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Public rhetoric and public safety at the Chicago Transit Authority

David Coogan Journal of Business and Technical Communication; Jul 2002; 16, 3; ABI/INFORM Global pg. 277

This article compares three rhetorical approaches to accident analysi,,; matalali,,!, classical, and constructivist. The focal points for comparison are tllf two accidenl rep,)rl, issued by the National Transporlation Safety Board (NTSB)-reports lllat attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to ciulIlge a problematic policy about rail communication alongside its technology for rail communication. Tile central question the article asks is, How can rhetorical theory hell' explain thl' CTA's inaction, which ultimately led to property damage, injury, and death? Classicalalld constructivist approaches, emphasizing rational deliberation /Jctwenl equals, 011 olle hand, alld tile social construction of tcchnical kllowledge belwecllpro{cssiolials, Oil the other, offer plausible explanations for what went wrong, But only the materialist approach appears capable of discerning the ideological nature of thc CTA's resistance to the NTSB's recommendations.

Public Rhetoric and Public Safety at the Chicago Transit Authority Three Approaches to Accident Analysis DAVID COOGAN Illinois Institute of Teclmoio?,"Y

hen two trains collide causing injury and death, everybody wants to know what happened. However, when the investigation of the accident fails to prevent the same sort of accident from occurring again, the question is no longer How did it happen? but Why did authorities allow it to happen again? At issue in this article is such a case where the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) attempted (and failed) to persuade the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) to change a policy about rail communication in 1976-a failure that later resulted in another, similar accident in 1984. These two accidents together produced thousands of dollars of property damage, hundreds of injuries, and two deaths. The central question I ask is, How can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA's inaction? Because the NTSB is not a regulatory agency that can compel compliance but a quasi-independent federal agency that must persuade all responsible parties to heed its recommendations, the agency recognizes that a large part of its work is rhetorical. In its mission statement, for example, the agency explains that accident reports "must be

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Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol. 161\:0.3 July 2002 © 2002 Sage Publications

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readable, credible, and convincing to the point that recipients are persuaded to act" (United States, NTSB, Strategic). Because more than 82% of the NTSB's safety recommendations have been adopted by those in a position to effect change (United States, NTSB, An1lual 2), these reports appear to have been, by and large, persuasive. The reason why they were persuasive, however, is not immediately apparent. The NTSB attributes its rhetorical success, in part, to its independence from the Department of Transportation (DOT): Because the DOT is responsible for both the regulation and promotion of transportation within the United States and accidents may suggest deficiencies in the transportation system, the Board's independence was deemed necessary for proper oversight. The NTSB, which has no authority to regulate, fund, or be directly involved in the operation of any mode of transportation, seeks to conduct investigations and to make recommendations from a totally objective viewpoint. (United States, NTSB, AII//uall)

By distinguishing itself from the DOT and from the office of regulation, the NTSB distinguishes itself as a "totally objective" investigator. From objectivity comes credibility. In this way, the NTSB legitimates rhetorical work as an objective pursuit of the truth. Yet, as Beverly Sauer's research ("Sense") on coal-mining accident reports indicates, this so-called objective stance may be more problematic than reassuring. At least in the coal-mining industry, reports issued by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) often fail to reduce future accidents, according to Sauer, because they rely too heavily on "the standard of historical, or representational, truth" and tend to disregard what she calls a feminist "standard of performative truth-the ability of a text to change reality or events" ("Sense" 511). Sauer's recommendation to replace the linear, text-based, cause-and-effect reporting style with a visually oriented, problem-solving model ("Dynamics") makes sense, then, especially when we consider that the MSHA has not been very successful in reducing the number of fatalities in the nation's mines ("Sense" 513). In the transportation industry, however, where NTSB recommendations have largely been accepted voluntarily by those in a position to effect change, we have little reason to believe that the objective ethos in these reports is seriously problematic. At least in the case of the eTA story I present here,

How much of the issue is the difference in the industries, mining vs. transport?

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at stake is not the rehabilitation of a genre but the reconstruction of an interorganizational disagreement. The challenge facing the NTSB report writers in 1976 was to secure consensus among a wide array of constituents charged with the safe operation of mass transit in Chicago: the CTA's managers, workers (i.e., union workers of the Amalgamated Transit Union), clients (i.e., Motorola, the company that provided the CTA with its communication equipment), and its funder and regulator (the Regional Transit Authority of Illinois). Consensus was difficult to obtain, however, because of increased tensions between CTA management and the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) of Illinois, a mayoral race in which transit efficiency became a hot-button issue, a memorable blizzard that nearly shut down rail service, and a four-day strike by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) over wage increases that actually did shut down rail service. To change the policy about rail communication, the NTSB had to persuade CTA managers, RTA regulators, and ATU workers to collaborate on a solution. NTSB recommendations to change both communication technology and policy, however, implied a challenge to the CTA's autonomy from the RTA, on one hand, and from ATU workers, on the other hand. Resistance to this threatened loss of autonomy was manifest in the CTA's inaction, which tragically led to the second accident. If the emphasis here on ideology only confirms what perhaps many already fear about rhetoric-that people are moved, as Michael McGee put it, "more by maxims and self-interest than by reason and evidence" ("Search" 342)-it nevertheless offers a valuable insight into the way in which rhetoric functions in "the brute reality" of human interaction, where some claims" are demonstrably useful to an end or are failures" (McGee, "Materialist's" 25). By this logic, rhetoric is not found in the accumulated traditions of an organization-in its socially constructed discourse. Nor is it found in the prescriptive ideals of rhetorical deliberation. To say that rhetoric has a material quality is to say that it is an object, "as material and omnipresent as air and water" (26). To be more precise, rhetoric is a natural social phf'nomenon in the context of which symbolic claims are made on the behavior and lor belief of one or more persons, allegedly in the interest of such individuals, and with the strong presumption that such claims will cause meaningful change. (McGee, "Materialist's" 38)

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Ideograph is a term coined by rhetorical scholar and critic Michael Calvin McGee describing the use of particular words and phrases as political language in a way that captures (as well as creates or reinforces) particular ideological positions. McGee sees the ideograph as a way of understanding of how specific, concrete instances of political discourse relate to the more abstract idea of political ideology (from JBTC / July 2002 WikiPedia 280

