features the fairly hard-nosed measures of pay and promotion to make his case. I see a moral to be drawn: When you find yourself in an “information Polynesia,” get in the outrigger, paddle to the next island, and make friends.

Sullivan and Porter offer postmodern mapping to researchers as a theoretical technique for discovering possibilities of research programs. Although they pre-date Burt by what seems to be about nine years, they advocate much along the lines defined by Burt by pointing to the value of a bridge between academic research on computers and writing and workplace research (lacking a focus on computing as an environment for writing)”:

The classroom perhaps is the best site for effecting fundamental change in the nature of workplace literacy; it certainly provides an opportunity for experimentation, for testing new possibilities (whereas workplace action can be constrained by “the way things have always been done.”

Sullivan and Porter similarly map sectors (clusters) of research communities. The result looks very much like an information Polynesia.

There are two things about the S & P reading I’m still chewing on: (1) the instrumental and pragmatic nature of the corporate setting seemed to make a very odd bedfellow for postmodern theory, with its skepticism of institutions. Isn’t the move to pragmatism (and to tradition in hermeneutics) in some sense a hedge against the indeterminacy of the world postmodernism posits? Also, I had trouble seeing what was necessarily postmodern about these maps until S & P explained it in the last paragraph--thank you! (2) Could someone explain the difference between “situated theory” and “empirical practice”? It seems to hinge on a nuance between relationships and identities in particular situations, without metanarrative, as opposed to observed behavior in same without abstract theorizing. I can’t see the lines.

Perhaps the additional readings will throw some light on this.