Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus for the Final Solution through Organizational and Technical Communication

The Final Solution was largely accomplished in eleven months; its executors, the Nazi SS, faced the constant problem that as killing and plunder escalated so did internal competition and corruption; and the SS deliberately cultivated an intensely competitive and polycratic organizational culture that fit the Nazi worldview of life-as-struggle. By tying these three observations together—that the Final Solution was punctuated, entropic, and polycratic—the problem arises: How did SS organizational communications manage, just barely long enough, to create a temporary social reality that regulated the internal contradictions of its genocidal project and fragmented bureaucracy? This study contends that through its organizational and technical communication—the outwardly normal and communally validated regime of formatted documents, official stationery, preprinted forms, filing codes, organizational nomenclature, and bureaucratic catchphrases—competing SS personnel found a common frame of reference to socially construct rules for temporary cooperation. Thus, their documents became boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Wilson & Herndl, 2007) which bridged competing organizational interests within the rhetorical community (Miller, 1994) of desk-murderers. To explore this thesis an evidentiary sample of surviving documents is selected from a single but representative SS bureau, the Security Police (Sipo) Technical Matters Group that administered the mobile gas van program. The documents are analyzed according to Longo\u27s (1998) cultural research methodology for technical writing in which texts are examined in their historical and cultural contexts and then analyzed as discourse, followed by an interrogation of how the texts have been ordered by their analysts for purposes of study and the analysts\u27 relationships to the text. The organization of this project follows this methodology as Chapter 1 introduces the problem; Chapter 2 provides an historical narrative of the gas van program and its antecedents; Chapter 3 reviews the integrative aspects of the Group members\u27 national and institutional cultures, and the differentiating aspects of their organizational culture and its various subcultures; Chapter 4 describes the biographies and postwar testimonies of the Group\u27s principal actors; Chapter 5 introduces and describes the documents themselves; Chapter 6 offers an analysis, grounded in Miller\u27s (1994) concept of the rhetorical community, of the documents\u27 textual and visual rhetorics; Chapter 7 provides a discourse analysis of Group members\u27 use of linguistic resources; Chapter 8 explores various postwar orderings of the lengthiest and most notorious of the gas van texts, prior to and including Katz\u27s (1992a) introduction of the document into the technical communication literature; Chapter 9 interrogates how subsequent analysts within the discipline have ordered the text and what this may reveal about their relationships to it; and Chapter 10 elaborates possible implications for communication ethics. The research problem is answered with the claim that, rather than understanding the Final Solution only as the operation in extremis of Weberian bureaucratic rationality, the desk-murderers may be viewed as a rhetorical community that held chaos at bay through boundary objects—their documents—that deployed metaphors, narratives, and genres onto which competing interests could project their own interpretations while constructing temporary spaces of cooperation

“Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy

The anti-intellectual strain of American evangelicalism, rooted in the populist Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has prompted much commentary from the 20th century to the present. Analysis of this anti-intellectualism has gained new currency today as evangelicals, who comprise 1 in 4 Americans, reject theories of evolution and manmade climate change. Scholarship on the subject has focused on the discourses of evangelical leaders at the national level. The present study, based on three years of fieldwork at an evangelical church, finds that an animus against intellectual elites is a potent local strategy for constructing a satisfying evangelical identity within the organizational culture of a local congregation. Using a constant-comparative method, observations of more than fifty Sunday sermons, preached on the Gospel of Mark over 14 months, identified five binary themes. By spurning intellectualism, evangelicals can seek truth and avoid distraction, and be compassionate versus impersonal, inclusive versus pedantic, actors versus talkers, and God-seekers versus self-seekers. The five themes are then analyzed in terms of constructing an organizational identification in which casting intellectual elites as others is incorporated into church members\u27 personal and social identities. The study contributes to discussions of faith-based anti-intellectualism by demonstrating that macro-level discourses not only shape but also reflect micro-level practices

A Parks and Recreation Plan for Wheatland Wyoming

For Wheatland, Wyoming the necessity of a parks and recreation study is more important now than ever before because of the rapid population growth. This increase in both the population of Wheatland and Platte County is due primarily to the construction of the 1500 megawatt coal-fired Missouri Basin Power Project located 4-1/2 miles northeast of Wheatland

Common carp (Cyprinus carpio L.) alters its feeding niche in response to changing food resources: direct observations in simulated ponds

We used customized fish tanks as model fish ponds to observe grazing, swimming, and conspecific social behavior of common carp (Cyprinus carpio) under variable food-resource conditions to assess alterations in feeding niche. Different food and feeding situations were created by using only pond water or pond water plus pond bottom sediment or pond water plus pond bottom sediment and artificial feeding. All tanks were fertilized twice, prior to stocking and 2 weeks later after starting the experiment to stimulate natural food production. Common carp preferred artificial feed over benthic macroinvertebrates, followed by zooplankton. Common carp did not prefer any group of phytoplankton in any treatment. Common carp was mainly benthic in habitat choice, feeding on benthic macroinvertebrates when only plankton and benthic macroinvertebrates were available in the system. In the absence of benthic macroinvertebrates, their feeding niche shifted from near the bottom of the tanks to the water column where they spent 85% of the total time and fed principally on zooplankton. Common carp readily switched to artificial feed when available, which led to better growth. Common carp preferred to graze individually. Behavioral observations of common carp in tanks yielded new information that assists our understanding of their ecological niche. This knowledge could be potentially used to further the development of common carp aquaculture

Understanding factors associated with the translation of cardiovascular research: A multinational case study approach

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Funders of health research increasingly seek to understand how best to allocate resources in order to achieve maximum value from their funding. We built an international consortium and developed a multinational case study approach to assess benefits arising from health research. We used that to facilitate analysis of factors in the production of research that might be associated with translating research findings into wider impacts, and the complexities involved. Methods: We built on the Payback Framework and expanded its application through conducting co-ordinated case studies on the payback from cardiovascular and stroke research in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. We selected a stratified random sample of projects from leading medical research funders. We devised a series of innovative steps to: minimize the effect of researcher bias; rate the level of impacts identified in the case studies; and interrogate case study narratives to identify factors that correlated with achieving high or low levels of impact. Results: Twenty-nine detailed case studies produced many and diverse impacts. Over the 15 to 20 years examined, basic biomedical research has a greater impact than clinical research in terms of academic impacts such as knowledge production and research capacity building. Clinical research has greater levels of wider impact on health policies, practice, and generating health gains. There was no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts. We identified various factors associated with high impact. Interaction between researchers and practitioners and the public is associated with achieving high academic impact and translation into wider impacts, as is basic research conducted with a clinical focus. Strategic thinking by clinical researchers, in terms of thinking through pathways by which research could potentially be translated into practice, is associated with high wider impact. Finally, we identified the complexity of factors behind research translation that can arise in a single case. Conclusions: We can systematically assess research impacts and use the findings to promote translation. Research funders can justify funding research of diverse types, but they should not assume academic impacts are proxies for wider impacts. They should encourage researchers to consider pathways towards impact and engage potential research users in research processes. © 2014 Wooding et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.RAND Europe and HERG, with subsequent funding from the NHFA, the HSFC and the CIHR. This research was also partially supported by the Policy Research Programme in the English Department of Health