Effects of Content Management on writing in an administrative office: Building a way of organizing writing

Recent research has focused on the need for new writing tools to facilitate knowledge work and the utility of the Content Management System (CMS) for meeting that need. Little, however, is known about the effects introduction of a CMS may cause in the workplace writing environment. This project attempts to answer the question of how content management, existing writing practices, and workplace culture interact. Qualitative research methods are used to study writing practices in an administrative office before and alter CMS introduction. Analysis of the results is driven by an activity theory framework and the genre ecology metaphor. This method revealed points of tension between the CMS and the workplace culture; writers' concepts of what writing is and how they do it were challenged. The result is a vision of how content management (CM) and workplace culture are mutually constituted, and how the later can be taken into account when developing technologies to facilitate the former.