These claims are made in the form of "ideographs" that "function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief." As an articulation of ideology, ideographs "presumptuously suggest that each member of a community will see as gestalt every complex nuance in them" (McGee, '"Ideograph''' 428). In ordinary times, they "remain essentially unchanged" (431), "but when we engage ideological argument, when we cause ideographs to do work explaining, justifying, or guiding policy in specific situations, the relationship of ideographs changes" (434). To analyze a train accident from a materialist perspective, then, is to take up those ideographs in the safety recommendation that instigated ideological argument over public safety. Because the fields of rhetoric and technical communication have more than a passing interest in the relationship between technology and public safety-and the safe operation of mass transit is an issue that not only concerns technical communicators but citizens, politicians, and engineers alike-a rhetorical analysis of accidents should proceed from sources that name the public concern. Clearly, the NTSB reports are designed to address the public: The public relies on and trusts the information provided by the Safety Board. All of our work results in Safety Board publications that are public documents and are disseminated to as wide an audience as possible so that the lessons learned from one accident or incident can be used to prevent future tragedies. For each investigation, we create a public docket often containing thousands of pages of information uncovered in our research. During our investigations, the Board provides factual briefings to the media to ensure that accurate information is provided to the public in a timely and informative manner. This tradition of openness and independence has gained the trust of the American people. (United States, NTSB, Strategic)

However, the NTSB also recognizes that "the public" is not an abstraction that it alone is privileged to constitute. Rather, the NTSB's success-its "independence"-oddly enough depends on the support of its collaborators who, together, must agree to the recommendations that the public will read: The Board has a long history of partnering with industry to accomplish our mission. We multiply our resources several times over by using technical experts from industry and other government entities to assist us in our accident investigations. This "party system" ensures that involved operators, manufacturers, labor organizations, and Watch the trend/discussion of independence.

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regulators participate in the investigation of accidents. (United States, NTSB, Strategic)

One way to study the rhetorical address of these reports, then, is to study those ideographs that define or disrupt the common concern. In this way, materialism challenges the dichotomy between public rhetoric and professional communication, between the prescriptive ideals of classical rhetoric and the descriptive accounts of constructivist rhetoric. As I see it, that dichotomy emerged in 1950 when Kenneth Burke uncovered a problem with the "autonomous activity" of technical experts "who may be unconcerned" or simply unable to gauge the moral impact of their work in society (27). The primary line of defense, naturally, was a well-educated public capable of steering, regulating, or in other ways guiding technology toward more humanistic ends (Goodnight; Bitzer; Wallace). The secondaty line of defense was an educated class of professionals capable of rhetorical deliberation about their work-a class of professionals who could, in a sense, expand the limits of technical communication with rhetorical deliberation (Bytwerk; Sullivan; Miller, "Technology"; Johnson). Although subsequent studies published throughout the 1980s and 1990s have affirmed the vitality of this-what I call the classical approach to the rhetoric of technology-no studies that I am aware of have demonstrated that the principles of classical rhetoric are capable of improving public discourse about technology, in general, or professional deliberations about risk and safety. What has emerged in place of evidence supporting the classical approach has been a social constructivist approach that takes the public as a synonym for the workplace and rhetoric as a synonym for workplace communication: The premise of this approach is that if technical data must be interpreted to be rendered useful and if interpretation is a rhetorical act of generating claims that one's discipline, profession, or organization would find persuasive, then engineers, managers, technical communicators, and other technologists must use rhetoric. Along these lines, rhetoric may now be found in the very same" interlocking system of operations" that Burke once deemed" an affront" to "the true liberal" (31): in engineering reports (Barabas; Ornatowski); instructional manuals (Mirel, "Beyond," "Writing"); arguments relying on numbers, graphs, and visuals (Winsor, "What"; Pogghenpohl); the talk and text of research and development (Baker; Winsor, "Engineering"; Miller, "Opportunity"); and the orchestration of technology

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transfer events (Doheny-Farina; Van Nostrand). A closer look at the literature, however, suggests that constructivists may not need rhetorical theory at all to explain their ethnographic data on workplace communication. What the constructivist turn suggests is not so much evolution or even pluralism but an unresolved dichotomy between public rhetoric and professional communication. The materialist approach suggests an alternative that may dissolve that dichotomy. If the objective of rhetorical study is to analyze those utterances that establish (or fail to establish) the consensus necessary to coordinate technological work, then we will not find rhetoric in either descriptive accounts of workplace discourse or prescriptive ideals about deliberation but in the sometimes discordant interaction between corporations and their constituents-in those ideological commitments shared (or not shared) by stakeholders who, ostensibly, work together to provide a technological service. This article offers a materialist analysis of NTSB reports to discern those ideological tensions between the NTSB, the eTA, the RTA, and the ATU. Before I get to that analysis, I present the eTA story itself, as gleaned from the NTSB reports. Then I discuss the materialist, classical, and constructivist approaches to accident analysis, comparing the relative merits of each approach against the general question, How can rhetorical theory explain the eTA's inaction? I then conclude with a call for more studies linking rhetoric, ideology, and technology, emphasizing the unique role that materialist rhetoric might play in cases where the public safety or public interest is at stake.

THE STUDY The prospect of linking technology and ideology emerged one semester while I was advising a team of undergraduates at the Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) who were enrolled in our lnterprofessional Research Program (IPRO). This program pairs small teams of students from a variety of academic disciplines with faculty advisers to solve an actual problem for a client. l In this case, the eTA had contracted lIT to develop new applications for wireless information networks on its rail and bus services. A professor of electrical engineering coordinated the students' technical research. 2 My role was to help the students address the social implications of any proposed changes to the eTA workers' environment. Because the students were interested in proposing new applications for the handheld

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walkie-talkies carried by the train operators (e.g., adding e-mail or Global Positioning Satellite capabilities), I decided to focus my research on the technical and procedural communication between train operators and the Control Center. Changes to the communication infrastructure, I reasoned, would only be made within ideological circumstances favorable to change, and those circumstances could be studied by studying what was said or written about the technologies and procedures. From a book by former CTA general manager George Krambles and Arthur Peterson, I learned that in 1948, the office of Central Service Control (CSC) had been established to monitor the movement of trains and busses throughout the city. Because each vehicle did not have a portable communication device, CTA operators had to locate a point supervisor (who had access to a street telephone) to report problems or convey information to CSc. Although this system was functional, it was technically inefficient. In 1951, a telephone system was implemented on all CTA trains, eliminating the go-between of the point supervisor. This system used the track's third rail and running rails as the communication paths. Yet, because the phones drew their power from the third rail of the tracks, a power outage-even for a short time-would cut off communication with the Control Center. The CTA began phasing out the problematic telephone system in 1979, three years after the first accident examined here. By 1981, they had replaced the telephone with portable radios. By replacing the telephones with portable radios, the CTA replaced a communication device that was unreliable and inflexible-a device that only worked if a constant source of power ran through the third rail of the track, only allowed communication between operators and the Control Center but not between motormen and conductors, and was a source of weakness in the communication infrastructure, especially during emergencies. What the CTAhad not done, oddly, was solve the communication problem on rail service. Through a literature search of NTSB accident reports referencing communication or communication systems, I found a 1985 report that described how radio communication between the train operators and the Control Center had failed, contributing to the cause of the accident (United States, NTSB, Rear). To emphasize the conclusion that this accident could have been avoided, the NTSB referenced an earlier report from 1976 (United States, NTSB, Chicago), in which the NTSB had recommended both technical and procedural changes to the CTA's emergency communication procedures. From these two Change of technology on the trains did not improve communications.

