Abstract 
ETHOS AND COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR: AN EXPLORATION OF THE 
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN AN ORGANIZATION’S IDENTITY AND ITS 
COLLABORATIVE REVIEW PROCESSES 
By Alexis Poe Davis 
November, 2010 
DIRECTOR: Dr. Wendy B. Sharer 
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH 
 This dissertation explores the ways in which organizational identity actually functions 
within the day-to-day processes of an organization, showing how organizational identity trickles 
down into collaborative writing processes and what the effects of this trickle-down are, in terms 
of the document being produced, the workgroup producing the document, and the organization 
as a whole.  Specifically, the dissertation examines the organizational identity of the Employees 
Association of the State and discovers how identity traits or characteristics influence the 
collaborative review process of EAS’s newsletter.  First I examine the public-sector labor 
association to discover its organizational identity through the perceptions of its employees.  I 
then examine the review and revise processes of the writing group which produces the 
organization’s member-directed newsletter.  Finally, I make visible any connections that exist 
between the organization’s identity and its review processes, focusing especially on the effects 
on EAS’s ethos and on the cooperative behaviors of its employees. 
 Keywords: organizational identity, collaborative writing, organization studies
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
ETHOS AND COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR: AN EXPLORATION OF THE 
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN AN ORGANIZATION’S IDENTITY AND ITS 
COLLABORATIVE REVIEW PROCESSES 
 
A Dissertation 
Presented To  
The Faculty of the Department of English 
East Carolina University 
 
In Partial Fulfillment 
of the Requirements for the Degree 
Doctor of Philosophy 
 
by 
Alexis Poe Davis 
November, 2010 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
©Copyright 2010 
Alexis Poe Davis 
 
 
ETHOS AND COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR: AN EXPLORATION OF THE 
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN AN ORGANIZATION’S IDENTITY AND ITS 
COLLABORATIVE REVIEW PROCESSES 
by 
Alexis Poe Davis 
 
APPROVED BY: 
DIRECTOR OF DISSERTATION:_________________________________________________ 
Dr. Wendy B. Sharer, PhD 
COMMITTEE MEMBER:________________________________________________________ 
Dr. Holly Hapke, PhD 
 
COMMITTEE MEMBER:________________________________________________________ 
Dr. Donna Kain, PhD 
 
COMMITTEE MEMBER:________________________________________________________ 
Dr. Sherry Southard, PhD 
 
CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH:_____________________________________ 
Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, PhD 
 
DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL:____________________________________________ 
Dr. Paul J. Gemperline, PhD
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 Many thanks are due to my committee for their encouragement and support during the 
process of crafting my dissertation.  Dr. Holly Hapke, from the ECU Geography Department, 
ensured my work was accessible and clear to a non-expert.  Dr. Donna Kain’s expertise in 
organizational communication helped me sharpen some of the dull edges of my discussion and 
analysis.  Dr. Sherry Southard was a vital part of my dissertation process, particularly during the 
earliest stages of my writing.  Her generosity with her time and ideas taught me a lesson I will 
pass on to my own graduate students one day.  The presence of the late, great Dr. Janice Tovey 
was greatly missed, particularly during the celebrations of my completion of the doctorate.   
Dr. Wendy Sharer, the Chair of my dissertation committee, warrants special thanks.  Dr. 
Sharer’s patience and unflappable serenity even in the face of my most intense neuroses is a 
critical reason this dissertation exists.  She tirelessly examined multiple drafts of this document 
with a sharp eye and a kind heart.  I deeply and sincerely appreciate her belief in my intellectual 
abilities.  
Most of all, my family – especially Mom, Dad, and Tiff – deserve thanks for their 
support.  Their pride in me is almost tangible.  My son, Nick, was the reason and inspiration for 
pursuing my doctorate in the first place.  He and my grandson Cayden remind me every day not 
to give up hope, but to press on continually to greater things. 
This completed dissertation represents the realization of a personal dream, as well as the 
answer to many prayers offered on my behalf.  I am grateful to God for seeing me through times 
of no inspiration and no intellectual energy.  He is as responsible for this work as I am. 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
TITLE PAGE……………………………………………………………….………i 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………….……….ii 
LIST OF TABLES………………...…………………………………………….....v 
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………….….vi 
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND….………………….….1 
CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP.…………………………………….9 
CHAPTER 3: METHODS………………………………………….……….….....26 
CHAPTER 4: PRESENTATION OF DATA AND DISCUSSION  
OF EAS’S ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY……………….…….……..............44 
CHAPTER 5: PRESENTATION OF DATA AND DISCUSSION  
OF THE REVIEW AND REVISE GROUP’S CULTURE…….………….…...…79 
CHAPTER 6: ANALYSIS………………………….……………………....……112 
POSTSCRIPT…...................................................................................................122 
REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………...125 
APPENDIX A: IRB Approval Materials.………………………………………..129 
APPENDIX B: EAS Publication Review Cover Sheet………………………….130 
 
 
APPENDIX C: EAS Publication Review Guidelines……………..……………132 
APPENDIX D: Content List for The Informer…………………………………134 
APPENDIX E: Interview Protocol……………………………………………...136 
APPENDIX F: Online Survey Instrument……………………………………...137 
APPENDIX G: List of Membership Eligibility Criteria………………………..146
 
 
LIST OF TABLES 
1.  Frequency of Topics in The Informer, 2006-2007………………..…….……51 
2. Number of Articles per Section…………………………………….…….…...52 
3. Review and Revise Group Positions and Responsibilities……….……………81 
4. The Informer 2007-2008 Publication Schedules………………….……….….83 
5. Decisions Made During Content List Review Meeting………………..….…..87 
6. Modes and Frequency of Margin Comments………………….……………....91 
7. Communicated Values Reflected in Substantive Margin Comments…….......92 
8. Frequency of Oral Exchanges Categories in Review and Revise Sessions…..97 
9. Collaborative vs. Hierarchical Cultures……………………………………...102 
.
 
 
LIST OF FIGURES 
1. Employee Perception of EAS Purposes……………………………………55 
2. Employee Perception of EAS Responsiveness………………………...….57 
3. Employee Perception of Member Ownership……………………………..59 
4. Employee Perception of EAS Transparency………………………………61 
5. Employee Perception of Political Influence………………………….……63 
6. Employee Perception of Employee and Member Treatment…….………..65 
7. The Informer Production Cycle……………………………………....……84 
 
 
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND 
This dissertation sets out to discover what connections can be drawn between an 
organization’s identity and its writing processes.  Specifically, I examine a public labor 
association, the Employees Association of the State1 (EAS), to discover its organizational 
identity through the perceptions of its employees.  I then examine the review and revise process2 
of the writing group which produces the organization’s member-directed newsletter.  Finally, I 
make visible any connections and/or disconnections that exist between the organization’s 
identity and its review process, focusing especially on the effects on EAS’s ethos and on the 
cooperative behaviors of its employees. 
When I first entered the doctoral program, I was interested in studying how group or 
organizational identity was established, sustained, and grown through electronic media.  As my 
interest in workplace writing studies and collaborative writing grew, my approach to studying 
identity’s role in discourse began to change.  While doing the required reading for my 
comprehensive exams, I read a collection of essays edited by Rachel Spilka (1993).  The 
collection, Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives, contains chapters by Geoffrey 
Cross and Susan Kleimann; each writer looks at the process by which an organization 
collaboratively creates a document.  Cross’s work examines the process of a Midwestern 
insurance corporation’s creation of an Executive Letter to accompany its annual report. Cross 
identifies several factors that affected the corporate writing group’s process, particularly in the 
review and revision stages.  Kleimann studies two divisions within the U.S. General Accounting 
Office (now called the Government Accountability Office) to compare the two divisions’ 
                                                 
1
  Throughout this dissertation, pseudonyms are used for the organization, the publication, and the individuals being studied. 
2
  Lowry et al define reviewing as “[h]aving a participant or an editor read and annotate document draft sections for content, 
grammar, and style improvements (Galegher & Kraut, 1994)” (Lowry et al, 82).  Revising is “[r]esponding to review comments 
by making changes in the draft that reflect the review comments (Galegher and Kraut, 1994)” (Lowry et al, 82). 
2 
 
cultures and their cultures’ effects on their review processes. Kleimann characterizes each 
division’s culture as having hierarchical characteristics or collaborative characteristics. 
Later I read Cross’s (1994) book Collaboration and Conflict: A Contextual Exploration of 
Group Writing and Positive Emphasis, which is based on his own dissertation.  In his “Need for 
Further Research” section, Cross wonders if the factors identified in his study – factors that 
include hierarchy within the writing group, suppression of conflict, and serial communication 
among reviewers – “have the same effects in other collaborations” (p. 144).  In addition, Cross 
asserts that “researchers need to investigate further the influence of culture on group writing,” 
and asks “[t]o what extent does knowledge of an organization’s cultural expectations determine 
the success of writing groups?” (p. 144). This dissertation is an attempt to answer Cross’s call for 
additional research into how different types of organizations, displaying different kinds of 
cultures, allow their processes to be influenced by their identity (and perhaps vice versa).  When 
I began to consider EAS’s purpose(s) as an organization3, which seem quite different from an 
insurance corporation’s purpose, I hypothesized there would in fact be differences between how 
EAS employees engage in collaborative writing and how Cross’s insurance company employees 
engaged in collaborative writing.  After all, I thought, rhetorical purpose is an important part of 
writing, so it stands to reason that organizational writing could be affected by the organization’s 
purpose.  Further, I hypothesized that a reason for these differences would lie mainly in the 
differences between the two organizations’ identities.  Between Cross’s study and Kleimann’s 
                                                 
3
  According to Article II of EAS’s Bylaws, its purposes are, “1.1. to promote the best interests and welfare of current, retired and 
future employees of the [state], 1.2. to provide information to the membership, 1.3. to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas 
and problems, 1.4. to facilitate communication among employees of the [state]…, 1.5. to promote the professionalism of the 
employees of the [state]…in order to provide effective and efficient programs and services to the citizens of [the state].  In the 
accomplishment of the above purposes, [EAS], with the approval of the Convention, shall be able to affiliate with like-minded 
organizations.” 
3 
 
research indicating that workgroup culture affects the review process, my curiosity was piqued 
regarding whether / how writing processes and organizational identity are related. 
Being a practical woman, I wondered how organizational identity actually plays out in 
workplace writing processes.  Does organizational identity work its way into the everyday 
processes of an organization?  More specifically, how would traits or features of organizational 
identity trickle down into collaborative writing processes?  What might be the effects on the 
workgroup producing the document, or on the organization as a whole?   
The organizations studied by Cross and Kleimann represent the for-profit corporate 
sector (large insurance corporation) and the government sector (U.S. General Accounting 
Office).  However, I found no examples of studies of this type that focus specifically on public 
sector labor organizations, or on the connections between writing processes and organizational 
identity.  This study is a contribution toward filling this gap in research by examining the 
Employees Association of the State, its identity, and its writing process.  As Edgar Schein (1996) 
notes, “[o]rganizations both in the public and private sector have discovered that they are not 
efficient enough, given the levels of global competition and shrinking resources” (p. 235).  
Assuming Schein is correct, more research into public sector organizations needs to be done in 
order to assist these organizations, and the workers they represent, to become more efficient and 
more competitive.  Such research may also help scholars better understand how the type of 
organization (for-profit, non-profit, government, labor, etc.) influences the writing processes 
undertaken in the workplace. 
In terms of organizational studies, this study is not unique.  However, previous studies of 
organizational identity have focused on the theoretical treatment of determining identity.  As 
lamented by scholars like Philip Aust (2004), very few studies examine how organizational 
4 
 
identity actually functions within the everyday processes of the organization.  None situate 
studies in a workplace that is a labor association.  Schein (1996) argues that in order for 
researchers to provide the necessary practical assistance to organizations to help them become 
more efficient and competitive, research must be derived from “concrete observations of real 
behavior in real organizations” (p. 231).  As suggested by Cross (1994), studying the writing 
processes of various types of organizations may provide insights into subtle differences in how 
organizational identity functions within those different organizations. 
 One of the linchpins of organizational identity, as will be discussed at length in 
subsequent chapters of this dissertation, is an organization’s history, or its temporal continuity.  
Before continuing with my study, allow me to provide some background information about the 
history of EAS.  During the 1940s, when EAS was created, labor unions had begun to increase in 
popularity due partly to the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.  At the time, 
most unions or labor associations were private sector rather than public sector.  Public sector 
unions, which represent public sector employees like police, firefighters, and prison staff, are 
regulated through municipal, county, state, or federal legislation.  As of 2009, 7.9 million 
American public sector workers belong to a workplace union; this number represents 37.4% of 
all public sector workers (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010).  
The Employees Association of the State was the nation’s largest independent state 
employees association, with 34 employees and more than 55,000 members, until its 2008 
affiliation with the enormous Service Employees International Union.  The association has 
evidently arisen organically from the desire of state workers to gain some political influence over 
their working situations.  Around 1940, some highway and prison employees began to loosely 
organize in order to voice their needs to the state’s legislative body, the General Assembly; by 
5 
 
1945, an engineer was chosen as the first official leader of EAS.  By 1946, EAS had 
approximately 3,600 members and had expanded from highway and prison employees to other 
state departments, including the Employment Security Commission and the State Treasurer’s 
Office.  The first EAS convention was held in January 1947 in the state’s capital.  The next 
several decades saw EAS working to voice the needs and opinions of state employees to the 
General Assembly, which legislates state employees’ salaries and benefits.  
 According to EAS’s official website, the organization claims many victories throughout 
the rest of the century.  In the 1950s, state employees saw a 26% increase in salaries, the addition 
of five state holidays, and an increase in annual leave days.  The 1960s saw another 28% 
increase in salaries and the advent of longevity pay.  In the 1970s, salaries increased by 50%.  
Additionally, a state health plan was created, and there was a 30-year retirement and formula 
increase.  EAS awarded its first scholarship and began its still-popular member discount 
program.  In the 1980s, salaries were increased by 60%, longevity pay was enhanced, and the 
EAS scholarship program was strengthened.  The 1990s saw another 20% increase in salaries 
and the newly-created Employees Political Action Committee’s (EMPAC) first candidate 
endorsement.  In the late 90s, EAS had an important legal victory, when an EAS-backed lawsuit 
resulted in the overturning of a law that had allowed the taxation of state retirees’ pension 
benefits.   
 In the new millennium, EAS became more politically-minded.  In addition to salary 
increases and an increase in the cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) for retirees, EAS sued the 
state’s governor to regain more than $130 million of escrowed retirement funds.  In response to a 
huge state budget deficit in 2001, the governor diverted money from the retirement system 
employer contributions to help balance the budget.  EAS filed a lawsuit to prevent the governor 
6 
 
from using these retirement funds for any purpose other than retirement benefits and 
administration costs; the lawsuit demanded full repayment of the funds, plus interest.  Six years 
later, in 2007, a judge ruled that the governor had violated state and federal constitutions.  When 
the General Assembly paid back the entire $130 million – but not the interest – EAS filed an 
appeal to get back the lost interest.    
 Other EAS milestones in the 2000s include the creation of the Member Action Team 
(MAT), the creation of the first Retiree Director, the rise of EMPAC, and the affiliation with 
SEIU.  MAT started in 2005.  The Member Action Department, which houses MAT, sends EAS 
employees into districts to train EAS members in leadership skills, lobbying techniques, and 
recruiting.  MAT also organizes state-wide “lobby days,” when EAS members go the General 
Assembly building and meet with state legislators personally.  The first Retiree Director position 
was created in order to focus efforts specifically on retirees, who most EAS employees view as a 
valuable constituency within EAS.  EAS’s EMPAC increased its ranking from the nation’s 276th 
most-powerful political action committee in 2002 to the 11th most-powerful in 2008.  Also in 
2008, a huge majority – nearly 80% - of EAS delegates voted to affiliate with the large and 
powerful SEIU.  It is around this time, in Spring of 2008, that this study began. 
 The history of EAS provides a backdrop for the rest of this dissertation.  The main focus 
of the research project is the processes used by the members of the EAS Communications 
Department to review the organization’s newsletter.  The newsletter created by the review and 
revise group, The Informer, is a 16-page, full-color semi-glossy published every other month.  
The audience for the newsletter is the membership of EAS, though according to the 
organization’s Communications Director the review and revise group considers the retired 
members to be one of the most important segments of the newsletter’s audience.  The newsletter 
7 
 
contains several regular features, including a front-page piece on the issue of the moment, such 
as collective bargaining rights, lawsuits filed by EAS, and election-related issues.  Other regular 
features are columns written by the Executive Director, the legal counsel, and the current 
President of EAS, who is a rank-and-file member of EAS elected by the membership to serve a 
two-year term.  The newsletter contains articles written by the EAS employees and members, as 
well as photos of district events, such as employee award ceremonies, employee barbecues, and 
fundraising events. 
 The subsequent chapters of this dissertation will examine how the organizational identity 
of EAS has what Kleimann (1993) might call a “reciprocal relationship” with the review and 
revise process of the EAS newsletter, The Informer.  Chapter 2 provides an overview of both 
organizational identity studies and collaborative workplace writing studies in order to situate my 
study in the ongoing conversations of those disciplines.  In particular, the review of scholarship 
shows the evolution of the concept of identity from personal to organizational.  Additionally, the 
review provides definitions of collaborative writing in the workplace and a discussion of the 
roles social context, including workgroup culture, plays in workplace writing.  Chapter 3 
describes the methods utilized for data collection and analysis, as well as detailing the types of 
data which were collected.  Chapters 4 and 5 each present the actual data collected, as well as 
discussions and interpretation of the data.  Chapter 4 establishes the organizational identity of 
EAS by presenting the results from an online survey of EAS employees, an analysis of the 
previous year’s Informer topics and their rhetorical purposes, official documents of EAS, and 
structured interviews with three randomly-chosen EAS employees.  Chapter 5 examines the 
review processes for the newsletter, including my field observations, and characterizes the 
culture of the review and revise group.  Chapter 6 analyzes the results presented in Chapters 4 
8 
 
and 5 to make visible the connections between EAS’s organizational identity and the review and 
revise processes undertaken in the production of its newsletter.  In particular, the chapter looks at 
the implications of these connections in terms of the organization’s ethos and the cooperative 
behaviors of its employees.  A sort of postscript concludes the study by proposing avenues of 
future research in the rich and fertile area of inquiry surrounding issues of organizational identity 
and writing processes. 
 
