Writing and Social Change

In social communities such as organizations, institutions, and communities of work, writing enables people to achieve specific activities. This chapter explores how writing enables such groups to initiate, manage, and stabilize sociocultural change. The chapter discusses the interrelationship between writing and social change, emphasizing that writing simultaneously constitutes and reflects social practices. First, I provide an overview of the current research and theory on writing and cultural change in social systems, primarily organizations. This research has been instrumental in helping scholars better understand and empirically document the function of written texts in contexts of social change. I explain that change occurs as a transitional process in which advocates will initially destabilize a current context, introduce new elements into that context, and then restabilize that context with new meanings and practices.