ERIC Number: ED463544
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2001-Apr
Pages: 22
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
From the Classroom to the Cubicle: Reading the Rhetoric of the Emerging Corporate University.
Wills, Katherine V.
This paper examines online corporate university artifacts to bring to light additive definitions of literacy. Rhetorical analysis in the paper shows four claims made about literacy in the corporate university artifacts: literacy is knowing the corporate culture; literacy provides immediate and quantifiable benefits; literacy is easily accessible and comprehensible; and corporate literacy is globally transferable. The paper explains that underlying these four claims are four warrants: the corporate culture is a content area upon which to teach, assess, and build an educational end-product; immediate and quantifiable benefits, often in the form of wages or profits to an individual or corporation constitute literacy mastery; immediate accessibility and comprehensibility is to be valued over long-term or reflective and critical practice; and, corporate university training programs provide literacy that can be transferred and applied to other local or global corporations or situations. For the paper, artifacts were collected from online sites of Motorola, Disney, McDonald's and Super 8 Motels, hardcopy texts, and secondary sources, and include phone interviews with corporate university representatives. While postmodern sensibility seems to hail the death of the single proprietary author, discussions with corporate representatives for this paper suggest that at least some corporations firmly retain their rights to corporate authorship. The artifacts of emerging literacy of corporate universities are described in the paper and then analyzed to better understand messages implicit about what constitutes literacy. Sources for the paper include academic and rhetorical authorities, along with writers and theorists for the business sphere. (Contains 23 references.) Appended is the "University of Pineapple Canon." (NKA)
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A