 
 
CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP 
Introduction 
Organizational identity and collaborative writing encompass fields as diverse as business 
communication, composition studies, management studies, social psychology, organizational 
behavior, discourse studies, and more.  This dissertation draws from many of these fields in order 
to examine the relationship between an organization’s collaborative writing and its 
organizational identity.  Engagement with scholarship and research from a variety of fields 
illustrates the complex natures of both organizational identity and collaborative workplace 
writing processes.  In particular, this project builds on the scholarship of Susan Kleimann (1993), 
whose work “The Reciprocal Relationship of Workplace Culture and Review” attempts to 
“situate” workplace review in “a particular setting” (p. 57) and on the foundational Albert and 
Whetten (1985) article, “Organizational Identity.”  The primary purpose of this review of 
scholarship is to provide an overview of issues in both workplace collaborative writing and 
organizational identity in order to contextualize this dissertation’s unique attempt to identify the 
interconnections between organizational identity, culture, and collaborative writing. 
Organizational Identity 
Stuart Albert and David A. Whetten’s foundational 1985 article, “Organizational 
Identity,” was originally published in Research in Organizational Behavior.  Reprinted several 
times since, the article is one of the earliest efforts at defining identity in the context of an 
organization.  The authors attempt to produce both a concept to be used for self-reflection by the 
organization, and a “scientifically tractable” (p. 263) theory of organizational identity gathered 
from a nebula of previous scholarly work in, among others, the disciplines of sociology and 
social psychology.   
10 
 
Albert and Whetton (1985) characterize an organization’s identity as “a self-reflective 
question” (p. 264) asked and answered by its members.  They point out that organizations 
usually assume, rather than articulate, their identities until some force – a merger, a budget 
shortfall, a major policy shift, etc. – pushes them to answer “the question of identity” (p. 264). 
The authors assert that in order to answer the question of identity, an organization should use a 
tripartite set of classification criteria.  The answer to “Who are we as an organization?” must 
fulfill all criteria: 
1. The answer points to features that are somehow seen as the essence of the 
organization: the criterion of claimed central character. 
2. The answer points to features that distinguish the organization from others with which 
it may be compared: the criterion of claimed distinctiveness. 
3. The answer points to features that exhibit some degree of sameness or continuity over 
time: the criterion of claimed temporal continuity. (pp. 264-265, italics in original) 
Subsequent scholars shortened the definition to CED – central, enduring, and distinctive.  Albert 
and Whetten’s definition is used in most theoretical treatments of organizational identity, and 
serves as the definition of organizational identity used in this dissertation, with one slight 
modification centered on the criterion of claimed temporal continuity; this modification is 
discussed later in this section.  
More than a decade before Albert and Whetten’s landmark article appeared, social 
psychologists were examining different levels of identity to explore intragroup relations, or 
relations between an individual’s identity and his or her group identities.  The general belief 
among social psychologists at the time was that by studying the psychology of an individual, 
they could also understand the group(s) to which the individual belonged.  However, in 1979 
11 
 
Henri Tajfel and John Turner (2004) introduce a new theory of social identification (SIT), 
proposing that group identity is social and asserting that in addition to personal or individual 
identity, a separate and distinct collective psychology exists for members of a group.  Tajfel and 
Turner (2004) see the definition of a group, in part, as “a collection of individuals who perceive 
themselves to be members of the same social category,” (p. 40) which can include religious 
affiliation, level of education, gender, and socioeconomic status.   
In their article “Social Identity Theory and the Organization,” Blake E. Ashforth and Fred 
Mael (1989) introduce the application of Tajfel and Turner’s social categorization – a collection 
of individuals who see themselves as belonging to the same social category – to the study of 
organizational identity, marking an early link between individual levels of analysis and 
organizational levels of analysis.  Ashforth and Mael argue that Tajfel and Turner’s concept of 
group membership requires the individual to have a frame of reference, namely a collective or 
organizational identity that exists outside of the individual, yet has characteristics desirable for 
that individual.  Their definition of organizational identity is founded on this “psychological 
reality [which exists] beyond its membership” (p. 26).  Ashforth and Mael’s concept is supported 
by Albert and Whetten’s (1985) notion that an organization can endure throughout time as an 
independent entity, rather than a temporally-restricted organization of particular individuals.  
Individual members may come and go, but the organization remains, if not stable, then at least 
continuous. 
Subsequent scholars continue to examine the complex connections between individual or 
personal identity and group, including organizational, identity.  Social psychologists Marilyn B. 
Brewer and Wendi Gardner (1996), in their article “Who is this ‘We’? Levels of Collective 
Identity and Self Representations,” further refine the distinction between the personal and the 
12 
 
social by introducing three levels of self: Personal, Relational, and Collective. According to the 
writers,  
At the individual level, the personal self is the differentiated, individuated self-concept 
most characteristic of studies of the self in Western psychology… At the interpersonal 
level, the relational self is the self-concept derived from connections and role 
relationships with significant others…. Finally, at the group level is the collective self, 
which corresponds to the concept of social identity as represented in social identity 
theory.” (p. 85, italics in original)   
The collective self-view can be further refined.  Serena Chen, Karen Chen, and Lindsay Shaw 
(2004) refer to a collective self-view as personal qualities that are associated with group 
membership, like conservative Republican or, I would argue, dedicated state employee.  Edward 
P. Lemay, Jr. and Richard D. Ashmore (2004) refer to group identities as characteristics of a 
group that may or may not be applied to an individual member of that group.  For instance, an 
American could acknowledge that one characteristic of being an American citizen is voting, but 
that she herself never votes, or an EAS employee might acknowledge that one characteristic of 
being a part of the EAS organization is training members to lobby legislators, but that he himself 
does not like to talk to politicians.  While Tajfel and Turner (2004) and Ashforth and Mael 
(1989) assert that the group must exist as an entity outside of and separate from the individual, 
other scholars (Brewer and Gardner, 1996; Chen, Chen, and Shaw, 2004; Lemay and Ashmore, 
2004) see a complex meshing of the identities of the individual and the organization, in which 
personal qualities of an individual are associated with organizational identity and vice versa, 
even when some of the group characteristics are not applied to the individual (or vice versa).  In 
other words, the connections between personal and organizational identities are dynamic and yet 
13 
 
somehow stable. These dynamic complexities may help explain why EAS’s organizational 
identity is not seen as a stable, non-moving entity by its employees.  As will be shown in 
subsequent chapters of this dissertation, individual employees bring their own perceptions and 
identities to the workplace; these individual traits influence workplace processes – like 
collaborative writing – and influence employees’ perceptions of EAS’s organizational identity.  
 The complex (dynamic, multilayered) nature of organizational identity is highlighted by 
“Organizational Identity, Image, and Adaptive Instability,” in which Dennis A Gioia, Majken 
Schultz, and Kevin G. Corley (2000) state that Albert and Whetten’s (1985) CED definition of 
organizational identity has a weakness centered on the criterion of claimed temporal continuity. 
Instead, the trio argues, organizational identity is always changing and is instable.  They offer the 
idea of adaptive identities, which allow an organization’s identity to evolve with time.  Gioia, 
Schultz, and Corley point to the example of a technology company: What it means to be a tech 
company will change over the next decades, so the company’s identity must adapt to those 
changes in meaning if the company is to survive.  Similarly, EAS’s organizational identity – 
though still centered on enhancing the welfare of state employees – has adapted over the years in 
response to changes in, among other things, the meanings of “enhancing” and “welfare” and 
even “state employees,” focusing more on retirement issues and on gaining and wielding 
political influence.   
The concept of organizational image referred to in the title of Gioia et al.’s article is 
utilized by Mats Alvesson (1990) in his article, “Organization: From Substance to Image?,” in 
which he introduces the idea of organizational image to the field of organizational identity 
studies.  Alvesson defines organizational image as an “impression held by a particular [external] 
group towards a corporation [or organization], partly as a result of information processing 
14 
 
(sense-making) carried out by the group’s members…[and] the fabricated and projected picture 
of [the organization] itself” (p. 376).  Organizational image, he writes, is external and mediated, 
“through mass media, public appearances, from second-hand sources etc., not through our own 
direct, lasting experiences and perceptions” (p. 376); on the other hand, organizational identity is 
internal and is characterized by the perceptions of organizational members.  Before Alvesson’s 
article, it was generally assumed that by maintaining a strong, external organizational identity 
(e.g., Tajfel and Turner, 2004 and Ashforth and Mael, 1989), the identities and identifications of 
individual organizational members would naturally follow; in other words, image and identity 
were unwittingly conflated by scholars.  Alvesson argues that this unwitting assumption is 
problematic; to counteract the problem, he proposes a distinction between organizational identity 
(internally-perceived) and organizational image (externally-perceived), facilitating the study of 
the relationship between the two.  For instance, the now-visible distinction allows for the study 
of how an organization’s external image can cause the organization to alter or adapt its actions or 
processes, actions which in part help define the organization’s internally-perceived identity.  The 
resulting organizational identity would be what Gioia et al. call an adaptive identity.   
Jane E. Dutton and Janet M. Dukerich (1991), in their influential article “Keeping an Eye 
on the Mirror: Image and Identity in Organizational Adaptation,” use a case study of the New 
York and New Jersey Port Authority as a platform from which to explore organizational image 
and its effects on organizational identity by looking at “the processes by which environments and 
organizations are related over time” (p. 517).  The article is credited (Hatch and Schultz, 2004) 
as offering the first empirical evidence of how organizational identity actually works in a natural 
context.  Dutton and Dukerich find that the negative image of the Port Authority held by the 
public – for instance, that the bus terminals were always filled with sleeping homeless people – 
15 
 
affected not only how the Authority acted, but how its internal stakeholders, like employees, 
perceived its identity as an organization.  Once the Authority took actions to clean up its 
organizational image, in part by literally cleaning up its terminals, the employees’ perceptions of 
the Authority’s organizational identity began to change for the better.  Importantly, Dutton and 
Dukerich claim that “[p]atterns of actions in response to issues over time create patterns of 
organizational action that in turn modify an organization’s environment” (p. 518).  For instance, 
the organizational identity of EAS depends heavily on its membership, who in turn exert a strong 
influence over the processes and actions taken by EAS in order to “enhance the welfare” of its 
membership / state employees.  One of these influenced actions and processes is the 
collaborative review process of the writing group responsible for producing EAS’s newsletter. 
 These very complicated (and complicating) concepts of identity – individual, group, and 
organizational – can be used to understand how the identity(ies) of small workgroups interact 
with, influence, and are influenced by the organization as a whole.  Now that issues of identity 
have been clarified a bit, we will try to understand more about collaborative writing in the 
workplace.  As in organizational identity, social context and interpersonal interaction play 
important roles in the process of collaborative writing in the workplace. 
Collaborative Writing 
What is meant by the term “collaborative writing”?  Collaborative writing (CW) is not 
limited to more than one person drafting text.  CW encompasses a number of stages or steps, 
which can include planning, revising, editing, and reviewing, in addition to drafting, but not 
necessarily in that order and not necessarily neatly.  For instance, in my study of the EAS review 
and revise group, I did not examine the drafting of articles; instead, I focused on the messy and 
recursive review process of the organization’s newsletter.  Because collaborative writing is used 
16 
 
in so many different disciplines, and consequently must be studied by disciplines which utilize 
various research methodologies, some composition scholars have suggested that a “common 
taxonomy” (Forman, 2004) should be created so that scholars from all disciplines can talk and 
write about collaborative writing more clearly. 
In her introduction to a 2004 special edition of the Journal of Business Communication 
focused on collaborative writing scholarship, Janis Forman asserts that a common taxonomy is 
crucial for advancing multi/interdisciplinary research on collaborative writing.  In the same 
edition of JBC, Paul Lowry, Aaron Curtis, and Michelle Lowry’s (2004) article “Building a 
Taxonomy and Nomenclature of Collaborative Writing to Improve Interdisciplinary Research 
and Practice” “engages in a dynamically negotiated process with representatives of the other 
disciplines interested in collaborative writing” (qtd. in Forman, p. 34).  Lowry et al.’s purpose is 
to establish a taxonomy so that these strands of thought can speak the same language.  They liken 
the current situation in CW research to cancer researchers from different disciplines (like 
medicine, biology, dietetics, etc.) trying to use different terms – the result “would certainly 
impair the interdisciplinary cancer research community’s ability to collaboratively discuss and 
treat cancer problems” (p. 68).  So, they write, “Much can be gained by building on the strengths 
of each area, through a common discourse, to create interdisciplinary solutions to pressing CW 
issues” (p. 69).  Because this dissertation could be considered a multidisciplinary study, and in 
light of the many possible definitions of collaborative writing, I will provide an overview of 
some of these possible definitions, paying particular attention to the types of collaborative 
writing relevant to this study. 
For the purposes of this particular research situation, Lowry et al.’s and Jolene Galegher 
and Robert E. Kraut’s (1994) definitions are used.  These scholars offer solid definitions for the 
17 
 
main activities undertaken by the review and revise group at EAS: reviewing and revising.  
Lowry et al. define reviewing as “[h]aving a participant or an editor read and annotate document 
draft sections for content, grammar, and style improvements (Galegher & Kraut, 1994)” (qtd. in 
Lowry et al., p. 82).  Revising is “[r]esponding to review comments by making changes in the 
draft that reflect the review comments (Galegher and Kraut, 1994).  Revising is used over editing 
to distinguish this activity more clearly from copyediting and from the editorial process of 
reviewing” (qtd. in Lowry et al., p. 82).  Both of these activities – reviewing and revising – are 
performed by the EAS review and revise group during the study. 
Allen, Atkinson, Morgan, Moore, and Snow’s (1987) article, “What Experienced 
Collaborators Say About Collaborative Writing,” is one of the earliest and most influential 
survey studies in collaborative writing.  The group undertook their study of collaborative writers 
as a response to what they perceived as the lack of research specifically focused on collaborative 
writing in the workplace; previous studies, they say – studies which include Lester Faigley and 
Thomas Miller’s (1982) survey of professionals who write and Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami’s 
(1985) oft-cited collection Writing in Nonacademic Settings – only resulted in “fragmentary and 
unfocused” (p. 70) information about collaborative writing.   
Allen et al.’s (1987) study finds that forms of collaboration vary by group: all the groups 
they studied reported that planning was done collaboratively, as were revision and editing.  The 
majority of groups – 10 out of 14 – reported that drafting was always done individually; “[s]ome 
respondents reported that attempts at group drafting produced only frustration” (p. 77).  The most 
common approach to drafting, Allen et al. find, was for groups to split up drafting tasks 
according to areas of expertise or familiarity.  Another common approach involved one primary 
draft writer whose draft was produced as a result of group planning; the draft was then reviewed 
18 
 
