Essay 28 H o m e S w e e t Home: W h e r e Do Technical Communication Departments Belong? Nina Wishbow Entrust Technologies Ottawa, Ontario K1V 1A7 Canada nina.wishbow@entrust.com Who Cares? t has always surprised me how few authors talk about the social context of documentation departments in public companies. Schriver (1997) and Carver (1998) offer interesting discussions on the placement of technical communication departments in academia. But only Schriver discusses technical communications in public companies, and then only briefly in a section entitled "Practitioners Without a Profession: Nobody Loves Me But My Mother and She Could Be Jivin', Too."(Schriver,pp. 53-97). To the best of this author's knowledge, to date there has been no formal scholarship on the role of technical communications departments in large organizations. Technical writers in high.tech organizations usually find themselves, or their managers, reporting to people in job functions that are only marginally related to Technical Communication. Historically, the communication product (the manuals, the help, and so on) have not been viewed of sufficient economic importance to the larger organization to justify keeping the writing group at a level parallel to others in the organization. This paper only briefly addresses whether
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