In Technical Communication Quarterly’s most recent special issue on research methods and methodologies, the issue’s guest editors assert “methodological approaches” are important “markers for disciplinary identity” and thereby agree with previous guest editor, Goubil-Gambrell, who in the 1998 special issue “argued that ‘defining research methods is a part of disciplinary development’” (McNely, Spinuzzi, & Teston, 2015, p. 2). Furthermore, the authors of the 2015 special issue revere the 1998 special issue as a “landmark issue” including ideas that “informed a generation of technical communication scholars as they defined their own objects of study, enacted their research ethics, and thought through their metrics” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 9).
It is in this tradition the authors of the 2015 special issue both desire to review “key methodological developments” and associated theories forming the technical communication “field’s current research identity” and to preview and “map future methodological approaches” and relevant theories (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 2). The editors argue the approaches and theories discussed in this special edition of the journal “not only respond to” what they view as substantial changes in “tools, technologies, spaces, and practices” in the field over the past two decades, but also “innovate” by describing and modeling how these changes are informing technical communicators’ emerging research methodologies and theories as those methodologies and theories relate to the “field’s objects of study, research ethics, and metrics” (i.e. “methodo-communicative issues”) (McNely, et al., 2015, pp. 1-2, 6-7).
Reviewing what they see as the fundamental theories and research methodologies of the field, the authors explore how a broad set of factors (e.g. assumptions, values, agency, tools, technology, and contexts) manifest in work produced along three vectors of theory and practice they identify as “sociocultural theories of writing and communication,” “associative theories and methodologies,” and “the new material turn” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 2). The authors describe the sociocultural vector as developing from theoretical traditions in “social psychology, symbolic interactionism,” “learning theory,” and “activity theory,” among others, and as essentially involving “purposeful human actors,” “material surroundings,” “heterogeneous artifacts and tools,” and even “cognitive constructs” combining in “concrete interactions” – that is, situations – arising from synchronic and diachronic contextual variables scholars may identify, describe, measure, and use to explain phenomena and theorize about them (McNely, et al., 2015, pp. 2-4). The authors describe the associative vector as developing from theoretical traditions in “articulation theory,” “rhizomatics,” “distributed cognition,” and “actor-network theory (ANT)” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 4) and as essentially involving “symmetry—a methodological stance that ascribes agency to a network of human and nonhuman actors rather than to specific human actors” and therefore leading researchers to “focus on associations among nodes” as objects at the methodological nexus (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 4). The authors describe the new material vector as developing from theoretical traditions in “science and technology studies, political science, rhetoric, and philosophy” (with the overlap of the specific traditions from political science and philosophy often “collected under the umbrella known as “object-oriented ontology”) and as essentially involving a “radically symmetrical perspective on relationships between humans and nonhumans—between people and things, whether those things are animal, vegetable, or mineral” and how these human and non-human entities integrate into “collectives” or “assemblages” that have “agency” one could view as “distributed and interdependent,” a phenomenon the authors cite Latour as labeling “interagentivity” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 5).
Previewing the articles in this special issue, the editors acknowledge how technical communication methodologies have been “influenced by new materialisms and associative theories” and argue these methodologies “broaden the scope of social and rhetorical aspects” of the field and “encourage us to consider tools, technologies, and environs as potentially interagentive elements of practice” that enrich the field (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 6). At the same time, the editors mention how approaches such as “action research” and “participatory design” are advancing “traditional qualitative approaches” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 6). In addition, the authors state “given the increasing importance of so-called ‘big data’ in a variety of knowledge work fields, mixed methods and statistical approaches to technical communication are likely to become more prominent” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 6). Amidst these developments, the editor’s state their view that adopting “innovative methods” in order to “explore increasingly large date sets” while “remaining grounded in the values and aims that have guided technical communication methodologies over the previous three decades” may be one of the field’s greatest challenges (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 6).
In the final section of their paper, the authors explicitly return to what they seem to view as primary disciplinary characteristics (i.e. markers, identifiers), which they call “methodo-communicative issues,” and use those characteristics to compare the articles in the 1998 special issue with those in the 2015 special issue and to identify what they see as new or significant in the 2015 articles. The “methodo-communicative issues” or disciplinary characteristics they use are: “objects of study, research ethics, and metrics” (McNely, et al., 2015, pp. 6-7). Regarding objects of study, the authors note how in the 1998 special issue, Longo focuses on the “contextual nature of technical communication” while in the 2015 special issue, Read and Swarts focus on “networks and knowledge work” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 7). Regarding ethics, the authors cite Blyer in the 1998 special issue as applying “critical” methods rather than “descriptive/explanatory methods” while in the 2015 special issue, Walton, Zraly, and Mugengana apply “visual methods” to create “ethically sound cross-cultural, community-based research” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 7). Regarding metrics or “measurement,” the authors cite Charney in the 1998 special issue as contrasting the affordances of “empiricism” with “romanticism” while in the 2015 special issue, Graham, Kim, DeVasto, and Keith explore the affordances of “statistical genre analysis of larger data sets” (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 7). In their discussion of what is new or significant in the articles in the 2015 special issue, the editors highlight how some articles address particular methodo-communicative issues. Regarding metrics or “measurement,” for example, they highlight how Graham, Kim, DeVasto, and Keith apply Statistical Genre Analysis (SGA) – a hybrid research method combining rhetorical analysis with statistical analysis – to answer research questions such as which “specific genre features can be correlated with specific outcomes” across an “entire data set” rather than across selected exemplars (McNely, et al., 2015, p. 8).
In summary, the guest editors of this 2015 special issue on contemporary research methodologies both review the theoretical and methodological traditions of technical communication and preview the probable future direction of the field as portrayed in the articles included in this special issue.