by the other individuals in the group, then revised and edited collaboratively.  Had Allen et al. 
studied the review and revise group at EAS, they would have found a similar collaborative 
process: group planning, individual drafting, individual and group copyediting, individual 
review, and group revision and review, with various duties divided by expertise or familiarity. 
Many other scholars examine the various stages and incarnations of CW.  For instance, 
Odell (1985) studies the “collaborative planning of a document that is drafted and revised by an 
individual” (p. 250); Stephen Doheny-Farina (1986) looks at “individual planning and drafting of 
a document that is revised collaboratively” (p. 159); James Paradis, David Dobrin, and Roger 
Miller (1985) study “a supervisor’s assignment of a document that is researched and drafted by a 
staff member, but carefully edited by the supervisor” (p. 282). Rodney Rice and John Huguley, 
Jr. (1994) define collaboration as “any writing performed collectively by more than one person 
that is used to produce a single text; and…writing as any activity that leads to a completed 
document, including brainstorming or idea generating, gathering research, planning and 
organizing, drafting, revision, and editing” (p. 163).  Rather than approaching collaborative 
writing holistically, each of these studies considers different stages of the whole process – 
collaborations in invention, planning, drafting, revision, and editing – any of which can be used 
as a locus for study.  Using a word like “stage” does not imply, however, that collaborative 
writing is a step-by-step process; it is recursive, and each stage bleeds into others at different 
times.   
Not all collaborative writing is performed in writing, however.  Lisa Ede and Andrea 
Lunsford’s landmark Singular Texts/Plural Authors (1990) provides further evidence that group 
writing could – and does – take place in different writing stages (like brainstorming, planning, 
and editing).  The pair define group writing as “any writing done in collaboration with one or 
19 
 
more persons”; by “writing” they mean “any of the activities that lead to a completed written 
document [including] written and spoken brainstorming, outlining, note-taking, organizational 
planning, drafting, revising, and editing” (p. 14, italics mine).  These additions of non-written 
text as part of CW are important, because studies have consistently shown that much 
collaboration is done orally (Dobrin, 1985; Kleimann, 1993; Selzer, 1983; Spilka, 1990).  This 
was the case with the EAS review and revise group.  In fact, orality plays a large and pivotal role 
in most collaborative writing, as will be discussed further in a few paragraphs. 
Some definitions of collaborative writing emphasize a role the group takes or perfoms.  
For instance, Deborah Bosley (1989) defines collaborative writing as “two or more people 
working together to produce one written document in a situation in which a group takes 
responsibility for having produced the document” (p. 6, italics mine).  Allen et al. (1987) 
describe collaborative writing as “collaborators producing a shared document, engaging in 
substantive interaction about that document, and sharing decision-making power and 
responsibility for it” (p. 70, italics mine).  Galegher and Kraut (1994) characterize collaborative 
writing by “negotiation,” “consensus,” “division of labor,” “coordination,” and “resolution of 
questions” (p. 113).  These definitions take into consideration not only the actual writing 
processes, but the human interactions as well.  Collaboration is not just that two or more people 
write or produce a document; true collaboration includes an interweaving of individuals marked 
by interaction and shared responsibility.   
When a group works together over a period of time, particularly when the group 
members must interact with each other often and share responsibility for a work product (like a 
text), a distinct workgroup culture develops.  Edgar Schein (1996) defines organizational culture 
as “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that 
20 
 
determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments” (p. 236).  
Social scientists Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy (1983) define culture as “internalized 
values, attitudes, knowledge, and ways of acting that are shared” (p. 499).  Lee Odell (1985) 
defines culture as “widely shared attitudes, knowledge, and ways of operating” (p. 250).  As will 
be shown later in this dissertation, these shared assumptions, attitudes, knowledge, and ways of 
operating help tie together processes and identity.  The processes of the group – its ways of 
operating or acting – reflect its culture; in turn, workgroup culture reflects the organization’s 
values, attitudes, knowledge, and ways of acting/operating.  Schein (2004) argues that a group’s 
culture actually defines that group, and “once we achieve a sense of group identity, [culture] is 
our major stabilizing force” (p. 14).  Therefore, it seems, a sense of organizational or group 
identity is first established, and the workgroup culture which then develops offers the group a 
way of securing that organizational identity.   
Such is not always the case, however.   Kleimann’s (1993) “The Reciprocal Relationship 
of Workplace Culture and Review” focuses on the review process in two departments of the 
United States General Accounting Office (GAO).  Though located in the same office building in 
Washington, D.C., each department displayed a distinctly different culture, which Kleimann 
concludes affected each department’s review process.  While Kleimann does not attempt to 
connect departmental review processes with the GAO’s organizational identity, it seems 
counterintuitive to think that two departments with completely different cultures could both 
reflect organizational identity.  However, the GAO is an enormous government bureaucracy 
which most likely displays a complex identity; perhaps both workgroup cultures do reflect this 
complex identity.   Bart Victor and John Cullen (1988) point out that, “[t]o the extent that 
different subgroups within organizations have identifiably different climates, such climates likely 
21 
 
indicate the existence of organizational subcultures” (p. 104).  An organization as large and 
complex as the GAO is likely to support the existence of many subcultures within it.  EAS is 
considerably smaller – fewer than 30 employees actually work together in the office building – 
and so probably cannot support a great number of subcultures4. 
 At any rate, Kleimann’s (1993) study does offer evidence that the culture of a workgroup 
affects the processes and the products of the group.  Kleimann identifies three main aspects of 
the review process that are influenced by a review group’s culture: “[T]he different cultures of 
individual divisions [in an organization] affect every aspect of the review process, from the 
structure of the process to the way reviewers frame their written comments to the number of 
written comments” (57).  Three broad features characterize what Kleimann calls a collaborative 
culture.  According to her case study of two divisions at the GAO, collaborative cultures 
• Structure their review process using concurrent review, a flattened hierarchy, widely 
available written guidance, and stipulated deadlines; 
• Conduct face-to-face meetings to consolidate and/or reconcile comments; and 
• Use statements and questions in comments nearly half the time, emphasizing the 
negotiative aspects of revision / review (pp. 62-67). 
As will become clearer in later chapters of this dissertation, these workgroup features can in fact 
be linked to organizational identity. 
Social context has long been acknowledged by composition scholars as being influential 
for writing situations, particularly in collaborative workplace writing (Cross, 1994; Ede and 
Lunsford, 1990; Faigley, 1985; Kleimann, 1993; Odell, 1985; Paradis, Dobrin, Miller, 1985, 
among others).  Geoffrey Cross’s (1994) work Conflict and Collaboration: A Contextual 
                                                 
4
  That being said, later in this dissertation an interviewee named Tyler makes comments about the differences 
between the climates of the different departments within EAS. 
22 
 
Exploration of Group Writing and Positive Emphasis  is based on his study of the collaborative 
writing processes of a Midwestern insurance corporation, to which he gives the name Auldouest.  
Cross’s study focuses on the review and revise process – emphasizing the social context of the 
process – for an executive letter to accompany the corporation’s annual report.  He finds the CW 
process to be flawed, resulting in a rhetorically flawed document, due in large part to the strict 
hierarchical power structure of Auldouest and the silencing of voices from some group members.  
Cross identifies several factors, including many social factors, which contribute either positively 
or negatively to the review and revise process of the corporation’s executive letter.   
 Like Kleimann (1993) found at the GAO, Cross (1994) finds that social context affects 
the review and revise process of the Auldouest insurance corporation.  Many of the factors which 
make up the social context of the CW process seem to be related to the organizational identity of 
the corporation.  For instance, Auldouest utilized a strict hierarchical structure in the corporation 
as a whole, as well as in the smaller writing group.  This hierarchy was evident even in the 
physical layout of the building which housed the corporation; the three lowest ranking members 
of the writing group, including the sole professional writer, were housed on the third floor of the 
building, while the five highest ranking members, including the CEO, were on the thirty-third 
(the top) floor.  The physical separation of the members of the group did not contribute 
positively to the collaborative writing process.  In fact, the hierarchical structure and the 
separation of the group members made it difficult for the group to engage in the necessary social 
interactions which help construct writing. 
The idea that writing is socially constructed is not new.  Gregory Clark (1990), in 
Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing, 
characterizes the collaboration between readers and writers as “coparticipants in the perpetual 
23 
 
process of constructing the common knowledge that will support their collective life” (p. 10).   
Communication itself is a collaboration that makes meaning which can be collectively held; in 
fact, Clark asserts, “writers and readers use their ongoing exchange of texts collaboratively to 
construct their collectivity” (pp. 10-11).  He believes that “embedded in the acts of reading and 
writing are fundamental human interactions, interactions that determine the direction of our 
common experience” (p. 6). Charles Bazerman and James Paradis (1991), in the introduction to 
their book Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing 
in Professional Communities, go even further than Clark.  Writing is not only a socially 
constructed action, but is actually a socially constructive one; “[t]exts are causal dynamic 
entities” (p. 7), implying that texts help “cause” social context.   “Textual Dynamics” refers to 
the idea that written discourse is produced by a complex of social, cognitive, material, and 
rhetorical activities.  In other words, interactions between group members and between group 
members and the text (that is, collaboration) help produce social knowledge.  Collaboration helps 
create a collective life. 
By definition, collaborative writing requires that group members interact with each other, 
often in a variety of ways.  For instance, while the members of the EAS review and revise group 
did interact through written text, like margin comments, the bulk of their process used spoken 
text, or what I refer to as “oral exchanges.”  Many scholars have found that interaction among 
writers comes in different forms.   Jack Selzer (1983) uses the term “communal brainstorming” 
(p. 178) to name the “formal and informal conversations” which take place during all phases of 
collaborative writing, but especially during planning.  Faigley and Miller’s (1982) survey 
research indicates that “some sort of human interaction may be important to the production of a 
written text” (qtd. in Odell, 1985, p. 250).  Clark (1990) characterizes the process of “discursive 
24 
 
exchange” with the terms “dialogue,” “dialectic,” and “conversation.”  My observation of EAS’s 
review and revise group indicates that in their case at least, near-constant interaction between the 
core group members, usually in the form of oral exchanges, was crucial for their process.  These 
interactions make up a large and important part of this study. 
Rachel Spilka, with a nod to Walter Ong, names these oral exchanges with a general 
term, “orality.”  In her article “Orality and Literacy in the Workplace,” Spilka (1990) defines 
orality as conversation and spoken messages, as well as written forms which resemble speech 
(like emails or comments made in the margins of documents); literacy refers to written materials 
(like drafts).  She found that in the most rhetorically successfully situations she observed, orality 
played at least four significant roles in the collaborative composing process: Orality was the 
central means of analyzing multiple audiences, adapting discourse to multiple audiences, 
fulfilling rhetorical and social goals, and building and sustaining corporate culture.   Overall, 
Spilka comments that not orally soliciting and listening to others’ viewpoints made documents 
weak in terms of purpose, audience, and cultural contexts.  The EAS review and revise group 
used orality, or oral exchanges, to negotiate with each other to resolve revision suggestions.  
Additionally, their oral exchanges seemed to provide a mechanism for flattening the hierarchy 
between group members.  Many of their exchanges were based on soliciting advice from other 
group members and from written guidance like dictionaries or style guides.  As will be discussed 
in a later chapter, their oral exchanges provide insights into how the group’s culture is 
manifested in group actions. 
Chapter Conclusion 
 Three important, and useful, insights arise from the review of scholarship in the areas of 
collaborative writing and organizational identity.  First, collaborative writing in the workplace is 
25 
 
a fact of life and happens at different types of workplaces, including academic, governmental, 
and corporate.  Second, collaborative workplace writing occurs within a social context; this 
context influences both writing and writer.  The third important insight I gained from reviewing 
the existent literature is the realization that while connections have been made between 
workgroup culture and writing group processes, connections between collaborative workplace 
writing and organizational identity have not previously been made.  In my study, I show how 
organizational identity trickles down into collaborative writing processes and what the effects of 
this trickle-down are, in terms of the document being produced, the workgroup producing the 
document, and the organization as a whole. 
In the next chapter, I describe my methods of collecting and analyzing evidence related to 
organizational identity and collaborative workplace writing processes.  The data were collected 
to discover how these elements were at work in EAS and the EAS review and revise group.    
  
 
CHAPTER 3: METHODS 
Introduction 
 As noted in the previous chapter, the goal of this study is to gain insight into the 
connections or relationships between organizational identity and collaborative workplace writing 
processes.  In particular, the study examines the relationships or connections between EAS 
employees’ perceptions of EAS’s organizational identity and the EAS review and revise group’s 
review process and its culture.  Because of the many disciplines encompassed by this study – 
composition studies, rhetoric, organizational behavior, and social psychology to name a few – I 
borrowed methods from several areas.  The primary purpose of this Methods chapter is to 
explain what data were collected and why, as well as to explain how and why the data were 
analyzed to provide evidence related to EAS’s organizational identity and its collaborative 
workplace writing processes.  Materials associated with the IRB approval of this study are 
included in Appendix A. 
 Specifically, the data described in this chapter were gathered to answer the following 
focused research questions: 
• What is EAS’s organizational identity?  What traits or features characterize EAS’s 
identity? 
• What values does EAS communicate through its official documents? 
• Do EAS employees perceive those communicated values as characteristic features of 
EAS’s organizational identity? 
• In what ways do EAS’s communicated values relate to the review and revise group’s 
review processes? 
27 
 
• In what ways do the review and revise group, and its processes, contribute to EAS’s 
identity? 
Description of Study Participants 
 The participants for this study were employees of the Employees’ Association of the 
State (EAS)5.  An important distinction exists between the members of EAS and its employees.  
For this study, I was not concerned with the 55,000 members of the association but rather with 
the paid staff and management who were employed by EAS, most of whom were located in one 
office building in the state capital.  A total of 34 people, including both staff and management, 
were employed by EAS at the time of this study.  Within the larger group designated as 
employees, I focused on the smaller group of six employees who were involved in reviewing and 
revising the organization’s newsletter, The Informer; for this study, the smaller group is referred 
to as the review and revise group.  I focused on the review of the newsletter rather than, say, a 
memo or a letter, because it was not a one-day process; rather, the review processes for The 
Informer were complicated enough to allow for interesting data to be gathered.  Also, the 
newsletter is a dynamic official document which is continuously written and re-written, as 
compared to a more stable official document like the mission statement or Bylaws.  Thus, 
studying the review processes for the newsletter allowed me to see the effects of EAS’s 
organizational identity on the document and on the workgroup producing the document. 
The main focus of my field research at EAS was the study of the review and revise group 
and its processes.  Observation of review and revise sessions, including the study of the revisions 
themselves, form the basis of the case study presented in this dissertation.  The review and revise 
group was comprised of four core members who did the bulk of the work and two other 
                                                 