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reports I realized that although the telephone system of the mid-1970s was indeed problematic, so too was the CTA's policy on rail communication-a policy that the CTA failed to change in response to the NTSB's recommendations. How, then, can rhetorical theory help explain the CTA's inaction? Before I address that question, I first reconstruct the accidents from the descriptions given in the NTSB reports and explain the rhetorical situation that these reports addressed. Then I compare the materialist, classical, and constructivist approaches to accident analysis.

A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE specific, concrete example which demonstrates the problem

During the early morning rush hour ofJanuary9, 1976, the motorman of train 104 "saw a blue light, which indicated a circuit breaker had been actuated on his train." He then "attempted to notify central control by train phone ... but he did not receive a response" (United States, NTSB, Chicago 2). The motorman stopped his train at Addison and stepped onto the platform to inspect the train. Meanwhile, a second motorman, who had not yet departed for his morning route, noticed that his automatic train control (ATC) system was malfunctioning. He also tried calling the Control Center and received no response. The second motorman then left his train to use another telephone to call the rail supervisor of his line, who gave him clearance to proceed without a fully functioning ATC, a violation of standard operating procedure. The second motorman was not scheduled to stop at Addison, where the first train was standing. He was not told that train 104 was standing because the motorman of train 104 had not told the Control Center that he had stopped. With the sun in his eyes, the second motorman could not see train 104 as he approached the Addison Street station. He was therefore unprepared to apply the backup friction brakes in time, and without ATC, he had no way to automatically stop the train. This accident produced 381 injuries and one death. Although the NTSB could not, in 1976, identify with certainty the problem with the train phone system, it speculated that "varying metallurgical compositions" in the third rail could have affected "the sensitivity of pickup device" (United States, NTSB, Chicago 24). Therefore, it recommended that the CTA create a "predeparture test" (28) for the train phone and a backup plan for emergency communication, concluding that "the controller's ability to communicate with a train Suggestion was to alter the process/adjust the testing out instead of looking at changing the technology.

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may mean the difference between no accident or a catastrophe" (24). The eTA's response to the first part of the recommendation seemed adequate enough: Maintenance procedures have been intensified for both carbone and wayside train phone equipment. A survey of signal strength has been made over trackage. This has led to the installation of additional wayside equipment. More train phones are being acquired to provide greater reserve spares. Additionally, a radio system is being designed to supplement the existing phone system which operates over the electrified power rail. (United States, NTSB, Rear 29)

This seems like it is maintaining the equipment and not embodying the test/check that was suggested

The NTSB, however, classified the response as unacceptable. Emphasizing that its recommendation "calls for more than just hardware," the NTSB said that the eTA should provide backup procedures as well as backup equipment for emergency communication (29). In fact, what the NTSB called for was better regulation of the eTA. On this point, the NTSB highlighted the eTA's problematic independence from its regulatory overseer, the RTA: "The Chicago Regional Transit Authority (RTA) has authority under its charter to regulate and control the eTA, but at the time of the accident, the RTA had not exercised this power. The eTA is virtually self-regulating" (United States, NTSB, Chicago 7). Self-regulation was not rejected outright, but it was raised as a communication problem between the eTA and the RTA: In the past, the operations of the eTA have not been subject to any regulatory authority. While it is possible to provide safe and reliable transportation without regulation, it is difficult for those within the structure of a company to maintain objectivity with respect to company problems. Since regulatory agencies view a system from the outside, they may provide better insight into safety and operating problems. Also, guidelines should be established by an external authority because the economics of internal policies may allow requirements for maintenance, installation standards, design, etc., to be relaxed. Unbiased controls by a regulatory agency may insure that a company's operations are safer and more dependable. (26)

The regulatory process is, at best, a dialogue between the "external authority" and the "company." Because the eTA appeared unwilling to communicate with the RTA, the NTSB was forced to recommend to the governor of Illinois that he "insure the RTA exercises its statutory, regulatory authority over the CTA so that the CT A may provide the

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safest practical transit service" (30). But even the governor was unable to intervene. Eight years later, another accident occurred that also involved a failure in the communication infrastructure. On August 17, 1984, the motorman of train 135 was heading southbound toward the Loop when he "heard a popping noise and smelled smoke" (United States, NTSB, Rear 1). He stopped the train to examine the brake system and to confer with his conductor on the platform. They met on the platform because motormen and conductors were not allowed to use their radios to communicate with each other. The two men then returned to the train and proceeded up a slight incline just past the Montrose stop when the train inexplicably rolled to a stop. The motorman tried to move the train forward, but the train would not respond. He then applied the friction brakes, removed his master controller key, and walked toward the seventh car to access a manual switch. He did not notify the Control Center that he was troubleshooting-a violation of standard operating procedure. Leaving the train on an incline to investigate a brake problem also turned out to be a bad idea, for suddenly, as he was walking through the cars, the train began to roll backward. He then used his portable radio to contact the controller to advise him of the situation; however, although the controller responded, the motorman was not sure that the controller understood his message. He did not use the portable radio to contact the conductor. (2)

Meanwhile, a second train, which was not scheduled to stop at Montrose, approached the station. The motorman of the second train noticed the stoplight on the tracks and stopped his train. The second motorman could see the first train on the hill ahead of him, apparently standing still, but he could not figure out what was going on, so he attempted to contact the Control Center. He got no response. While the second motorman was trying to contact the Control Center, the first motorman was struggling to stop his train from rolling backward down the hill. Because his train was composed of eight cars, he could not address all the passengers while walking through the cars. At a certain point, all he could do was exhort those passengers he could reach to move forward and get down or bury their heads between their knees. His train reached 20 miles per hour when it finally crashed into the standing train. Forty-three people on that moving

