics
Afterword: The Reality of Words and Their Aftermaths
Steven B. Katz
References
Index