5
  Pseudonyms are used for the names of the organization, its newsletter, and its employees. 
28 
 
members.  The core members of the review and revise group consisted of two people whose jobs 
as editor-in-chief and managing editor made them directly responsible for the newsletter, and 
two associate editors who supported the two other core members with tasks like copyediting and 
fact-checking.  The other two group members were the organization’s legal counsel, who 
reviewed and approved article content from a legal perspective “so we don’t get sued,” and 
EAS’s executive director, who had little direct input in revising or reviewing, but whose opinion, 
as the editor-in-chief stated, “always matters.”  The role of each member of the review and revise 
group will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5: Presentation of Data and Discussion of the 
Review and Revise Group’s Culture. 
The members of the review and revise group did not self-identify as such; rather, the 
boundaries of the review and revise group membership were created by me, the researcher.  The 
editor-in-chief and managing editor were obvious choices for participants, as were the two 
associate editors.  The other two members – the executive director and the legal counsel – were 
not as obvious.  Only after some preliminary observations did the value of their contributions 
become apparent.  The major contribution of the executive director’s came toward the beginning 
of the production cycle of the newsletter.  During a meeting in his office, the executive director 
met with the editor-in-chief and the managing editor to discuss the content list for the upcoming 
edition of The Informer.  (Details regarding the content list and its creation are included in the 
next section.)  Though the content list was created by the managing editor with input from the 
editor-in-chief, the list had to be approved by the executive director, thereby making his 
influence strongly felt before reviewing and revising even began.  In addition to approving the 
content list, the executive director also contributes a column, “From the Desk of the Executive 
Director,” to each edition of the newsletter.  EAS’s legal counsel also contributes a column, 
29 
 
“Counselor’s Comments,” to each edition of the newsletter.  The counselor’s major contribution 
to the review of The Informer regarded legal issues in terms of article content and word choices; 
for instance, the counselor was consulted regarding whether “senior” or “Medicare-eligible” was 
a better term for older or retired state employees.   
 The core members of the review and revise group, who also make up the 
Communications Department, have a variety of professional and education backgrounds.  Terri, 
the Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter, has an undergraduate degree in Foreign Affairs from the 
University of Virginia and a Masters degree in Government from Johns Hopkins University.  
Before coming to work for EAS five years prior to this study, she spent many years in military 
and government service.  The Managing Editor of the newsletter, Elaine, has an undergraduate 
degree from a Midwestern university, and had experience in journalism and communications 
before joining EAS seven years prior to this study.  Melissa, the newsletter’s Advertising 
Manager, and Cassie, its Associate Editor, both have undergraduate degrees from local 
universities.  Melissa served as an intern for EAS before she was hired permanently, just a 
couple of years before this study.  Cassie had experience in communications, and of the four core 
members of the review and revise group, had been employed by EAS the longest – about nine 
and a half years. 
Data Collection and Rationale 
Several types of data were gathered.  Below is a list of what was collected, followed by 
more detailed descriptions of the data, the data collection process, and the rationale for collecting 
the data. 
30 
 
• All hard copy and electronic margin comments made by the members of the 
review and revise group (text-only content and designed proofs) to The Informer 
articles; 
• one year’s worth of The Informer article topics; 
• “peripheral” documents, including past and current content lists, the publication 
schedule for The Informer, a review cover sheet used in the review process, a 
publication review guideline sheet, and EAS’s mission statement, bylaws6, and 
official history as provided on its website; 
• survey data regarding EAS employees’ perceptions of EAS’s organizational 
identity, using an online survey program; 
• observations of review and revise sessions, including digital audio recordings and 
my handwritten field notes; 
• observation of content list7 review meeting, including digital audio recording and 
my handwritten field notes; 
• structured interviews8 to follow-up the online survey, including digital audio 
recordings and my handwritten field notes; and 
• informal interviews, in person and on the telephone, with members of the review 
and revise group, including digital audio recordings and my handwritten field 
notes. 
 
 
                                                 
6
  Copies of the review cover sheet and the publication review guideline sheet are included in Appendices B and C, 
respectively. 
7
  An example of a content list is included in Appendix D. 
8
  The interview protocol is included in Appendix E. 
31 
 
Hard Copy and Electronic Margin Comments   
Documents in various stages of reviewing and revision were collected to allow for the 
study of the types of revisions made to the newsletter articles.  The majority of articles for the 
newsletter were written individually by the members of the review and revise group; the 
members were guided by a content list, which is described in detail later in this chapter.  The 
remaining articles were written by other members of EAS according to their interests and 
expertise.  For example, one article about the state health plan was written by the EAS member 
who is the state health plan network operations manager.  The first set of documents to be 
reviewed and revised were drafts of text-only article content for The Informer, in both hard copy 
and electronic format.  All four core members of the review and revise group – the editor-in-
 chief, the managing editor, and both associate editors – reviewed the content and made revision 
suggestions on the drafts; throughout this dissertation, I refer to these comments as “margin 
comments.”  Each of the core members individually revised the text of all the articles during the 
first round of review and revision.  The reviewers brought their edited copies to the second round 
of reviewing, which was done face-to-face, with group members consulting each other regarding 
revisions.  Two rounds were completed using only text.  After the second round, the editor-in-
 chief and the managing editor got together to reconcile all edits, resulting in a single document 
ready to be sent to the designer in order to create a designed proof. 
The managing editor sent the document containing the reconciled revisions to the 
designer, whose services were outsourced.  The initial designed proof took a few days for the 
designer to create, after which it was returned via email to the managing editor.  The managing 
editor then printed out the proof and distributed the hard copies to the other core members of the 
review and revise group and to the legal counsel.  All members of the group, excepting the 
32 
 
executive director, made more margin comments on the proof, often after consulting with one or 
more of the other group members.  Two more face-to-face group review and revision sessions 
took place after that, during which all four core members of the group worked collaboratively on 
revision and review; the legal counsel participated in one of these face-to-face review and 
revision sessions.  Three designed proofs were revised and reviewed.  In total, five rounds of 
review and revise sessions were held. 
The Informer Article Topics and Rhetorical Purposes 
I coded and analyzed the topics of previously published editions of The Informer, 
describing the types of stories published over the previous year.  Looking at the year’s topics and 
the rhetorical purposes of the news items indicated what issues are important to EAS and helped 
give me a sense of what I might be looking for in later observations. The point was to explore 
whether the rhetorical purposes of the news items put forth in The Informer, one of EAS’s 
official documents, would reveal the values of EAS in practice, not only in employee 
perceptions.  The insights gained helped me craft survey questions to ascertain whether what 
EAS as an organization seemed to value – as indicated by the types of articles published in its 
official newsletter – is similar to what employees perceived as valuable – as indicated by the 
survey results. For instance, if The Informer contained many articles that indicated its 
responsiveness to the needs of the EAS membership, then one should be able to assume that the 
EAS membership is valuable to the organization.  EAS’s values as communicated through an 
official document, such as its newsletter, can be used to help determine its organizational 
identity.  I categorized the article topics into five general categories according to the rhetorical 
purposes of each article.  A more detailed discussion is provided in the next chapter. 
 
33 
 
Peripheral Documents 
One of the first steps in the process of publishing The Informer was creating the content 
list, which is a guide for the editors regarding the articles and advertisements for the upcoming 
edition of the newsletter.   The content list was drawn up by the managing editor of The 
Informer, with limited input from the newsletter’s editor-in-chief.  After the content list met their 
approval, the managing editor and editor-in-chief brought the list to the executive director for a 
discussion of each potential article.  While the creation and approval of the content list may not 
be a strictly collaborative process, the creation – indeed, the very existence – of the content list 
affects the rest of the process and so had to be considered.  All of the content for the newsletter, 
from articles to advertisements to scholarship announcements, is decided on during the content 
list meeting.  The meeting at which the content list was discussed and presented to the executive 
director for approval was digitally audio recorded; the recording was later transcribed for 
analysis. 
Other peripheral documents were collected, including the publication schedule for The 
Informer, a review cover sheet, the publication review guideline sheet, and online documents 
containing EAS’s mission statement, bylaws, and history.  The publication schedule is usually 
about 4-5 weeks from beginning to end; for instance, work on the May 2008 issue began March 
24 and ended April 23.  The short turn-around indicates the time-sensitive nature of the articles 
in the newsletter.  Examining the review cover sheet, which is simply a cover sheet affixed to the 
draft being reviewed and revised, and the publication review guideline sheet, a set of instructions 
detailing how the review process works, gave insights into some of the processes that occur 
during the review and revise sessions, though I did not use these documents directly in my study.  
The publication review guidelines were not used by the review and revise group during this 
34 
 
study, because the group seemed to have followed the same procedures for so long that they 
simply knew what to do.  Only one person in the review and revise group used the review cover 
sheet – the legal counsel, Tim, who affixed the cover sheet to the final set of revisions he made 
to a proof of the newsletter.  Even though the group did not need to refer to these publication 
review documents during this study, the fact that written guidance is available to all review and 
revise group members is a characteristic common among collaborative writing groups; this 
knowledge – that the group may have collaborative characteristics – provided some context for 
my later inquiries into the culture of the EAS review and revise group.   
The content of EAS’s mission statement, bylaws, and self-published history provided not 
only insight into EAS’s organizational identity, but also helped me shape questions for the online 
survey.  As with the analysis of newsletter topics and rhetorical purposes, the point was to 
explore whether what was put forth in some of EAS’s official documents would shed light on the 
values of EAS.  The insights gained helped me craft survey questions to ascertain whether what 
EAS as an organization seemed to value – as indicated by its mission statement, bylaws, and 
history – is similar to what employees perceived as valuable – as indicated by the survey results. 
For instance, if its bylaws state that communication between EAS staff and EAS membership is 
one of EAS’s purposes, then one should be able to assume that communication is important and 
valuable to EAS employees.  In turn, the knowledge of what EAS employees value can be used 
to help determine EAS’s organizational identity.  
Online Survey  
To ascertain how its employees perceive EAS’s organizational identity, an online survey 
program called Survey Monkey was used to create a password-protected electronic survey.  After 
a pilot test of the survey was performed, the final survey was administered to all 34 EAS 
35 
 
employees; 19 surveys were completed.  Scholarly recommendations regarding a required 
number of participants for survey research varies.  Researcher Michael Patton (1990) goes so far 
as to state that in qualitative inquiry, “there are no rules for sample size” (p. 184), though most 
researchers say that a fifty percent response rate is acceptable (Babbie, 2001).  The response rate 
for this survey was 56%.  With the permission of the communications director, who is also the 
editor-in-chief of The Informer, I obtained the email addresses of employees from the EAS 
website.  The communications director sent an email to employees telling them about the 
research study and asking employees to participate in the online survey.  Two days later, I sent a 
follow-up email to employees stating who I am and why I was emailing them, and that the 
survey was completely confidential; the email included a link to the survey and a password to 
access it.  The survey remained open for three weeks; over the course of the three weeks I sent a 
total of three emails to the EAS employees to encourage them to participate in the survey and to 
thank them for their participation. 
The survey questions were constructed to elicit responses regarding the employees’ 
perceptions of EAS’s organizational identity.  As discussed in Chapter 2: Review of Scholarship, 
Albert and Whetten (1985) center their definition on the perceptions, or “claims,” of 
organizational members.  The writers assert that “an adequate statement of organizational 
identity” will satisfy three main criteria: “claimed central character,” “claimed distinctiveness,” 
and “claimed temporal continuity” (p. 90); subsequent scholars refer to the list of criteria as CED 
– Central, Enduring, and Distinctive characteristics or attributes of organizational identity.  The 
entire survey instrument can be found in Appendix F. 
The survey was organized into four general categories: demographic information, 
questions based on EAS’s bylaws, questions based on article topics from previous editions of 
36 
 
The Informer, and questions which directly addressed the concepts of central, enduring, and 
distinctive attributes of EAS. 
The process of crafting the non-demographic survey questions began with the above 
definition of organizational identity.  Using Albert and Whetten’s (1985) CED as a frame of 
reference, I examined EAS’s mission statement and bylaws to find out what attributes EAS 
assigned to itself; I also analyzed the previous year’s Informer to find out the rhetorical purposes 
of articles EAS published.  Details of these analyses are included in Chapter 4: Presentation of 
Data and Discussion of the Organizational Identity of EAS.  The information gathered from 
these three sources enabled the formulation of questions which would test whether, and to what 
degree, the employee perceived EAS actually demonstrates the stated attributes.  For example, 
Question 4 of the survey asked, “[EAS’s] bylaws make statements about the purposes of [EAS].  
In your opinion, how well does [EAS] accomplish these purposes?”  Each statement made in the 
bylaws regarding EAS’s purposes was listed, and the respondent was asked to judge EAS’s 
performance on a 5-point scale ranging from “Very Poorly” to “Very Well.”  A “Don’t Know” 
option was offered, as was a space for optional comments from the respondent.  Questions 5-8 
were based on the analysis of The Informer article topics.  For example, Question 6 of the survey 
asked, “As an organization, how consistently does [EAS] encourage [EAS] members, staff, 
and/or management to feel like owners of [EAS]?”  Each of these categories (member, staff, 
management) was listed, and the respondent was asked to judge EAS’s performance on a 5-point 
scale ranging from “Never” to “Always.”  A “Don’t Know” option was provided, as was a space 
for optional comments from the respondent. 
The final question of the survey directly addressed the concept of CED attributes; it 
reads, “For the final question, I’d like to know your perception of different attributes or 
37 
 
characteristics of [EAS] as an organization.  As well as you can, please provide a word or phrase 
which, in your opinion, best answers the following:” These open-ended questions were, “What is 
the central characteristic which helps define [EAS]?  (In other words, if you took away [blank], 
[EAS] would not be [EAS].)”; “What characteristic of [EAS] has endured since [EAS’s] 
beginning and will continue into the future?”; and, “What characteristic of [EAS] is unique?  (In 
other words, what distinguishes [EAS] from other organizations?)”.  Each question provided a 
blank space for the respondent to enter the word or phrase of his or her choice. 
Observation of Content List Review Meeting 
 I observed the sole content list review meeting; the observation included a digital audio 
recording, recorded with the participants’ permission, and handwritten field notes.  In contrast to 
the review and revise sessions, the content list review meeting was neat and orderly.  The 
managing editor, the editor-in-chief, and the executive director were the only attendees of this 
meeting, which took place in the office of the executive director.  To help minimize my presence 
at the meeting, so as not to impact the normal processes, I placed myself on a sofa along the wall 
of the executive director’s office, out of the direct line-of-sight of the participants.  The meeting 
was held to discuss the content of the upcoming edition of The Informer and to solicit the 
approval of the executive director.  The data collected from the meeting were used to observe the 
process of approving the content list and the interaction among the three group members. In 
particular, I wanted to see if the opinions and expertise of the editors were seriously considered 
by the executive director.  The observation was particularly important because of the limited role 
of the executive director in the review and revise sessions.   
 