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train were injured. One man sitting close to the back end of the moving train was crushed to death. The NTSB determined that "the probable cause of this accident was the failure of the motorman of train No. 135 to apply the track brakes while the train was rolling downhill" (United States, NTSB, Rear i). A contributing factor to the accident was this breakdown in the communication infrastructure: Apparently, "interference by other users on the same frequency" prevented the train operators from communicating their technical difficulties to the Control Center (24). Just as important, "there were no CTA procedures for clearing the air of the nonessential traffic during the emergency or for switching to a discrete emergency frequency" (24). In short, the CTArail service did not have a backup plan for emergency communication, a point emphasized in the report: The eTA's records indicate that operating personnel frequently have difficulty trying to communicate with the controller during emergencies. The motorman of train 135 testified that, during his career, on at least three separate occasions he tried unsuccessfully to contact the controller during unusual occurrences. There have been other instances of poor communications between train operating personnel and the controller. For example, on January 9,1976, two eTA trains collided at the Addison Street Station. In its investigation, the Safety Board found that "the train phone system did not operate reliably and it failed to provide the necessary communications with the controller on the morning of the accident." (21)

Without any evidence that the CTA had created a backup plan for emergency communication, the NTSB could only repeat in its 1985 report what it had already said in 1976: The NTSB reiterates Safety Recommendation R-76-38 issued to the eTA on July 8, 1976: Insure that the train phone system provides dependable, reliable, and backup communication for operational control and that proper procedures are in effect to provide emergency warnings and instructions. (United States, NTSB, Rear 34)

According to an official in the Safety Recommendations Department at the NTSB, in 1987, the CTAresponded to the NTSB's recommendation by reporting that it had phased out the troublesome telephone system and instituted a radio system. Six years after that, in 1993, the NTSB concluded its investigation, marking it "closed and unaccept-

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able." Why, then, did the CTA reject the NTSB's recommendation to change the policy on rail communication? Campbell: Text as site/scene of rhetorical action through space/time bounded only by people's ideology.

THE MATERIALIST APPROACH

In materialist rhetoric, stated John Campbell, "the text" is not a container of arguments but rather" a temporary and proximate site of a scene of rhetorical action that in principle ranges over space and time and is bounded only by the ideology of the people" (250). What appears to hold the action together are not arguments but ideographs, which link ideology with words and phrases. A materialist, then, might say that the 1976 NTSB report failed because it did not signify a vital alternative to communication between the RTA and the CTA, on one hand, and between CTA managers and ATU train operators, on the other hand. Thus, communication and its cognates become an ideo- graphic site of struggle for the constituents of the NTSB report. Materialist critics John Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, who have studied the comparative uses of <equality>3 in the public discourse of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, explain that to reshape an ideograph, a rhetor needs to challenge "culturaltypal" narratives with" countercultural" narratives (471-72). In this case, Malcolm X's separatist vision of <equality> does not replace King's integrationist vision but significantly complicates it. That illustrates McGee's point that "ideology is dynamic and a jorce, always resilient, always keeping itself in some consonance and unity, but not always the same consonance and unity" ("'Ideograph'" 434) and that one can comprehend subtle changes to ideology by paying attention to the articulation and rearticulation of ideographs. In contemporary technological projects, where stakeholders may have competing claims on the development or deployment of a technology, articulation of key values can adhere to the product or a technical process itself. The technology is tagged, so to speak, which materialists indicate by placing around the ideograph. The manifestation of ideological disputes-this tagging-can be readily illustrated in Benoit Godin's study of the coordination of health care information between doctors, patients, pharmacists, and governmental bodies in Canada. Godin's point is that "logical arguments" about the value of a proposed "were either questioned, minimized, or overshadowed" by actors' hopes and fears about "the unknown" aspects of smart-card technology (894): Physi-

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It appears that ideograph is about the ideas/concepts which are linked to specific pieces of language and who gets to control the associations that word/ideograph has and then how different forces change it. I think. Coogan I PUBLIC RHETORIC 289

cians, it seemed, wanted the to centralize patient information, but to privacy advocates, that smacked of "Big Brother" and the "potential misuse of this information for illicit purposes" (878). During the multiyear process of negotiation that Godin observed, the was transformed from an emblem of technological efficiency to an instrument of surveillance and state control. A similar transformation may be found in Stuart Blume's study of . When deaf people failed to sign up for cochlear implants in the mid-1970s, Blume reported, otologists, medical suppliers, and journalists decided to construct the implants as a heroic technological breakthrough-the rhetoric of the bionic ear-to generate interest in the procedure. However, because this narrative of medical progress relied on a shorthand "cultural assumption" about "humanity's very essence" (40) and its relation to speech, some deaf citizens in France took offense. "It had simply been taken for granted," Blume explained, "that deaf people viewed their deafness in the same terms as medical and audiological professionals: as a loss of hearing" (39). On the con trary, the French ci tizens indica ted tha tthe deaf experienced deafness not simply as a loss of hearing but as a cultural identity. What the medical community described as liberatory, the deaf community described as "yet another attempt at sociocultural genocide" (49). What finally emerged from these public disagreements between doctors and deaf-advocacy groups, Blume concluded, was a "reluctant but growing willingness of implant teams to negotiate how the technology is to be deployed" (51). Materialist critic Ronald Green has explained that in cases such as these, "rhetoric becomes a discourse of power when its 'publicity effect' makes a population visible inscribing that population onto a field of practical reasoning" (32). In the cases described by Godin and Blume, the Canadian public and the deaf population, respectively, were made visible by ideographic transformations of the and the . In the case of the CTA accidents, however, dissent was not so much discursive as it was demonstrative: Inaction spoke louder than words. The NTSB report recommended that the CTA create a backup plan for emergency so that motormen and conductors could communicate with each other should they lose contact with the Control Center. The CTA attempted to address this recommendation solely through the adaptation of portable radios. What the CTAnever addressed was its policy discouraging motormen and conductors from using their radios to talk with one another.

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Evidence for this claim may be found in the NTSB report issued in 1985. The report states that preceding the accident, the motorman of the first train made an unauthorized stop to troubleshoot a technical problem. Then, while he was working on the problem, the train rolled backward and struck another train. In the report, the NTSB investigators questioned why the motorman and the conductor of the first train had to leave their posts to troubleshoot face-to-face. What they learned was that, at that time, managers discouraged motormen and conductors from using their radios to speak with one another; they required instead that operators communicate directly with the Control Center. "If they do that," the CTA's manager of Operations, Training, and Instruction testified, "then the other would hear and know there is a problem" (United States, NTSB, Rear 21). According to the NTSB, however, this knee-jerk defense of company policy was simply "not borne out by the findings of this investigation" (United States, NTSB, Rear 28). As the report indicates, "between the motorman of train 135 and the controller were poor," and no "procedures [existed] for clearing the air of nonessential traffic during the emergency or for switching to a discrete emergency frequency" (24). The NTSB concluded, then, that "the manner in which the motorman and the controller used the [] system suggests the need for better procedures and better training of employees in the use of radio for train operation and in emergencies" (24). Motormen and conductors, it went on to say, should not be discouraged from directly with each other with their radios. Yet, by challenging the adequacy of the system at the level of training and procedures, NTSB investigators did not merely challenge the CTA's policies but the CTA's conception of managers as leaders and of operators as followers. The alternate conception of open disrupted the traditional conception of top-down by empowering subordinates (the train operators) to make their own decisions and bypass their superiors in times of crisis. This recommendation was rejected, in part, because, during the years following the 1976 NTSB report, when managers and operators should have been working to improve the train system, they were instead working to defeat each other in a strike (Young and Strong 1). The strike of the Amalgamated Transit Union workers in 1979 took place during a period of rising inflation and budget cuts for mass

