We are all Knowledge Workers!
This magazine is for you - the knowledge worker within the field of professional language-use and communication. The magazine is intended to be an international forum where theory, within the field of professional language-use and communication is ‘translated' into practice. The main purpose of the magazine is to provide a place for scholars and professionals within this field to exchange ideas about their work. We hope that it becomes the kind of forum that we currently lack - the bridge between theory and practice.
A knowledge worker is somebody who primarily works as a "symbolic analyst", i.e. somebody who works with symbols rather than, say, machinery. When the translator translates, when the communicator communicates, and when the technical-writer writes, then s/he is working with symbols - the symbols of the trade being words, texts, and images. You are in fact a knowledge worker par excellence.
We all Know that the Knowledge Society is upon us
It is estimated that more than fifty percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in the major OECD economies is based on the production and distribution of knowledge. But what is the knowledge-based society and the corresponding knowledge economy? According to a definition offered by the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry (1998), "A knowledge-driven economy is one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge play the predominant part in the creation of wealth". Knowledge intensive companies can be defined along the same lines - as companies where the bulk of the work being carried out is no longer centred around working with and producing physical objects such as machines, but on gathering, processing, refining and distributing knowledge.
So what does this have to do with me, you may ask? I'm just a communicator, a translator, a technical-writer. Our answer is that it has everything to do with you.
How do we classify the knowledge we are working with? According to the OECD (The Knowledge-Based Economy, 1996), there are four kinds of knowledge, and you are making good use of each and every one of them during an average working day.
- Knowing-what refers to knowledge about "facts". For instance, the answers to questions like: "What is the address of our partner in the Ukraine?" or "Where can I find the company template for enquiries?"
- Knowing-why refers to "science". In our case, linguistics, translation and communication theory. For example, you don't merely know how to address someone from another culture correctly and appropriately in an e-mail, but you also know why this is the correct and appropriate way of addressing this person
- Knowing-how refers to "skills" or the capability of doing something. E.g. when communicators plan, oversee, and run a campaign. Or when a technical-writer judges the receptive powers of her audience and designs her documents accordingly.
- Knowing-who refers to "social competences", which involve networking capabilities and the talent for spotting "who knows what" and "who knows how to do what" - both inside, as well as outside the company.
Many still associate the knowledge society with high-tech businesses and industries such as nanotechnology research labs, telecommunications, and financial services. This, however, is a much too limited notion. Apart from communicators, technical and medical writers, translators, and copy writers, the label "knowledge worker", also applies to teachers, human resource officers, lawyers, architects, designers, shipping agents etc. As knowledge workers we are by no means alone, and - according to surveys - there will be more and more of us over the years to come.
True to our credo you will meet both professionals and professors in this issue of Language at Work; among many other things they will be presenting and discussing what language and communication quality is and what we - as knowledge workers - may do to improve the quality of our daily work.
As the front page reveals this issue is thematically centred around "quality assurance in documentation processes". The aim of this thematic section is to provide different viewpoints on a very important issue and suggest new ways of dealing with it.
Dear reader, welcome to YOUR magazine!
Peter Kastberg, Ph.D., Director of the ASB Research Group for Knowledge Communication, The Aarhus School of Business, Denmark
Jeanette Ørsted, Cand.ling.merc., Head of Translation at the intellectual property consulting company Plougmann & Vingtoft a/s, Denmark
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