 
38 
 
Observations of Review and Revise Sessions 
Five separate review and revise sessions were observed; the observations included 
making digital audio recordings, recorded with the participants’ permission, and handwritten 
field notes.  These sessions were, in a word, messy.  At no time did the entire review and revise 
group meet in a single room for any period of time; rather, the offices of either the editor-in-chief 
or the managing editor served as the home base for the session, supplemented by phone calls or 
emails to other group members, or by the other group members popping into the office where the 
reviewing was taking place.  For example, the first day of review and revision took place in the 
office of the editor-in-chief and was broken into two separate sessions.  The first session 
included the four core group members – the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, and the two 
associate editors; the second session included the editor-in-chief and the managing editor, with a 
brief visit from one of the associate editors to clarify details of an article she had written.  Using 
the field notes and transcribed recordings, I produced a text which I divided into segments.  Each 
segment was analyzed in order to characterize the types of actions which took place during the 
review and revise sessions.  The segments were used to find evidence categorized into 
negotiation/discussion, advice-seeking, agreement/no discussion, and sharing organizational 
knowledge and experience.  A more detailed discussion of these categories is included in a later 
section of this chapter. 
Interviews  
 Both structured and non-structured interviews were performed.  Non-structured 
interviews were done with the core members of the review and revise group, most often during 
the review and revise sessions.  For example, if during a session one of the members suggested a 
change for a reason which was not immediately clear to me, I simply asked the reviewer for her 
39 
 
reason(s) and noted her response.  Occasionally after re-reading my observation field notes, I 
would find I had questions about a procedure, a revision, or some other event which occurred 
during the session.  In those cases, I would telephone either the managing editor or the editor-in-
 chief to clarify. 
 Structured interviews were performed at EAS headquarters with three randomly-selected 
employees.  After arranging with their supervisors for their time, I met individually with each 
employee in a conference room.  The interviews were digitally audio recorded and were 
supplemented by handwritten notes.  The questions were designed to probe a little further into 
the data collected from the survey.  For example, one question designed to explore an “enduring” 
element of EAS was, “Has (or how has) [EAS] changed over the time you have been here?  
What has not changed?  How do you feel about that?  Is that consistent with other things you see 
at [EAS]?  Could you elaborate on that?”  A full list of interview questions is included in 
Appendix E. 
Data Analysis 
 The following sections explain how the collected data were analyzed.  These data include 
information gathered from an online survey, designed to measure EAS employees’ perception of 
EAS’s organizational identity; the modes, frequencies, and content of margin comments written 
during review and revision sessions; the topics from the previous year’s Informer; and transcripts 
of oral exchanges between group members during face-to-face meetings. 
Survey  
The electronic survey program provided options for filtering survey responses in order to 
find patterns in the data.  Survey responses were provided as both percentages and frequencies; 
for instance, 44.4% of respondents (8 people) expressed that EAS does “Well” regarding the 
40 
 
endorsement and election of politicians who are supportive of state employees.  Open-ended 
questions which allowed respondents to provide their own word or phrase in response to a 
question were analyzed using both percentages and frequencies; for instance, 72% of 
respondents (13 people) used the word “members” or the phrase “state employees” to describe 
the central characteristics of EAS.  The program also provided options for downloading results 
into different formats; for this project, an Excel spreadsheet was used to organize the data.  The 
program also provided options for expressing data results in graph form.  These graphs are used 
to present data in Chapter 4. 
Margin Comments  
To analyze the reviewing and revision comments written on the articles, I utilized the 
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), a widely-used statistical software package.  
SPSS helped create a cross-index of measures.  Each comment was identified by  
• Round Number: Informer articles underwent five separate rounds of review; the 
number of the review round indicated which round the particular article fell 
under; 
• Reviewer: a code number indicated the name of the review and revise group 
member responsible for the comments on the particular draft; these numbers were 
based on the member’s hierarchical position within the review and revise group; 
• Draft Number: each article was assigned a unique identifying code number; 
• Writer: the writer of each article was assigned an identifying code number, based 
when appropriate on the writer’s hierarchical position within the review and 
revise group; and, 
41 
 
• Comment Modes: each margin comment written on the draft was noted; comment 
modes were Statement, Question, Direct Change, and Non-Word Symbol. 
For this project, “comment” is defined as any mark written on the draft by a reviewer.  
My categorization of modes was verified by a third-party rater to provide inter-rater reliability.  
The modes are based on the work of Susan Kleimann (1993) in her study “The Reciprocal 
Relationship of Workplace Culture and Review.”  Using SPSS, I was able to detect patterns such 
as which reviewer made the most comments, how many edits were direct changes, and other 
questions.  Such information, according to Kleimann, provides an indication of the influence of 
social context, including organizational identity, on the process of review. 
Oral Exchanges  
To analyze the content of oral exchanges made during the review and revise process, I 
created categories to organize the transcribed data from my observations of the content list 
review meeting and the five review and revise sessions.  Some categories were suggested by my 
initial analysis of the topics from the previous year’s Informer.  The data collected from the 
review and revise sessions were used to find evidence of negotiation / discussion, advice-
 seeking, agreement / no discussion, and sharing organizational knowledge and experience.  As 
Kleimann (1993) suggests, these categories represent characteristics of a collaborative review 
process (pp. 65-68).  Negotiation and discussion are an outgrowth of frequent meetings among 
group members (Kleimann, 1993); advice-seeking is a form of respect; agreement / no discussion 
illustrates where the group members mutually understand what changes should be made; sharing 
organizational knowledge and experience is termed by Kleimann as “contributory expertise,” 
which she defines as “the individual’s knowledge of some aspect of the assignment…[or] 
previous experiences” (p. 68). 
42 
 
To analyze the transcripts of the oral exchanges, I divided the text into what I term 
“segments.”  The parameters of a segment are determined by a topic being raised, discussed, then 
resolved in some way.  For instance, a segment may begin with one group member asking for 
another’s opinion on a word choice.  The person responds with his or her opinion, the asker 
accepts the answer, and the speakers move on to another topic.  A third-party rater was used to 
help provide inter-rater reliability. The purpose of each segment was determined and categorized 
into one of the following: 
• Negotiation / Discussion: discussion among members of the review and revise 
group in which different options were expressed, the pros and cons were 
discussed, and a best solution was chosen by the group members; 
• Advice-Seeking: advice was sought by a member of the review and revise group; 
often, the advice was sought on the basis of specialized expertise, like an 
understanding of legal issues or a knowledge of grammar;  sometimes the asker 
simply needed a second opinion on a minor issue (“Does this look right?”); 
• Agreement / No Discussion: group members agreed with no discussion or 
negotiation, or an option was chosen (usually by the higher-ranking member) with 
no discussion of different options; and, 
• Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience: group members used their 
knowledge of the organization (EAS) or past experience with the organization to 
solve a problem, or a group member specifically asked to learn something about 
the organization.  
 
 
43 
 
Chapter Conclusion 
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, the data collection and analysis were 
designed to provide insight into what I might call, borrowing from Kleimann (1993), the 
“reciprocal relationship” between organizational identity and workplace writing processes.  To 
further explore these relationships, in Chapter 4 I establish the characteristic features of EAS’s 
identity and the values that EAS communicates through its official documents.  I also explore 
EAS employees’ perceptions of those communicated values as characteristic features of EAS’s 
identity.  In Chapter 5 I look at the ways in which EAS’s communicated values and its 
organizational identity relate to the review and revise group’s review processes, and I examine 
the ways in which the review and revise group and its culture contribute to EAS’s identity. 
  
 
CHAPTER 4: PRESENTATION OF DATA AND DISCUSSION OF EAS’S 
ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY 
Introduction 
This chapter discusses the organizational identity of the Employees’ Association of the 
State (EAS).  The driving question of this chapter is, “What is EAS’s organizational identity, and 
how can it be characterized?”  A two-pronged approach was used to understand the 
organizational identity of EAS: employees’ perceived organizational identity and communicated 
values in the form of official documents.  An examination of two official EAS documents – the 
organization’s bylaws and mission statement – was conducted, as was an analysis of previous 
editions of the newsletter The Informer.  An online survey was administered to the 
organization’s employees to ascertain their perceptions of various aspects of the organization; in 
addition, structured interviews with three EAS employees were conducted.   Establishing EAS’s 
organizational identity is the first step in making visible the connections between the 
organization’s identity and the ways in which EAS’s organizational identity influences or 
otherwise relates to the processes of the collaborative review of its newsletter, The Informer. 
An Important Distinction – Members and Employees 
In the study of organizational identity, organizational members are the internal 
stakeholders of identity; in this study of EAS, its organizational members are its employees.  To 
avoid confusion between the terms “organizational member” and “a person who is a member of 
EAS,” I make a distinction between the membership of EAS and its employees or organizational 
members.  More than 55,000 members belong to EAS, making it the largest independent public 
employees’ association in the nation.  As a labor association, EAS relies heavily on the unpaid, 
voluntary work its membership performs on behalf of the organization, work which includes 
45 
 
everything from serving hot dogs at an employee appreciation picnic to meeting with state 
legislators on the opening day of the General Assembly.   
This study is not directly concerned with the membership of EAS but rather with the staff 
who are employed by EAS; the study of EAS’s organizational identity focuses on the perceptions 
of those paid employees of EAS.   When I refer to the “membership” of EAS, I am referring to 
the dues-paying state employees who have joined the association; the organizational members of 
EAS are referred to as “employees.”  
What is “Organizational Identity”? 
 As noted in Chapter 2, the definition of organizational identity I am using is the 
foundational one offered by Stuart Albert and David A. Whetten (1985).  Their definition is 
based on the idea of claimed features of central character, distinctiveness, and temporal 
continuity.  The concept is usually referred to as CED: central, enduring, and distinctive features 
of organizational identity.  The answer to “Who are we as an organization?” must fulfill all three 
criteria (pp. 264-265).  In the discussion that follows, I use Albert and Whetten’s concepts of 
CED to identify and examine the characteristics of EAS’s organizational identity as manifested 
in its official documents (mission statement, bylaws, newsletter) and the perceptions of EAS 
employees. 
EAS History, Mission Statement, and Bylaws 
To begin answering the question, “Who is EAS as an organization?,” I first looked at its 
history, its mission statement, and it bylaws. The history of an organization can, obviously, 
provide insight into what characteristics have endured over time.  A set of bylaws provides an 
organization with rules to govern its internal affairs; bylaws reflect the unique values of an 
organization.  An organization’s mission statement is also unique.  A mission statement can 
46 
 
provide information about an organization, information which provides insights into central, 
enduring, and distinctive characteristics of the organization.  A mission statement can “reflect an 
organization’s purpose, function, and primary reason for existing…build and communicate 
company values over periods of time…[and] distinguish an organization from others of the same 
type” (Alred, Brusaw, Oliu, 2003, p. 332).  The following sections further examine these 
elements – EAS’s history, bylaws, and mission statement – offering some context for the survey 
questions. 
Highlights9 from EAS History 
 EAS’s current executive director has served in his position for nearly ten years, and has 
focused much of his effort on making EAS more politically effective.  For instance, according to 
the EAS website, in 2005 EAS began its Member Action Team (MAT) in “an effort to empower 
members for lobbying, leadership and recruitment.  MAT activities include lobby day and 
grassroots lobbying efforts such as phone calls and letters to legislators.”  In 2006 the 
Association’s longtime focus on retired state employees yielded its first Retiree Director.  In 
2008 the Association’s political action committee – called EMPAC for Employees Political 
Action Committee – became the 11th most-powerful PAC in the nation. 
 The history of EAS points to several important enduring traits at the heart of the 
organization.  For instance, the development of the MAT suggests that both political activism 
and member involvement are essential to the values of the organization.  The strengthening of 
EMPAC also indicates that political influence, an important reason for the founding of the 
organization, has become even more important to EAS over time.  The organization’s focus on 
its membership has remained steady since its inception, but a concentrated effort to attend to 
                                                 
9
  For a more thorough treatment of EAS history, please refer back to Chapter 1. 
47 
 
retirees’ needs and interests is reflected in the fact that EAS created a position for a Retiree 
Director. 
Mission Statement and Bylaws 
EAS’s mission statement reads as follows: “[EAS] is committed to protecting and 
enhancing the rights and benefits of current, retired and future state employees.”  As with any 
organizational mission statement, EAS’s purpose, function, and primary reason for existing are 
expressed.  EAS’s stated reason to exist is to work for not just EAS members, but all state 
employees. The statement succinctly expresses that EAS values state employees. 
The concepts in its mission statement are central to the organizational identity of EAS.  
Though when asked, none of the employees surveyed or interviewed had the mission statement 
memorized, many of the participants’ comments seem to capture the flavor of the statement.  It 
seems they captured this flavor by reflecting on what seemed pervasive throughout their 
experience with EAS, rather than having specific knowledge of the mission statement.  As I 
observed during my time at the EAS headquarters, the idea that the EAS membership is 
important is something that is actually talked about in the EAS offices; it is genuinely a part of 
the work culture at EAS.     
Article II of EAS’s Bylaws reads as follows:  
Article II: Purpose.  The purposes of [EAS] are: 1.1 to promote the best interests and 
welfare of current, retired and future employees of the State of [xx], 1.2 to provide 
information to the membership, 1.3 to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas and 
problems, 1.4 to facilitate communication among employees of the State of [xx], 1.5 to 
promote the professionalism of the employees of the State of [xx] in order to provide 
effective and efficient programs and services to the citizens of [xx].  In the 
48 
 
accomplishment of the above purposes, [EAS], with the approval of the Convention, shall 
be able to affiliate with like-minded organizations. 
This Article is only part of the EAS bylaws, chosen because it specifically addresses the 
purposes of EAS.  Its own official rules require EAS to work for all state employees, not only 
EAS membership, including promoting their best interests and promoting professionalism, and 
require EAS to communicate with state employees and its membership, including providing 
information and providing a forum for discussion.  The responses of EAS employees to the 
survey questions based on the EAS mission statement and bylaws help show whether the 
organization has successfully, in the eyes of its employees, met the goals and purposes laid out in 
these two official documents.  As will become clear in Chapter 6: Analysis, it is important for the 
strength of the organization that employees buy-in to the organization’s communicated values as 
put forth in these official documents. 
Focus of Informer Topics 
Another official publication of EAS is its membership-directed newsletter.  As with any 
news publication, the topics of the EAS newsletter offer insight into what the organization 
values.  An analysis of the previous year’s publications revealed that the topics and rhetorical 
purposes of news items in The Informer could be broken into different categories, which I coded 
as ELECT, INNER, NEEDS, OWNER, and PUB POL.   
• ELECT: Trying to get employee-friendly political candidates elected to the state 
General Assembly and to the federal Congress (Bipartisan) 
Example: The article “EMPAC Endorsements Announced: Vote in Five [EAS] 
Members on Nov. 7” announces the candidacies of five EAS members for state 
congressional offices and endorses all five candidates. 
49 
 
• INNER: Informing members about the inner workings of EAS (i.e., what 
leaders/employees are doing, what types of events EAS leaders are attending, 
contact information for EAS leaders/staff) 
Example: The article “Staff Aligned for Member Action, Stronger [EAS] 
Operations” says that in response to EO 10510, the EAS Executive Director 
rearranged some EAS staff and created the Member Action Department (a 
combination of what were formerly called the Membership Services Department 
and the Political Department). 
• NEEDS: Illustrating EAS’s responsiveness to the needs of state employees and 
EAS members (i.e., information about healthcare, retirement, members discounts, 
state employee pay) 
Example: In his article “’Temporary’ Solution Needed,” EAS’s legal counsel 
discusses aspects of a case in which temporary state employees argue they should 
have gotten the same benefits as permanent state employees because they worked 
for the state longer than a year; EAS’s legal counsel supports the employees, 
saying that temp workers who work long-term should get the same benefits as 
permanent employees. 
• OWNER: Encouraging a sense of member ownership and loyalty (i.e., 
transparency in EAS decisions and leadership, soliciting ideas and feedback from 
                                                 
10
  Executive Order 105 was issued in response to a vetoed Senate bill. The bill read in part, “All State institutions, 
departments, bureaus, agencies, or commissions, shall permit representatives of a domiciled employees’ association 
that has at least 40,000 members, the majority of whom are current State employees, reasonable access to its 
facilities and employees for the purposes of membership recruitment, member consultation, and to offer member 
benefits, including insurance products.” The bill passed both houses overwhelmingly (House: 84 ayes / 12 nos; 
Senate: 46 ayes / 1 no), but the governor vetoed it. He later issued Executive Order 105, which reduced the required 
number of members to 2,000 with at least 500 state employees.  This decision strengthened EAS’s chances to 
engage in collective bargaining with the state, but increased EAS’s competition among public sector labor 
organizations. 
50 
 
members, highlighting members’ and districts’ accomplishments and activities, 
showing appreciation for members) 
Example: The item “[EAS] Salutes Awards for Excellence Employees” provides 
photos and brief bios of state employees who received the Award for Excellence. 
• PUB POL: Illustrating EAS’s effectiveness in influencing public policy and state 
laws 
Example: The article “Executive Order 105: Collective Bargaining’s First Step” 
explains why EAS supports EO 105, specifying that “Paragraph three of the order 
contains ‘meet and confer’ language allowing state employee associations with 
2,000 members, 500 of whom are state employees, the right to ‘meet annually 
with representatives of the Governor regarding issues of mutual concern prior to 
the annual convening of the General Assembly.’”  EAS had fought for years to 
secure the right of state employee associations to meet and confer with state 
officials. 
Items which were analyzed included articles, photos with cutlines, and member-service 
announcements (member discounts for theme park tickets or insurance, scholarship 
opportunities, district fundraisers, contact information for EAS and state leaders, etc.); 
advertisements were not analyzed.   Because some rhetorical overlap occurred, some items were 
coded with two categories.  See Table 1: Frequency of Topics in The Informer, 2006-2007, 
below, for details on the breakdown of topics. 
 