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transportation in major cities. With substantial reforms of mass transit mired in partisan politics in the wake of Mayor Richard J. Daley's death, "the conventional wisdom in Washington and Springfield was that shiny new equipment and additional routes would somehow reverse the exodus of Americans from transit to their automobiles" (Young 131). One of the "shiny new" pieces of equipment, of course, was the Motorola walkie-talkie radio that replaced the unreliable telephone system. Krambles and Peterson explained that there was dramatic proof of the value of radio in dealing with llpt'rahans in the winter of 1978-79 ... when Motorola, on short noticl', supplied a number of 450-megahertz walkie-talkie transceivers, lifesavers without which rail operation would have come to a halt. (87)

What Krambles and Peterson failed to describe, however, is the political context in which the radios emerged. As David Young recounted it, Daley died in 1976, and the renegade candidate Jane Byrne upset his successor, Michael Bilandic, in the Democratic primary in early 1979 largely on the campaign issue of the city's failure to plow streets adequately and to keep the CTA running during a succession of blizzards. Byrne, mindful of how transit had become a political issue in Chicago, successfully weathered a four-day strike by transit workers in December that was settled only after the strikers [seeking wage increases] were unable to prevent CTAmanagement from operating limited rushhour service on several elevated lines. (135)

Although the strikers from the ATU could not prevent their managers from running a few of their routes, they could make the job difficult. Picketing ATU workers not only threatened to harm the "scabs" (managers) who crossed their picket line but, in d few incidents, threatened to sabotage the trains (Smith and Sneed AI2). And although Mayor Byrne could not prevent the strike from occurring, she could use the strike as a political opportunity to paint the ATU as greedy and unreasonable, to ingratiate herself with the victimized commuters, who appeared to take her side in the dispute (Tyner AS). The strike ended when the courts declared that because eTA workers were a part of a "public corporation," they were not entitled to strike (Flannery and Williams AI4). Nevertheless, the strike was successful from the union point of view: ATU workers were awarded their wage increase (Strong 5; Strong and Young AI). From the public's point of view, however, the strike not only interrupted service for a week

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but jeopardized safety by exacerbating problems between management and labor. between the CTA and the RTA was also politically charged at this time. Thus, when the NTSB recommended that the governor ensure that the RTA exercise its regulatory authority over the CTA, this recommendation too was rejected. A materialist account may help us understand why. As Young explains, in the wake of Mayor Daley's death and the death of the old Democratic machine, the CTA was in financial trouble. Because Washington, DC, had, in the postwar period, "spent only $375 million on mass transit [nationwide], in contrast to $24 billion on roads, aviation, and waterways," the CTA was losing riders to the automobile, raising fares, and running an operating deficit that, by 1980, reached 281.8 million dollars (131). To stay afloat, the CTA began sharing power uneasily with the RTA, an umbrella organization that administers transportation in the city and the suburbs. Naturally, the suburban, Republican legislators were not interested in subsidizing the CTA and its Democratic backers. At that time, the RTA board was split evenly between city and suburban appointees, and it quickly became a political battleground between Republicans and Democrats. For example, Daley's appointment of Milton Pikarsky for chairman of the RTA-whom Young describes as an "apolitical engineer" (133) with a substantial record in city transit administration-was delayed by the suburban faction for nine months even though this faction failed to produce its own candidate for the job. Because public transportation had become politicized in the wake of Daley's death, the RTA and the CTA were unable to effect meaningful changes in regulatory oversight-changes that could have prevented the second accident from occurring. To nevertheless suggest such changes was, apparently, to take the Republican side in a political dispute and lose. If the NTSB failed to persuade the CTA to change its policy on emergency , it failed because it recommended changes in between the CTA and the RTA and between managers and operators that were untenable. The reports did not fail because they were poorly written, poorly received, or poorly interpreted but because they were focused improbably on changing an ideologically entrenched understanding of ; they modeled a series of changes to the CTA infrastructure that seemed sensible but politically impossible. In this formulation of accident analysis, rhetoric becomes a material force-a social phenomenon-in the context of which claims are

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made on the behavior and beliefs of others, with the strong presumption that such claims (if accepted) will lead to meaningful change (McGee, "Materialist's"). The focus here on ideographs further implies a departure from the prescriptive norms of rhetorical culture, as articulated in the classical approach, and from descriptive accounts of workplace communication, as articulated in the ethnographicconstructivist approach. To establish more clearly the importance of this departure, I discuss in the concluding sections the classical and constructivist approaches to the eTA story.

THE CLASSICAL APPROACH

What stands out in the classical approach is an idealized conception of deliberation between dissenting parties and a steadfast belief in the value of such deliberation, conducted honestly and intelligently. The problem with this approach is not so much conceptualfor few would argue with the value of rational deliberation-as it is empirical. Unfortunately, we have little evidence to suggest that rational deliberation about technology works the way classicists say it should work. What we do have is an honorable but anachronistic defense of the Greek polis: that realm of freedom where pure deliberation between equals takes place. This defense of an ideal realm of freedom seems to obscure the reality of dissent. In his discussion of the supersonic-transport debates of the late 1970s, for example, Randall Bytwerk suggested that opponents of the high-speed jet won not because of informed deliberation but in spite of it:

How do we want things to be vs. how they manifest /actually work out.

The plane's opponents made apocalyptic statements, often without providing sound support. [And] the plane's supporters failed to justify the economic and political advantages of the plane until well into the controversy, and then used specious argumentation.

Bytwerk concluded that both sides in the debate used "defective rhetoric" and failed to sustain a rational forum through which "public decisions on complex scientific and technical issues" could have been resolved (198). The conclusion works only if we imagine rhetorical deliberation to be an inherently reasonable process, not an agonistic and, at times, irrational one. What Bytwerk called apocalyptic statements would probably be construed in materialism as effective ideographs.

It's interesting how rhetoric is painted as assuming that all parties are reasonable and engaged and that Rhet falls apart or doesn't work so well when people are not reasonable.

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At first glance, perhaps, the differences between a materialist and classical approach do not seem readily apparent because both approaches place rhetoric within a political-historical context. Carolyn Miller, for example, has argued that technical discourse should not be construed as a form of production but as a form of rhetorical conduct, "a matter of arguing in a prudent way toward the good of the community rather than of constructing texts" ("What's" 22-23). Moreover, "the relevant community" that she imagined the technical communicator would address "is not the working group or the corporation but the larger community within which the corporation sells its products, pays taxes, hires employees, lobbies, issues stock, files lawsuits, and is itself held accountable to the law" (23). Although that might also describe the historical-political context of materialist rhetoric, her argument that technical discourse should be construed as a form of rhetorical conduct implies a rehabilitative role for rhetoric, an ambition to complement the limits of technical communication with humanistic, rational deliberation. At stake in this rehabilitative role is the notion that audiences are inherently reasonable. Michael McGee and Martha Martin, who were critical of this notion, found in Lloyd Bitzer's work an articulate exposition of it: Bitzer suggests that audiences are predisposed by a kind of knowledge, suggesting that there is something inherently reasonable about the history of a community, its tradition of literature and law, that is selfevident to a public. This public is liberally educated, "reasonable" in the same way and on the same terms that Bitzer is reasonable, as an academic interested in thinking about more or less timeless truths operating in contingent situations. Bitzer admits that people sometimes ignore their traditions, even seek actively to cut themselves off from an oppressive past, but this he dismisses as a predictable change in public knowledge or as an aberration, evidence that the public is "in eclipse" or temporarily incompetent. (50)

However, to McGee and Martin, who were weary of "content free speculation" about public knowledge, believing "in a transcendent 'public' or in the substantial 'reality' of such 'constituents of public knowledge' as liberty or equality" would be a "contradiction." They believed that "such concepts are adjectival, meaningful only in attachment to a concrete political practice" (50). Insofar as Bitzer and other classicists likewise obscure or minimize the self-interest of advocates who lay claim to "knowledge," classicists may appear to

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substitute what now seem like arbitrary rules of rational deliberation for the competitive visions of collective life discussed earlier in the materialist account of the CTA story. This substitution is most apparent in James Throgmorten's efforts to translate the classical ideal of rational deliberation into the "art of persuasive storytelling about the future." Throgmorten argued that Commonwealth Edison (Com Ed) failed to generate support for three nuclear power-generating facilities in Illinois during the 1980s because it was unable to "tell a persuasive story about how electric power could be supplied" in the future in the state of Illinois (143). Specifically, Com Ed failed to "persuade the Illinois Commerce Commissioners [to accept the proposed rate hike] precisely because Edison planners and managers did not read and critique the consumer groups' story carefully and then revise the company's initial story in light of that critique" (116-18). Throgmorten's effort to move beyond the limits of top-down, modernist, urban planning is admirable. But, at the same time, the effort appears to conflict with his own compelling analysis of Com Ed's "profit-motivated nuclear construction program" (118) and Com Ed's determined resistance to share information and decision-making responsibility with the Chicago public. That Throgmorten imagines Com Ed's behavior to be corrigible given enough time to study the principles of rhetorical deliberation seems good-natured enough but strangely unconvincing. Steven Katz and Carolyn Miller's study of risk communication further illustrates the strain of rehabilitating professional communication with rhetorical deliberation. Their study concerns those problematic assumptions about risk communication made by the North Carolina Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Authority, which include "the Authority's complete control of the process, agenda, and rules; ... its faith in the power of information and education; ... its restricted understanding of communication; and, ... the seeming contempt for the public that results from all of the above" (123). What is restricted in this "engineering model" of risk communication are those "suasory dimensions of language" and "the important role that values and affect play in all aspects of a decision" (132). Katz and Miller's "rhetorical model of risk communication" instead foregrounds "an open-ended rhetoric of participation, engagement, ambiguity, associated with the ideals of democracy" (134). Although this model appears more appealing as a vehicle for public participation, it does not seem capable of changing the Authority's barely disguised contempt for the public in North Carolina.

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The prospect that any theory of communication could civilize the inevitably charged, political process of finding a site to store nuclear waste or of resolving disagreements between management, regulators, and labor, as in the eTA case discussed here, seems unlikely. Yet, that is exactly what the classical approach would propose. It would say that the NTSB report of 1976 failed because it did not create, in Katz and Miller's formulation, "an open-ended rhetoric of participation" between the eTA, the RTAand the ATU. Perhaps, in responding to the report, the eTA relied too heavily on an engineering model of risk communication and, as a result, failed to engage ATU workers in a constructive dialogue about ways of clearing the radio airwaves during an emergency. Or, as Throgmorten might put it, perhaps the report simply failed to "tell a persuasive story" about the future of the eTA's communication network. At the very least, a classical approach would emphasize missed opportunity for rhetorical deliberation between the CTA, the RTA, and the ATU, deliberations that would have enabled clearheaded discussion, which in tum would have prevented the second accident from occurring. Yet, as those same studies by Throgmorten and by Miller and Katz also reveal, such deliberation seems untested, unrealistic, or naive. Obviously, that presents us with a dilemma. If classical rhetoric cannot prescribe the guidelines that would enable rational deliberation between a variety of stakeholders concerned with public safety, then what can it do?

And this is an excellent question. Idealism does not have much place alone, but if it can be adapted to a specific situation, perhaps.

THE CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH

One response has been to reject ideals of rational deliberation and of the public altogether and to replace them with detailed ethnographic evidence about professional communication in corporations. The constructivist response, in other words, has been to replace prescriptive guidelines about public discourse with descriptive accounts of private (corporate) discourse. Teresa Harrison, for example, has suggested a link between rhetoric and organizational culture through Thomas Farrell's definition of social knowledge. "Social knowledge," she said, paraphrasing Farrell, "directs the perceptual process so that individuals attend to bits of information that are meaningful and significant within a particular framework" (9). To perceive the "significant" bits of information in a given situation would be to perceive the organization's values.

This seems like a radically useless approach: if you can't have a decent, civil. balanced discussion, then you just go and study how people communicate in order to learn how they make decisions? Don't you want to impact/adjust how people communicate so that you can solve problems?