 
 
51 
 
      Table 1: Frequency of Topics in The Informer, 2006-2007                                     
Topic Category # of Items 
ELECT 11 
INNER 62 
NEEDS 53 
OWNER 126 
PUB POL 49 
 
The analysis was based on five editions of The Informer published during the 2006-2007 
schedule, corresponding to the state’s General Assembly schedule.  The labeled sections of each 
individual edition varied depending on the time of year.  As can be seen below in Table 2: 
Number of Articles per Section, aside from the unlabeled front page sections, which obviously 
appear in every edition, only 3 sections appear in every single edition: Columns (containing 
articles), Member Action (containing 30% articles and 70% photos with cutlines), and 
Retirement (containing articles).  The fact that these sections appear consistently seems to 
indicate that member action (political activism, participation of members, etc.) and retirees are 
important values to EAS.  The columns are written by the management (the executive director 
and legal counsel) and leadership (the President of EAS, who is a rank-and-file member elected 
by the EAS membership) of EAS, highlighting the importance of informing newsletter readers 
about the inner workings and decision processes of the EAS organization.  Other sections appear 
during appropriate times of the year; for instance, the legislative resource section appears just 
before an election in order to inform readers of important issues.  The annual convention section 
appears just before and just after the EAS convention in order to let members know what the 
agenda is for the upcoming convention, and to publish details of what was accomplished at the 
convention.  The appearance of these sections seems to indicate that member participation is a 
central value to the organization. 
 
52 
 
Table 2: Number of Articles per Section 
 
 
The fact that articles focused on OWNER, or encouraging member ownership and 
loyalty, appeared twice as often as articles in the second most frequent category (INNER) 
illustrates how the organization tries to make the participation of members a central 
characteristic.  Articles focused on INNER, or informing members about the inner workings of 
EAS, and articles focused on NEEDS, or illustrating EAS’s responsiveness to the needs of 
members, also indicate the central importance of the EAS membership.  Only slightly fewer 
articles focused on PUB POL (illustrating EAS’s effectiveness in influencing public policy) 
which seems to indicate that political influence is also central to EAS’s identity.  The smaller 
number of articles focused on ELECT (trying to get employee-friendly candidates elected) could 
indicate a lower interest in political action, but these types of articles actually appear in fewer 
editions of the newsletter because of its publication cycle, which in turn is dependent on the 
cyclical nature of elections.  (In other words, ELECT articles appear only when an election is 
eminent.) 
Survey Results 
The analysis of EAS’s mission statement, bylaws, and Informer topics provided some 
insight into EAS’s communicated values.  To find out the perceptions of EAS employees 
Section (In # of Editions) Total # of Articles 
Front Page (5) 10 
Member Action (5) 89 
Public Policy (3) 19 
Retirement (5) 26 
Health Care (3)   9 
Columns (5) 37 
Legislative Resource (1)   3 
Annual Convention (2) 14 
General Assembly Session (1)   3 
53 
 
regarding the organizational identity of EAS, an electronic survey was administered and focused 
interviews were conducted with three EAS employees.  Many survey questions were developed 
using the bylaws and mission statement of EAS.  More questions were developed by analyzing 
the topics of stories published in the previous year (see Table 1: Frequency of Topics in The 
Informer, 2006-2007 above).  The final question of the survey was based on Albert and 
Whetten’s (1985) tripartite definition of organizational identity (CED).  The following figures 
provide the survey questions administered to EAS employees and their responses to those 
questions.  
Responses to Multi-Choice Questions 
 Question Set 1 was based on EAS’s bylaws, as shown below in Figure 1: Employee 
Perception of EAS Purposes.  An organization crafts a set of bylaws to provide rules to govern 
its internal affairs.  I posed these bylaws-based questions to find out how EAS employees viewed 
the organization’s ability to put its communicated values into action.  Because bylaws are 
essential to an organization, the responses to Question Set 1 provide insights into some of EAS’s 
central characteristics, as perceived by its employees.   
An interesting finding is that 100% of respondents believe that EAS does “well” or “very 
well” at promoting the best interests and welfare of both current and retired state employees, 
indicating that EAS employees see state employees as a central characteristic of the organization.  
Findings are mixed in regard to how well EAS communicates with its membership, though the 
majority of respondents believe EAS performs “well” or “very well” when providing information 
(63%) and providing a forum for discussion (58%).  However, there seems to be some 
disagreement as to how well EAS facilitates communication among state employees, with a 
majority of respondents (58%) indicating EAS does only “okay” or even “poorly” and “very 
54 
 
poorly” on this issue.  These mixed results seem to indicate that although EAS does promote the 
interests of state employees to the state’s General Assembly – a political activity – EAS does not 
do as well communicating with and among membership, which could imply a lack of focus on 
hearing the voices of its membership.  This may also indicate that EAS employees would like to 
see better communication between the organization and its membership.  
  
55 
 
Figure 1: Employee Perception of EAS Purposes 
 
  
  
56 
 
Question Sets 2-5 were based on the analysis of topics from the previous year’s  
edition of The Informer.  The analysis of Informer topics suggested that EAS wants to respond to 
the needs of its membership and of state employees, or at least wants to appear to respond to 
those needs.  I posed these topics-based questions (Question Sets 2-5) to see if there was a 
correlation between what EAS appeared to value, indicated by what EAS publishes in its 
newsletter, and what EAS employees perceived regarding how EAS actually operates.  The 
responses to the following four question sets provide insights into how EAS employees perceive 
EAS’s central and distinctive characteristics. 
 As shown below in Figure2: Employee Perception of EAS Responsiveness, the majority 
of respondents believe that EAS is “always” or at least “often” responsive to the needs of state 
employees (current, retired, and future); however, there seems to be some slight disconnect 
between the perceptions of how state employees are treated compared to how the EAS 
membership and EAS employees are treated.  To be fair, the majority of respondents (more than 
75%) do believe that EAS is responsive to membership and employees, but a fairly significant 
percentage of respondents (about 20%) see that EAS is either “often not” or only “sometimes” 
responsive to the needs of EAS staff including management.  These results could imply that 
while state employees are certainly central and distinctive to EAS’s organizational identity, less 
attention is paid to membership and employee needs than some respondents believe should be 
paid. 
 
 
  
57 
 
 
Figure 2: Employee Perception of EAS Responsiveness (“NEEDS”) 
 
  
58 
 
As shown below in Figure 3: Employee Perception of Member Ownership, Question Set 
3 asked respondents for their perceptions of EAS’s efforts to encourage its membership and its 
employees to “own” EAS.  EAS has, throughout its history, claimed to be a member-driven 
organization; the responses to this question set indicate EAS employee perceptions regarding 
how consistently EAS achieves this claim.  The fact that a huge majority of respondents (more 
than 80%) believe that the EAS membership is consistently encouraged to feel like owners of 
EAS indicates the importance of members and their participation in the organization.  However, 
there seems to be another disjunction regarding how consistently the EAS staff11 are made to feel 
like owners of EAS, illustrated by the large percentage of respondents (50%) indicating that EAS 
“never,” “often [does] not,” or only “sometimes” does this.  In contrast, only about 15% of 
respondents believe EAS never, often, or sometimes makes EAS management feel like owners.  
One interpretation is that while members are a central characteristic of EAS’s organizational 
identity, its staff feel that perhaps they are not seen as being as essential to EAS as they should or 
would like to be seen.  There also seems to be the perception that management is encouraged to 
feel like owners more often than staff are, implying that a power differential exists. 
 
 
  
                                                 
11
  At EAS, “management” includes administrators, like department heads; “staff” includes workers like 
receptionists, support personnel, and recruiters, among others. 
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Figure 3: Employee Perception of Member Ownership (“OWNER”) 
 
 
 
 
 
  
60 
 
As shown below in Figure 4: Employee Perception of EAS Transparency, Question Set 4 
asked respondents for their perceptions of EAS’s efforts to provide information regarding its 
“inner workings” to its membership and employees and to both current and retired state 
employees.  Not only do the topics of Informer articles suggest EAS’s concern with providing 
such information, but so do EAS’s bylaws.  The responses to this question set indicate EAS 
employee perceptions regarding how consistently EAS actually provides information on its inner 
workings.   
Because EAS works for the best interest of state employees, one might assume that 
transparency – an act which enables people to make better informed decisions and which 
indicates a level of respect for information recipients, EAS members – is consistently provided 
by the organization to its members and employees.  The large majority of EAS employees who 
responded to this question set say that they believe EAS “often” or “always” provides 
transparency to current (69%) and retired (79%) state employees, to the EAS membership (78%), 
and to EAS employees (both staff (95%) and management(89%)).  However, an interesting 
disjunction is evident when comparing the perceptions of transparency provided to the EAS 
membership.  Though the majority believes EAS provides information about its inner workings 
to the membership, 22% of respondents seem to think that EAS is not doing as well as it should, 
perhaps, in being a transparent organization.  The doubt expressed by some EAS employees 
could indicate a perception that the membership is not as well-respected as it should be and that 
members should be better informed about how EAS is operated. 
  
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Figure 4: Employee Perception of EAS Transparency (“INNER”) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
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As shown below in Figure 5: Employee Perception of Political Influence, Question Set 5 
asked respondents for their perceptions of EAS’s efforts to gain and wield political influence.  
Since its beginning, EAS has claimed it provides a voice for state employees, especially 
regarding pay and benefits.  Because the state legislature must approve state employee pay and 
benefits, EAS must cultivate relationships with elected officials.  The responses to this question 
set indicate EAS employee perceptions regarding how well EAS is able to actually influence 
public policy and elect state employee-friendly politicians. 
Generally speaking, EAS employees believe that EAS does “well” or “very well” at 
influencing public policy and electing politicians who are supportive of state employees, and in 
working with other politically-minded organizations (like the SEIU).  However, a relatively large 
percentage of respondents (about 35%) believe that EAS does only “okay” or “poorly” at 
influencing state politics, possibly indicating that EAS employees think the organization could or 
should do more to effectively influence public policy or electing friendly politicians.  This result 
could also indicate that EAS employees simply do not feel heard by politicians, or that labor 
issues are not important to the state’s publics. 
 
 
  
63 
 
Figure 5: Employee Perception of Political Influence (“ELECT” and “PUB POL”) 
 
  
 
  
64 
 
As shown below in Figure 6: Employee Perception of Employee and Member Treatment, 
Question Set 6 was designed to find out how EAS employees perceive their treatment by the 
organization.  EAS claims to exist for state employees and the EAS membership, to work for 
their benefit, but how well does the organization treat its own employees?  The responses to this 
question set provide insight into whether EAS’s claims about supporting state workers are 
consistent with its treatment of its own workers. 
The majority of respondents think that EAS does “well” or “very well” at showing 
appreciation for the staff (53%) and the membership (66%) of EAS.  However, a significant 
percentage thinks that EAS only does “okay” or even “poorly” or “very poorly” at showing its 
appreciation.  This possible disjunction could indicate that EAS employees are, or at least feel, 
underappreciated.  This perception seems ironic for an organization whose purpose is to promote 
the best interests and welfare of state employees.  More disturbing is the fact that 50% of EAS 
employees think EAS is only “okay” at including staff in organizational decisions, a result which 
again indicates that employees feel underappreciated or ignored.  Similar results can be found 
regarding the soliciting of opinion from EAS staff and membership – 39% think EAS does only 
“okay” at this.  This result also could be interpreted as staff and membership being ignored by 
the organization. 
The fact that about 32% of those surveyed felt that EAS performed only “okay,” 
“poorly,” or even “very poorly” in regard to including the EAS membership in organizational 
decisions seems to point to a possible disjunction between the enduring and distinctive 
characteristics of member ownership of and involvement in EAS.  Employees seem to think the 
membership is not, perhaps, as centrally involved in the organization’s decisions as it should be. 
  
65 
 
 
Figure 6: Employee Perception of Employee and Member Treatment 
 
 
  
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Responses to Open-Ended Questions 
The final set of questions from the survey required respondents to provide their own 
comments rather than choosing from multiple options.  The instructions for this question read, 
“For the final question, I’d like to know your perception of different attributes or characteristics 
of EAS as an organization.  As well as you can, please provide a word or phrase which, in your 
opinion, best answers the following:”  The sub-questions are listed below. 
 When asked, “What is the central characteristic which helps define EAS? (In other 
words, if you took away [blank], EAS would not be EAS.),” 72% of respondents indicated that 
its membership or state employees were the central defining characteristic of EAS.  The 
remaining 28% of respondents used other phrases to describe EAS’s central characteristic, 
including “aggressiveness,” “personal agendas,” “unity,” “staff,” and “friendships between staff 
and membership.” 
When asked, “What characteristic of EAS has endured since EAS’s beginning and will 
continue into the future?,” 72% of respondents indicated that members or state employees were 
the enduring characteristic of EAS.  31% of those respondents specifically mention EAS’s work 
regarding benefits or equality for state employees.  The remaining 28% of respondents used 
more subjective concepts to describe EAS’s enduring characteristics, including the phrases 
“endurance to continue fighting,” “feeling of being an extended family,” “the feeling of being a 
family,” “strength,” and “pride and respect.” 
Several respondents to this subquestion indicated that EAS’s political lobbying efforts on 
behalf of members are included as part of EAS’s enduring characteristics.  Respondent 
comments included “looking out for State Employees trying to get better benefits,” “activists 
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working together, advocates for members,” “it’s [sic] attempt to increase benefits of its 
members,” and “working for active state employee’s [sic] and retired members.” 
When asked, “What characteristic of EAS is unique? (In other words, what distinguishes 
EAS from other organizations?),” 56% of respondents indicated that members and state 
employees were the distinctive characteristic of EAS.  Of those respondents, 30% specifically 
mention the large number of EAS members as being the distinctive characteristic of EAS.  33% 
of respondents used other phrases to describe EAS’s distinctive characteristics, including 
“decisions are made by members [of] the Executive Committee and Board of [Governors], not 
the staff,” “Progressive,” “a family that fights to improve the future,” “it represents both 
management and labor,” “effective,” and “strength in numbers.”  11% of respondents indicated 
“not sure” or “nothing” made EAS unique. 
Three respondents to this subquestion made comments regarding relationships.  One 
respondent indicated that the “rank and file staff interaction with members” is the characteristic 
which makes EAS unique.  Another indicated “the loyality [sic] from staff and members” makes 
EAS unique, while another mentioned “member participation.” 
Taken as a whole, the responses to these open-ended questions indicate that the EAS 
membership or state employees are the central, the enduring, and the distinctive feature of EAS.  
Other responses indicate that EAS employees feel a sense of personal relationships between 
employees and members; many respondents used words like “family” or phrases like “activists 
working together” and “rank and file staff interaction with members.”  This sense of having 
personal relationships seems to be a characteristic of EAS which is unique and distinctive.  An 
emphasis on personal relationships could indicate that EAS employees see their jobs as more 
than just a job – they feel it is important for the organization to interact with the state employees 
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the organization was created to serve and that EAS does this better than other similar 
organizations. 
Interviews 
Structured interviews were performed at EAS headquarters with three randomly-selected 
employees; by “randomly-selected,” I mean that I ran my finger down a list of EAS employees 
to select potential interviewees.  The questions12 were designed to probe a little further into the 
data collected from the survey; the interviews gave me an opportunity to follow up on any 
questions I had regarding the results from the online survey.  The three EAS employees I 
interviewed all worked in departments other than the Communications Department.  Although 
the employees were randomly chosen to be interviewed, I purposely eliminated Communications 
Department employees from the interview pool because of my extensive interactions, including 
interviews, with those employees.  I also eliminated from consideration the four employees 
based in locations far away from the EAS headquarters, as well as employees with whom I had 
personal acquaintances.  The three interview participants were Rita, Tyler, and Kay. 
Rita, a 16-year veteran of EAS, had worked for the state General Assembly in the 1980s.  
In the early 1990s, she met a secretary for one of the state representatives, who told Rita that 
EAS was looking for a receptionist.  Rita noted that compared to the General Assembly and 
another state agency she had worked for previously, EAS possessed several distinctive 
characteristics.  For one thing, EAS was “more family-oriented.”  At other places, she said, “you 
did your job and went home.”  Comparing EAS with other employees’ associations, Rita 
confessed she didn’t know much about other organizations, but she felt that EAS “helps 
members more than other [organizations] do,” because EAS is “member-driven.”   As a worker, 
                                                 
12
  A copy of the entire interview protocol is included in Appendix E.   
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she felt that her work was appreciated; her perception was that other organizations did not 
appreciate workers: “[The employees] can say something [to employers of other organizations] 
but it won’t matter.”  Rita felt strongly that EAS put a lot of effort into providing information for 
its membership, particularly by researching an issue; this effort made EAS different from other 
similar organizations.  She also felt strongly that EAS “stands behind employees, retired and 
active.  [EAS] offers more to retirees than other [employees’ associations].” 
When asked about how EAS had changed over her years as an employee, Rita noted she 
had worked for several executive directors and had seen many staff changes, most due to 
retirement or moving out of state.  She also mentioned that EAS has recently moved to a newer, 
larger, more modern building.  She said that in the older building, “people were on top of each 
other;” now, people had more room, but she missed the “closeness” of the old building.  She 
went on to say that the friendliness of employees was still there: “The changes are good.”  When 
asked what a new EAS employee might find, Rita again emphasized the friendliness of EAS 
employees: “Everyone would make an effort to speak to [the new employee], make sure you’re 
comfortable.”  She said that after a while, though, “the personalities come out [because EAS] 
employees speak their minds.” 
Tyler had been with EAS for a year and a half.  He had previously worked at a nearby 
state university and had heard about EAS “through casual conversations with people with 
political interests,” so when he found a job listing in the newsletter, he thought EAS would be a 
good place to work.  Comparing EAS with the university and other places he had worked – a real 
estate agency, Starbucks, retail shops – Tyler said that they all had “hierarchy, [a] typical power 
structure.”  But, he said, EAS encouraged him “to think more” and that a day at EAS was never 
routine.  Comparing EAS to other employees’ associations, Tyler said he didn’t know many 
70 
 
other associations very well, though they seem “mostly the same.”  Tyler stated that EAS was 
more “member-driven” than other associations, even if what the members want “may not be well 
thought out.”  Tyler emphasized that EAS was the only employees’ association to work with 
both active and retired members: “Other [associations] don’t seem as vocal about retirees.”  He 
also emphasized that EAS was an association, not a union. 
While most of Tyler’s comments regarding EAS’s distinctive characteristics were 
positive, he did have some criticisms of the organization.  He felt he and other EAS employees 
were treated well, though the pay they received was not as much as they deserved.  Tyler said the 
organization was “fractured, but not broken,” due in some part to the “multiple personalities” 
within the organization.  Many employees, he said, saw themselves and their jobs as the most 
important in the organization, resulting in what he called “junior high” behavior where the focus 
was on personal issues rather than solving a problem. 
When asked how EAS had changed over the time he had worked there, Tyler stated the 
organization had mostly stayed the same: “dysfunctional.”  His first month at EAS, he said, was 
“a nice honeymoon” which soon ended.  Tyler felt that each department within EAS had its own 
“agenda” that sometimes interfered with problem solving.  Conflicts were not always worked out 
in a mature manner; instead, “whoever throws the loudest tantrum” won.  When Tyler was asked 
what a new employee might find at EAS, he said “the atmosphere varies depending on what 
department or part of the building you work in….Department managers vary.  Some are laidback 
and some [employees in other departments] are not allowed to have fun.” 
Kay had only been with EAS for about five and a half months.  Kay, who found the EAS 
job listing through CraigsList, had previously worked for a construction company, a nonprofit 
children’s charity, and a New York City school district administration office.  Interestingly, Kay 
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said that until her job interview, she thought EAS focused only on retirees, because of the 
emphasis on retiree issues.  She found EAS to be distinct from her other employers in several 
ways, particularly in the way employees were treated.  Kay indicated that the children’s charity 
did not treat employees as would be expected: “[The charity] wants to treat kids well, but they 
didn’t treat [their] staff well.  [The workload and responsibility] wasn’t worth the money.”  EAS, 
she said, was “totally opposite.”  She said she felt “cherished” by EAS, which “fights for staff” 
when necessary.  When asked to compare EAS with other employees’ associations, Kay said she 
was not familiar with other associations, but that she had been a union member with the NYC 
school system.  She compared EAS favorably with the union, stating that EAS usually “goes 
beyond” for state employees to keep a person from unfairly losing his or her job.  She also noted 
that although unions are stronger in New York than in EAS’s state, the employees themselves 
were not necessarily better in New York.  Kay stated that EAS was “very informative, not 
secret” about issues like job losses or pay raises; comparatively, other organizations she had 
worked for kept these types of issues “quiet.” 
When asked about how EAS had changed during her short time there, Kay said that no 
physical changes had occurred, but that one big event happened: EAS affiliated itself with the 
Service Employees International Union, one of the largest unions in the world.  Kay thought she 
and EAS would probably see a lot of changes, but she was not nervous about potential changes 
because of the management’s “openness;” staff meetings were held monthly to keep staff 
informed during the process of affiliation with SEIU.  When asked what a new employee at EAS 
might find, Kay responded that respect from management could be expected.  She said the work 
atmosphere was “very friendly” and “family-oriented,” and that co-workers often ask about each 
other’s family members. 
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The information gathered from these interviews highlights the importance of the EAS 
membership, the relationships between EAS employees and members, and retired state 
employees.  It also highlights some of the disjunctions apparent in the results of the survey.  For 
instance, while the idea that EAS is a family-oriented organization is to some extent supported 
by each of the three interviewees, Tyler is not completely onboard with that assumption, 
suggesting that for some employees, integrating personal and professional lives is not always 
desirable.  Also intriguing is Tyler’s use of the phrase “fractured but not broken” and “multiple 
personalities” to describe EAS.  This idea of a fractured but not broken organization will 
reappear later in this dissertation.  One particularly interesting result from these interviews is the 
fact that only Kay, the newest employee I interviewed, mentioned EAS’s affiliation with SEIU.  
In fact, nowhere in the survey responses was the affiliation even mentioned.  The apparent lack 
of concern or interest of EAS employees about the affiliation with SEIU seems odd; though the 
affiliation automatically increased EAS’s political power, EAS employees do not yet consider 
this new power when discussing EAS’s organizational identity. 
What is EAS’s Organizational Identity? 
Using Albert and Whetten’s (1985) CED theory of organizational identity as a framework, a 
clear picture of EAS’s organizational identity can be seen through employee perceptions as 
revealed through the responses to the survey questions and to the structured interviews, and 
through the values communicated through item topics and sections of The Informer, EAS 
mission statements, and Article II of the bylaws.  Remember, according to Albert and Whetten, 
the answer to “Who are we as an organization?” must fulfill all three of the criteria for 
determining organizational identity: claimed features of central character, distinctiveness, and 
temporal continuity.  Four features appear to be important to EAS’s organizational identity: 
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• Relationships among EAS employees are a distinctive feature 
• Gaining and wielding political influence is an enduring and central feature 
• Focus on retirees and retirement issues is a distinctive and central feature 
• Commitment to benefiting the EAS’s membership is the central, enduring, and distinctive 
feature 
While each of these features is valuable to EAS, only one fulfills all three of Albert and 
Whetten’s criteria; only EAS’s membership are perceived by EAS employees as the central, the 
enduring, and the distinctive feature of the EAS organization.  The following sections examine 
each of these important features in some detail. 
EAS Employees 
 According to their own perceptions, EAS employees in general seem to have productive 
working relationships; in fact, these relationships are often identified by EAS employees as both 
a distinctive and a central characteristic of the organization.  An important part of EAS’s 
purposes, according to its Bylaws, is to facilitate communication among state employees and to 
promote professionalism of state employees.  A disconnect in this area between EAS’s stated 
purposes (to make workers better informed and more professional) and what actually happens in 
the EAS workplace is, at the least, ironic. After all, one would expect an organization which 
exists to promote the best interests of workers would itself promote the best interests of its own 
workers.  Most EAS employees agree that the organization – that is, the people who make up the 
staff, management, and leadership of EAS – does promote the interests of EAS employees; 
however, some intriguing areas of disconnect do exist.  These areas of disconnect will be briefly 
introduced in the following paragraphs; a more detailed discussion will be presented Chapter 6: 
Analysis. 
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In their interviews, EAS employees Rita and Kay said that one of the distinctive 
characteristics of EAS is its friendliness and “family” orientation.  Kay used the word 
“cherished” when asked how she felt as an EAS employee, and said she felt an “openness” in the 
organization’s information-sharing processes (for example, monthly staff meetings) that was not 
displayed at other organizations where she had worked.  However, it would appear from looking 
at the survey results from EAS employees that while many of them generally agreed with what 
Kay and Rita said, many others did not.  When asked how well EAS showed appreciation for 
staff, 56% of respondents felt that EAS did so “well” or “very well,” though a third of 
respondents felt EAS was only “okay” at showing appreciation and 11% felt they were “poor” or 
“very poor” in this area.   
Interviewee Tyler felt EAS employees were friendly, but he, like some other employees, 
had generally negative perceptions of how management treated staff.  For instance, half of the 
survey respondents felt EAS did only an “okay” job at including staff in organizational 
decisions, and 22% felt EAS did a “poor” or “very poor” job; only 28% felt EAS did this “well” 
or “very well.”  Many survey respondents (39%) felt EAS did an “okay” job at soliciting expert 
opinion from among its staff, while a third felt EAS did “well” or “very well.”  17% thought 
EAS did a “poor” or “very poor” job soliciting opinions.  Overall, however, EAS employees 
seem to feel the organization is responsive to their needs: 79% of survey respondents indicated 
that EAS was “often” or “always” responsive to the needs of EAS staff.  21% responded that 
EAS was “often not” or “sometimes” responsive to their needs, but no one indicated EAS was 
“never” responsive.   
 
 
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Political Influence 
 EAS was originally founded in 1946 for the purpose of voicing the needs of state 
employees to the state’s General Assembly, making it both an enduring and a central 
characteristic of EAS’s organizational identity.  The desire for political influence can be seen 
even in the publication schedule of EAS’s newsletter The Informer, which is published to 
coincide with the schedule of the General Assembly.  By aligning the publication of their 
newsletter with the General Assembly’s schedule, EAS is able to target their audience with 
specific information the audience will need to participate in the political process.  For instance, 
an edition of the newsletter is published in May, providing the membership with critical 
information in time to lobby the General Assembly and the Governor’s Office before the 
beginning of the fiscal year on July 1 when the governor must sign into law the state’s annual 
budget.   The August edition of the newsletter highlights the budget items that EAS lobbied for, 
endorsed, or otherwise supported to have included in the budget; these highlights serve to show 
its membership and other readers (including state politicians) how strong EAS’s political 
influence is. 
 EAS employees generally perceived the organization’s political influence to be effective.  
When asked how well EAS influenced public policy in the state, a large majority (61%) 
responded “well” or “very well.”  A third felt EAS did an “okay” job at influencing public 
policy, while only 6% felt they did a “poor” job.  When asked how well EAS did at endorsing 
and electing politicians who are supportive of state employees, a very large majority (72%) 
responded that EAS did “well” or “very well.”  17% thought EAS did “okay” and 11% thought 
EAS did “poorly” at endorsing or electing employee-friendly politicians.  Although no 
respondent explicitly used the word “political” to describe EAS, several respondents alluded to 
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EAS’s political aims.  For instance, one comment said that EAS’s central defining characteristic 
was that it “protects the rights of state employees,” an inherently political endeavor.  When asked 
about EAS’s enduring characteristic, several respondents pointed to EAS’s political work: 
“looking out for State Employees trying to get better benefits,” “activists working together, 
advocates for members,” “it’s [sic] attempt to increase benefits of members,” and “endurance to 
continue fighting” were among the comments from the survey. 
Retired EAS Members 
 Although EAS originally focused solely on active state employees, rather than retirees, 
the organization evolved to include retirees.  In fact, the year before this study took place, EAS 
created a new position within the organization, the Retirement Director, to help focus EAS’s 
efforts to address the needs of retired state employees, especially retired EAS members.  While 
the EAS membership in general is seen as the most important feature of EAS, as discussed in the 
next section, the focus on retired members is seen as a central and distinctive part of EAS’s 
organizational identity.  In their interviews, Rita, Tyler and Kay noted EAS’s distinctive focus on 
retirees.  Tyler emphasized that EAS was the only employees’ association he knew of that was 
“vocal” about retirees; Kay said that the focus on retirees was so sharp that until her job 
interview, she was under the impression that EAS worked solely on retiree issues.  Rita felt 
strongly that EAS “stands behind employees, retired and active” and that EAS “offers more to 
retirees” than any other employees’ association she knew of. 
 The survey responses from other EAS employees support what the three interviewees 
reported.  When asked how well EAS promoted the best interests and welfare of retired state 
employees, every single respondent indicated EAS did this either “well” (63%) or “very well” 
(37%).  When asked how responsive EAS was to the needs of retired state employees, an 
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overwhelming majority (90%) indicated EAS did this “always” or “often.”  A very large 
majority of respondents (78%) also believed that EAS “often” or “always” provided information 
about EAS to retired state employees. 
EAS’s Membership 
 Although several features are important to the identity of EAS, clearly the most important 
feature is the EAS membership, including both active and retired state employees.  It is the one 
feature which is perceived as meeting all three of Albert and Whetten’s criteria: EAS members 
are the seen as the essence of the organization (Central), the members distinguish EAS from 
other similar organizations (Distinctive), and the membership of state employees in EAS has 
remained the same since the organization’s inception (Enduring).   
 When asked directly to provide a word or phrase describing EAS’s central defining 
characteristic, a large majority (72%) of survey respondents indicated that state employees 
and/or the EAS membership were central to EAS’s identity.  When asked what characteristic of 
EAS had endured since the beginning and would continue into the future, another large majority 
(72%) indicated that state employees and/or EAS members were the enduring characteristic of 
EAS.  A smaller majority (59%) of survey respondents indicated that the EAS membership 
and/or state employees were the distinctive characteristic which set EAS apart from other similar 
organizations.  Of those respondents, a third specifically mention the large number (55,000) of 
EAS members as an important component of EAS identity. 
 Elsewhere in the survey, EAS employees were asked about their perceptions of how EAS 
members are treated or regarded by the organization as a whole.  When asked if EAS is 
responsive to the needs of the EAS membership, a large majority (79%) of respondents indicated 
“always” or “often.”  A very large majority of respondents (83%) felt that EAS “often” or 
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“always” encouraged EAS membership to feel like owners of the organization.  A large majority 
(78%) felt EAS provided transparency regarding the inner workings of EAS to the EAS 
membership.  A majority (67%) felt that EAS did “well” or “very well” in showing appreciate 
for EAS members, while a similar majority (68%) felt EAS did “well” or “very well” including 
EAS members in organizational decision-making. 
Chapter Conclusion 
   In this chapter, I discussed the results of my inquiries into the organizational identity of 
EAS, especially as that identity is perceived by EAS employees.  The organizational identity 
(CED) of EAS was characterized as focusing particularly on the EAS membership, but also on 
EAS employees, political influence, and retired state employees.  In Chapter 5, I present the 
results of my study of the EAS review and revise group and review processes for The Informer; 
this part of the study was undertaken in order to discover the ways in which EAS’s 
organizational identity influences or otherwise relates to the group’s review processes, and to 
discover the ways in which the review group and its processes contribute to EAS’s identity.  In 
Chapter 6: Analysis, I tie together some of the threads presented in this chapter and the next, in 
order to make visible the connections between EAS’s organizational identity and the processes 
of the review and revise group.  Chapter 6 also includes a discussion of the intriguing 
disjunctions or disconnections which were uncovered by the survey and interview responses of 
EAS employees, as well as some which were uncovered by the study of the review and revise 
group and the processes undertaken to create The Informer. 
 