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Although engineers and other technical professionals may use social knowledge when they communicate, how they might use it to create technical knowledge, as Harrison contended, is unclear. At least in Farrell's theory, technical knowledge precedes social knowledge: In attempting, for instance, to control, produce, or appropriate resources of the natural and externalized environment, managers and members of a social system must presuppose a technical or specialized knowledge. This knowledge, whether localized in science, craft, or technology, will acquire its character as an object through the general patterns, which are found to inhere in the natural environmental process. While reconstruction of those patterns may range from prediction, to empirical generalization, to theories constituted in law-like statements, it is the general and optimally invariant set of relationships among empirical phenomena which must preoccupy the scientist, the specialist, the social engineer. Yet much of our most ordinary and necessary social conduct does not easily reduce to such basic formulations. (143 emphasis added)

Farrell and Goodnight found little social knowledge in their analysis of the spokesperson's comments at Three Mile Island. To equate social knowledge with technical knowledge is to collapse Farrell's thesis. To Harrison, however, the equation is necessary because "being an organization member means being socialized into an understanding, if not an endorsement, of its worldview" (18). Rachel Spilka's study of two engineers who "did not communicate effectively with the majority of their multiple audiences" (49) further illustrates the problem with these claims for a constructivist rhetoric. Spilka's premise is that the engineers' failure to communicate effectively has much to do with their "strategy of isolation" (52), which denied them the necessary access to coworkers. Because the engineers lacked up-to-date information about company priorities and client needs, they were unable to write effective progress reports about the status of their work. To explain the role of rhetoric in this case, Spilka simply proclaimed that Bitzer's "notion of public knowledge is similar to the notion of corporate knowledge" (64). Bitzer's theory of public knowledge, like Farrell's theory of social knowledge, is a theory about rhetoric and public behavior. To Spilka, though, the theory "implies that, to become part of (or accepted by) the corporate community, a new employee needs to develop corporate knowledge" (64), including the knowledge of one's audience.

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However, Bitzer made an important distinction between audience and public, a distinction that Spilka did not seem to recognize: The public must be conceived to be a different thing from audience; for, while in some cases audiences and public may overlap or coincide, in most cases they do not. For example, the Senate deliberates and acts in the interests of the public thought to consist of the citizens of the country. Obviously, the Senate is not identical with the citizenry-the public whose interests are cared for. What is more, many senators may hold principles and interests opposed to the public they represent. The Senate, as a rhetorical audience, is addressed because it has the capacity to mediate change, but it may lack the power to authorize change. (73)

quote

Thus, the public becomes a third force to Bitzer, something that stands between rhetor and audience. Although the technical audience may act on behalf of the public (e.g., in the interests of consumers or stockholders), Spilka did not explore that possibility because it would undermine her strategy of using the public as an analogy for the corporation. What the constructivist approach seems to rely on, then, is not rhetorical theory per se but ethnographic data about professional communication and its relation to technical knowledge. Stephen Doheny-Farina's study of a new heart-assist pump provides a useful analogue between the constructivist approach and the CTAstory. In his study, a hospital employee must determine the initial starting rate at which a new machine will pump blood. After reading conflicting advice about this rate in the hospital's instruction manual and the manufacturer's specifications, he is unsure what to do. Nevertheless, he remains convinced that he needs to identify the correct starting rate. Doheny-Farina concluded that this search for the right answer "illustrates a nonrhetorical reading" (154) of the heart pump. Later on, when this employee, Mark, realizes that "higher pressures may be required if the patient is hypertensive or if the pump outlet is restricted" (158), Doheny-Farina noted that Mark had then developed an ability to make judgments. No longer just following the instructions, he had thus graduated to a rhetorical reading that recognizes and then controls contingencies in technical work. Along these lines, a constructivist might speculate that CTA workers failed to create new procedures for clearing the radio airwaves during an emergency because they failed to interpret the rules for using the radio in such a way that would account for contingencies such as overloaded frequencies. CTA workers reading the NTSB reports may have performed, in Doheny-Farina's words, a

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"nonrhetorical reading" of the radios. What they lacked, Harrison or Spilka might suggest, was a firm grounding in social, or corporate, knowledge. Perhaps individual CTA workers employed a "strategy of isolation" when they interpreted the NTSB recommendations and thus produced ineffective policy for the organization? Although CTA workers may, indeed, have failed to construct knowledge for using the new radios, how rhetoric would have enabled them to construct such knowledge is unclear. Consider, for example, the case for constructivist rhetoric laid out in Cezar Ornatowski's study of technical communication at an aerospace firm. In this study, Ornatowski analyzed an engine test report, written by Stephen, an engineer at ASD, and reviewed by Stephen's engineering colleagues. According to Ornatowski, none of the engineers reviewing the report "disputed the data," but the review group did dispute Stephen's interpretation of the data as a "failure" of the engine (328). After rewording Stephen's report, the review group also redefined parts of the specifications that Stephen used to construct the parameters of his tests and reworded the criteria for measuring the test results in order to comply with the Federal Aviation Administration requirements. Ornatowski was quick to point out that this story is "a story of rhetoric" not because the review team's "action constitutes a coverup" (331); rather, this routine experience of matching test results to specs by revising the specs and rephrasing the data only underscores the point that "technical facts and artifacts, like scientific facts and artifacts, are-at least to a significant extent--constructed through discursive transactions (including technical documents) that accompany the process of technical development" (332). No one would dispute the link between technical artifacts and technical documents. But how does rhetoric sustain the link? When Ornatowski established the rationale for this study of the aerospace firm, he cited the work of historians and sociologists of science and technology, including Pamela Mack, Louis Bucciarelli, Bruno Latour, and Wiebe Bijker, concluding that technological work now" exhibits a significant degree of interpretive flexibility" (316-17). "For rhetoricians," he went on to say, "the major implications of this work are that technology development is to a large extent a rhetorical enterprise and that the margin of indeterminacy surrounding technical artifacts constitutes a rhetorical space" (317). However, because Ornatowski merely asserted the connection to rhetorical theory but did not reference it, what rhetorical theory actually contributed is unclear.

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Also unclear is whether professionals are willing to concede that their socially constructed, technical knowledge has a rhetorical dimension. On more than one occasion, for example, Dorothy Winsor ("Rhetorical" 365-68, Writing 7, 31-32, 41-42, 45, 53, 69-70) has noted that the engineers in her studies do not see rhetoric or persuasion at work in their communication. Some even find the very idea of it threatening-a suggestion that they are perhaps trying to misrepresent data or inappropriately persuade a colleague to do something, an interpretation that some philosophers of professional ethics also share (see, e.g., Davis). Engineers would prefer to construe their arguments as problems that can be resolved with disciplinary techniques: in short, the very activity that Winsor and other constructivists want to call rhetorical. The problem, here, as Bernadette Longo recognized in her discussion of Doheny-Farina's work, is that constructivism has staked its claim to rhetoric upon technical discourse that creates knowledge in an organization. In this way, constructivist ethnographies cannot account for "influences outside the organization under study" as anything but background noise. With "a view of [professional] culture that is limited within the walls of one organization," constructivists are unable to analyze those larger" systems of power" that make a text possible, to understand "why the text legitimates some kinds of knowledge and not others" (55). Such tensions are muted not only because of conceptual limitations of the term culture, as Longo contended, but because of the practical limits of conducting research in contemporary, high-tech organizations. Because ethnographerconstructivists are not permitted, legally or ethically, to publish the knowledge that their participants have generated, readers are unable to judge the way rhetoric enabled a social construction of it. Remaining in the wake of actual knowledge about products or events is a generalization about the process employed to generate the knowledge or manage the events. F. Robert Baker's application of Bitzer's theory of exigency further illustrates the problem of limiting the rhetorical study of technology to workplace communication. Baker argued that in technical work, a situation becomes "rhetorical because, after Bitzer, the exigency is 'capable of positive modification' and ... positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse" (32). Although that is an accurate representation of Bitzer's definition, it is a problematic application because it overlooks the humanistic criticism of science and

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technology that informed Bitzer's work. Scientists, Bitzer said, are "increasingly uncomfortable" because they do not have any" contact with truths and values beyond the reach of [their] methods-humane wisdom that could give [them] competence to deal with the most vivid problems facing mankind" (82). And technology, he maintained, echoing John Dewey's argument, has become so large and complicated that laypersons can no longer access it much less understand it. Indeed, the eclipse of the public as a rhetorical polis, said Bitzer, can be traced to the" destruction of community by technology" (79).

quote

To Baker, however, rhetorical exigencies in engineering take on a less weighty tone. He simply assumes that engineering design teams will be given a technical problem to solve and that their first task will be to agree on the precise nature of the problem-to define it as an exigency that can be positively modified by proposals, feasibility studies, or other forms of technical discourse. Baker's contention, then, that "rhetoric of engineering" only begins "once the cultural and logical aspects of situation have been resolved and changes to improve them have been defined," seems odd (31), for Bitzer seemingly intended rhetoric to aid in the cultural analysis of a situation. Of course, we could use Baker's approach to reason thatthe CTAmisconstrued the exigency at hand when they read the NTSB report, taking the recommendation to improve as a technical problem with the telephones only, instead of as a technical and procedural problem with rail . To do so, however, we would need to misread Bitzer's intentions about the relationship between rhetoric and technology. One of the difficulties I have with constructivism, then, is that rhetoric only becomes intelligible within a particular corporate context. This assumption makes connecting technical or professional communication with its historical-political context difficult. Hence, although I agree with Dorothy Winsor when she said that "we will never understand the role rhetoric plays in technical work if we look only at [research] texts that are released to the public and not at the role texts play in technical work as it is actually accomplished" ("Rhetorical" 367), a loose reversal of what she said also seems to make sense: We will never understand the role that rhetoric plays in technical work if we only study technical discourse within the context of the corporation.

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CONCLUSION

This article has suggested one way to analyze the rhetorical aspects of ideological disagreements between several large organizations. As a form of rhetorical criticism . materialism does not assure us that the public is capable of controlling corporations with reasoned deliberations. Nor does it illustrate how technical professionals might use rhetoric to make sensible judgments about technical knowledge or even to construct technical knowledge. It rather admits that rhetoric is "a species of coercion"" (McGee, "Materialist's" 40) that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. To study these coercive acts is to study those ideological practices that enable stakeholders to cooperate or contend with one another. Ultimately, the materialist approach is not bound to the transportation industry in Chicago or to NTSB accident reports but to those utterances that enable professionals to construct technological services and products for the public. What is needed now are more contemporary studies that define these ideographic connections between corporations and their constituents, studies that do not isolate professional communication or abstract public deliberation but instead elucidate the ideological framework sustaining both. Find the connections, the networks of interaction between the corporate work worlds, the deliberative processes, and the various kinds of public.

NOTES 1. This is a signature program in the Illinois Institute of Technology's undergraduate curriculum. For more information, please see http://ipro.iit.edu. 2. Dr. Thomas Wong, chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, lllinois Institute of Technology. 3. Here I follow the convention that Lucaites and Condit have established of identifying ideographs by setting them off in angle brackets.

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Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Bytwerk, Randall. "The SST Controversy: A Case Study ofthe Rhetoric of Technology." Central States Speech Journal 30 (1979): 187-98. Campbell, John. "Introduction." Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 24951. Davis, Michael. "Professional Responsibility: Just Following the Rules?" Business and Professional Ethics Journal 18 (1999): 65-87. Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow, 1927. Doheny-Farina, Stephen. Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Farrell, Thomas. "Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 62 (1976): 1-14. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Lucaites, Celeste Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 140-52. Farrell, Thomas, and G. Thomas Goodnight. "Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island." Communication Monographs 48 (1981): 271-300. Flannery, Michael, and Lillian Williams. "Injunction Hearing Resumes Today." Chicago Sun-Times 20 Dec. 1979: AI4+. Godin, Benoit. "The Rhetoric of a Health Technology: The Microprocessor Patient Card." Social Studies of Science 27 (1997): 865-902. Goodnight, G. Thomas. "The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument." Argumentation and Advocacy 18 (1982): 214-27. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Lucaites, Celeste Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 251-64. Green, Ronald. "Another Materialist Rhetoric." Critical Studies ill Mass Connmmication 15 (1998): 22-41. Harrison, Teresa. "Frameworks for the Study of Writing in Organizational Contexts. '. Written Commullication 4 (1987): 3-23. Johnson, Robert. User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mlll1dane Objects. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Katz, Steven, and Carolyn Miller. "The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Controversy in North Carolina: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Risk Communication." Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Ed. Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 111-40. Krambles, George, and Arthur H. Peterson. The CTA at 45: A History of the First 45 Years of the Chicago Trallsit Authority. Chicago: Walsworth, 1993. Longo, Bernadette. "An Approach for Applying Cultural Study Theory to Technical Writing Research." Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 53-73. Lucaites, John Louis, and Celeste Michelle Condit. "Reconstructing <Equality>: Culturetypal and Counter-Cultural Rhetorics in the Martyred Black Vision." Communication Monographs 57 (1990): 5-24. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College, PA: Strata, 2000. 471-91. McGee, Michael. "The 'Ideograph': A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology." Quarterly Journal of Speech 6 (1980): 1-16. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Lucaites, Celeste Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 425-40. - - - . "In Search of the People: A Rhetorical Alternative." Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235-49. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Lucaites, Celeste Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 341-56. - - - . "A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric." Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger. Ed. Ray McKerrow. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1982. 23-48.

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David Coogan is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is the author of Electronic Writing Centers: Computing the Field of Composition (Ablex, 1999) and the director of a service learning research project about community leadership on the south side of Chicago. He may be reached at [email protected].

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.