 
CHAPTER 5: PRESENTATION OF DATA AND DISCUSSION OF THE REVIEW AND 
REVISE GROUP’S CULTURE 
Introduction 
 This chapter explores the culture of the EAS review and revise group.  The driving 
question of this chapter is, “How can the culture of the review and revise group be 
characterized?”  To understand the group’s culture, observations of the group’s review and revise 
processes were conducted, including review and revision sessions and face-to-face meetings; in 
addition, modes and frequencies of margin comments made by reviewers were analyzed, as was 
the content of the comments.  Using Susan Kleimann’s (1993) framework from her study “The 
Reciprocal Relationship of Workplace Culture and Review,” a set of characteristics which help 
define the culture of the review and revise group can be seen.  Kleimann identifies three main 
aspects of the review process that are influenced by a review group’s culture: “[T]he different 
cultures of individual divisions [in an organization] affect every aspect of the review process, 
from the structure of the process to the way reviewers frame their written comments to the 
number of written comments” (p. 57).  Kleimann’s framework has been adapted slightly to work 
with the EAS review and revise group; for instance, the EAS review and revise group often used 
orally-delivered review comments in addition to written, so oral comments were also examined 
for this study.  Three broad features characterize what Kleimann calls a collaborative culture.  
According to her case study of two divisions at the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), 
collaborative cultures 
• Structure their review process using concurrent review, a flattened hierarchy, widely 
available written guidance, and stipulated deadlines; 
• Conduct face-to-face meetings to consolidate and/or reconcile comments; and 
80 
 
• Use statements and questions in comments nearly half the time, emphasizing the 
negotiative aspects of revision / review (pp. 62-67). 
 Once the review and revise group’s culture is established, we will see more clearly any 
threads or connections which can be made between the organization’s identity and the ways 
EAS’s organizational identity influences (or does not influence) the process of the collaborative 
revision and review done for The Informer.  Identifying and studying these connections can 
show how the group’s review processes influence or otherwise relate to the identity of EAS.  It 
can also show how the culture of the writing workgroup affects the group’s processes and the 
final written product, and also affects and is affected by organizational identity.  After this 
chapter, an analysis follows, which links the writing processes discussed in this chapter and the 
organizational identity of EAS as discussed in the previous chapter. 
Description of Review and Revise Group Participants 
The review and revise group was comprised of four core members who did the bulk of 
the work and two other members.  The core members of the review and revise group consisted of 
two people whose jobs as editor-in-chief and managing editor made them directly responsible for 
the newsletter, and two associate editors who supported the two other core members with tasks 
like copyediting and fact-checking.  In addition to making up the review and revise group, these 
four core members also comprise the Communications Department.  The other two group 
members were the organization’s legal counsel, who reviewed and approved article content from 
a legal perspective “so we don’t get sued,” and EAS’s executive director, who had little direct 
input in revision or reviewing, but whose opinion, as the editor-in-chief stated, “always matters,” 
especially since the executive director has final approval over the publication.   
81 
 
Table 3: Review and Revise Group Positions and Responsibilities, below, lists the 
pseudonyms of each group member, along with a number signifying his or her hierarchical 
position within the review and revise group, though not necessarily within EAS as a whole, and 
his or her job title at the time of the field study.  Pseudonyms are used for all names in this study, 
including those in the table.  The table also provides information about the major responsibilities 
of each group member and about each member’s main focus during the review and revise 
process. 
Table 3: Review and Revise Group Positions and Responsibilities 
 
 
Position in Hierarchy/ 
Pseudonym of Reviewer Job Title / Responsibilities 
(1) Dan  Executive Director 
Approves final Content List 
Writes a column 
Approves final proof of newsletter 
(2) Tim  Chief of Staff / General Counsel 
Writes a column 
Reviews text of articles 
Review Focus = Legal perspective 
(3) Terri  Director of Communications / Editor-in-Chief 
May contribute to Content List; Approves Content List 
Writes articles; alternates writing front page with Elaine 
Review Focus = Rhetorical Content 
(4) Elaine  Assistant Director of Communications / Managing Editor 
Draws up initial Content List 
Writes articles; alternates writing front page with Terri 
Review Focus = Grammar 
(5) Cassie  Associate Editor 
 May contribute to Content List 
Writes articles and photo cutlines (captions) 
Review Focus = Fact checking 
(6) Melissa  Advertising Manager 
Coordinates advertising for newsletter 
Writes articles 
Review Focus = Punctuation 
82 
 
As mentioned in Chapter 3: Methods, the core members of the review and revise group 
have a variety of professional and education backgrounds.  Terri has an undergraduate degree in 
Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and a Masters degree in Government from Johns 
Hopkins University.  Before coming to work for EAS five years prior to this study, she spent 
many years in military and government service.  Elaine has an undergraduate degree from a 
Midwestern university, and had experience in journalism and communications before joining 
EAS seven years prior to this study.  Melissa and Cassie both have undergraduate degrees from 
local universities.  Melissa served as an intern for EAS before she was hired permanently, just a 
couple of year before this study.  Cassie had experience in communications, and of the four core 
members of the review and revise group, had been employed by EAS the longest – about nine 
and a half years. 
Production Cycle of The Informer 
The 16-page full-color newsletter is published four times a year in coordination with the 
schedule of the state’s legislative body, the General Assembly, consisting of a House of 
Representatives and a Senate.  As shown below in Table 4: The Informer 2007-2008 Publication 
Schedule, the production of The Informer starts about five weeks before the newsletter arrives in 
the mailboxes of the EAS membership.    EAS membership and employees are invited to submit 
articles for the newsletter on any topic they are interested in, though Terri said on rare occasion 
she will solicit an article from an expert.  However, the organization’s preference is that anyone 
who writes an article be an EAS member, so the writer is asked to join the organization; Terri 
will “rarely” waive this requirement.  (See Appendix G for a list of membership eligibility 
criteria.)  The majority of articles is written by the four core members of the review and revise 
group.  When an article is submitted by an EAS employee outside of the Communications 
83 
 
Department (i.e., Insurance Department, Retiree Department, etc.), that department’s director 
indicates approval of the article by “signing off” (EAS’s term) before publication. 
Table 4: The Informer 2007-2008 Publication Schedules  
Edition External 
Copy 
Deadline 
(M) 
Director 
Sign-off 
(F) 
Move to 
design 
studio 
for 
layout 
(M 12 
p.m.) 
Proofs 
T, R, 
M 
(T) 
Legal 
Review 
(T) 
Publication 
to [Printer] 
(T 9 a.m.) 
To [CES 
Capital] 
(F 9 
a.m.) 
To 
USPS 
(W) 
In 
Members’ 
Mailboxes 
(F) 
Nov 
2007 
Sept 17 Sept 21 Sept 24 Oct 2, 
4, 8 
Oct 9 Oct 12 Oct 
17 
Oct 26 
March 
2008 
Jan 22 
(T) 
Jan 25 Jan 28 Feb 5, 
7, 11 
Feb 12 Feb 15 Feb 
20 
Feb 28 
May 
2008 
March 
24 
March 
25 
March 
31 
April 
8, 10, 
14 
April 15 April 
18 
April 
23 
May 2 
Aug 
2008 
June 23 June 27 July 7 July 
15, 
17, 21 
July 22 July 25  July 
30 
Aug 8 
 
Illustrated below in Figure 7: The Informer Production Cycle, the cycle begins with the 
creation of the content list13, a guide for the reviewers regarding the articles, photos, and 
advertisements for the upcoming edition of the newsletter.  The content list is based in large part 
on the topics of the articles and/or photos submitted by EAS membership or employees and 
articles written by members of the review and revise group; the articles written by membership 
or other non-employees are referred to by the Communications Department as “external copy.”  
Elaine draws up the initial content list, with Cassie contributing information regarding the 
advertisements for the edition; the content list is then approved by Terri, who said she 
occasionally adds or subtracts information if necessary, though during this study she did not.  
After the content list meets their approval, Terri and Elaine bring the list to EAS’s executive 
                                                 
13
  An example of an EAS content list is included in Appendix D. 
84 
 
director, Dan, for a discussion of the article content, the photographs, and the advertisements.  At 
the end of the meeting, Dan indicates his approval.   
When I asked Terri if Dan had ever refused to approve the topics for The Informer, she 
said he had not because any problems were negotiated and worked through.  Because of his 
position as executive director, Terri said, Dan ultimately has the final say on anything regarding 
the newsletter, but that he “rarely if ever” uses his authority because he trusts Terri and Elaine’s 
judgment and expertise as communicators.  The content list review meeting is discussed in more 
detail in the next section of this chapter. 
Figure 7: The Informer Production Cycle 
 
 
START
 External 
Copy 
Deadline
 Content List 
Approved
 Dept 
Directors 
Sign-off
 Content to 
Design 
Studio
 Proofs and 
Legal 
Review
 Publication 
to Printer
 Pub 
Prepared 
for Mailing
 Pub to USPS
 END
 Pub in 
Members' 
Mailboxes
85 
 
The day the external copy is due, a face-to-face meeting of the four core members of the 
review and revise group is held in Terri’s office to discuss word count for the articles, an 
important step in the process because of the limited amount of space available for content in the 
newsletter.  Then each group member returns to her own office to begin individually revising the 
text of the articles, focusing on her area of expertise.  For instance, Cassie writes all the 
“cutlines” or captions for the photographs, and she fact-checks article content; Melissa’s 
expertise is in punctuation and spelling.  Elaine and Terri focus on more global-level concerns, 
particularly rhetorical content or “messaging” in Terri’s word, though both women also perform 
copyediting; Elaine focuses especially on grammar (sentence structure, subject/verb agreement, 
etc.).  However, it should be noted that each core group member performs all the different types 
of editing, not only those in her area of expertise.  The types of edits made by the review and 
revise group during this study are discussed in a later section. 
After the first two rounds of collaborative reviewing, during which the articles’ text is 
revised, copyedited, and fact-checked by the core members of the review and revise group (Terri, 
Elaine, Cassie, and Melissa), the content is sent via email to the designer.  The designing of the 
newsletter is outsourced to a local company; the designer is not an employee of EAS, which is 
why she is not included in this study as a part of the review and revise group.  In addition, she 
does not participate in reviewing the newsletter; rather, her task is simply to make the design 
changes as requested by the review and revise group.  Within a week of receiving the content, 
the designer sends the first set of designed proofs – which includes text and graphics – back to 
Elaine via email.  Over the course of three separate days spanning a week, revisions are made to 
the proofs, including a legal review by Tim, EAS’s legal counsel.  (As noted, a more detailed 
discussion of the edits will follow in a subsequent section.)  The final version of The Informer is 
86 
 
sent to the printing company the next day.  Three days after that, it is sent to a company which 
prepares the newsletters for mailing.  Five days afterward, the ready-to-be-mailed Informers 
arrive at the post office, and EAS members receive their copies of the newsletter in their 
mailboxes within the week. 
Content List Review Meeting 
A meeting to discuss the content of the upcoming edition of The Informer was held just 
after the external copy deadline.  The meeting took place in the executive director’s office and 
included Dan, the executive director; Terri, the editor-in-chief of the newsletter; and Elaine, the 
managing editor of the newsletter.  The content list was drawn up by Elaine, who showed it to 
Terri for her approval before the two editors met with Dan to discuss the list and gain his 
approval.  My main purpose for observing the content list review meeting was to observe the 
interactions between the three group members.  In particular, I wanted to see if the opinions and 
expertise of the editors were seriously considered by the executive director.  The evidence 
collected during the meeting indicates that Dan does indeed take under serious consideration any 
suggestions or comments made by Terri and Elaine, though ultimately he must make the final 
decision regarding approval of topics and/or content for the newsletter articles and other items, 
like photographs.  
The digital audio recording of the content list review meeting was transcribed and 
divided into segments; a total of 18 segments were identified.  Of these 18 segments, two 
segments involved relatively inconsequential matters (names of interns and what schools they 
were from); these two segments are not considered.  As shown below in Table 5: Decisions 
Made During Content List Review Meeting, of the remaining 16 segments, Terri and Elaine’s 
opinions prevailed in 63% of them, while Dan made the decision in 19% of the segments.  Two 
87 
 
decisions (12%) were postponed until EAS’s legal counsel could be consulted, and one decision 
(7%) was postponed until a particular archived photo could be located.  The fact that Terri and 
Elaine’s opinions prevailed more than three times as often as Dan’s is one sign among many that 
the EAS review and revise group utilizes a flattened – though not entirely flat – hierarchy during 
its review process.  This flattened hierarchy and its effect on the review process is discussed in a 
later section of this chapter. 
    Table 5: Decisions Made During Content List Review Meeting 
 
 
 
 
Example of Terri and Elaine’s Opinions Prevailing 
 In one segment, the group discussed how to present information about a retirement-
 related issue.  Dan asks about different options, but after Terri and Elaine explain their thoughts 
on the matter, Dan defers to their expertise.  The group’s comments illustrate the organization’s 
concern for EAS’s retired members and the value placed on communicating effectively with the 
membership, while also highlighting the tight production schedule of the newsletter. 
 Dan:  Okay, [moving on to the] retirement [section].  What are we going to do next? 
 Elaine:  We’re going to quote [the EAS insurance specialist] in the article. 
 Dan:  Is there going to be a picture with that one? 
 Elaine: We don’t have one; we don’t have time.  [Terri nods in agreement.] 
 Terri:  We thought we’d just use some art. 
Dan:  We could just do a history.  We could do an historic outline of events.  Or is that 
too much? 
Action  Occurrences Percentage 
Terri and Elaine prevail 10 63% 
Dan prevails 3 19% 
Decision postponed 3 19% 
88 
 
Terri:  If you’re going to do the timeline of the treasurer [in the front page article], you 
are going to be timeline-killing people if you do this one too.  Also, I think it would be 
better to save the timeline for next time when they [the insurance department] have a 
decision. 
Dan:  Okay, you’re the expert. 
Example of Dan’s Opinion Prevailing 
 In another segment, the group discusses options for a photo to accompany the front-page 
article14 about a lawsuit filed by EAS against the state Treasurer’s office.  Terri offers some 
options for the photo; Dan flatly rejects one option but agrees with another.  The careful 
consideration of the photo illustrates EAS’s desire to communicate effectively with its 
membership, particularly about EAS’s political influence. 
 Dan:  What is the photo going to be? 
Terri:  In our heads, it was either going to be us dropping off the lawsuit at the courthouse 
or someone in this office, desk spread out with paper.  And have someone kind of looking 
over them. 
Dan:  I don’t like that one.  The courthouse idea I like okay. 
Description of the Review and Revise Sessions 
For the first round of collaborative reviewing, which occurred the same day the 
department directors reviewed and signed off on the articles, I stationed myself in the central hub 
of work that day, Terri’s office.  Review and revision took place throughout the entire day.  At 
some point during the day, every member of the review and revise group either personally visited 
                                                 
14
  In 2007, Forbes magazine insinuated that a payola scandal in the state Treasurer’s office was negatively affecting 
the state employees’ pension fund.  To ascertain the truth of the accusations, EAS began requesting public records 
from the Treasurer’s office.  After a year of requests resulted in only incomplete records being provided, EAS filed a 
lawsuit to obtain the requested public records. 
89 
 
Terri’s office or Terri spoke to him or her on the telephone.  In addition to face-to-face and 
telephonic communication, a situation which I call “hallway chatter” took place fairly often.  
Here is an example of what I mean by hallway chatter: Melissa, who was sitting in her office 
reviewing an article written by Elaine, called out to Elaine who was sitting in her office, to 
question a particular edit Elaine had made and explained why she disagreed.  Elaine, without 
getting up from her office chair, simply called back that Melissa’s explanation was fine with her, 
giving Melissa permission to change the edit as she saw fit.  I call this exchange hallway chatter 
because instead of using a conduit like the phone or email, the two reviewers used the hallway to 
transmit their ideas.  A more detailed discussion of other oral exchanges is presented in a 
following section. 
For the second round of collaborative reviewing, which took place on the morning of the 
day the content would be moved to the design studio for layout, I stationed myself in Elaine’s 
office to observe several hours of review and revision.  Similar to the activity during the previous 
session, every core member of the review and revise group either visited Elaine’s office or Elaine 
spoke to her on the phone or in hallway chatter.  At one point, Elaine joined Terri in Terri’s 
office to do some heavy revision on an article written by an intern.  Neither Dan nor Tim took 
part in this day’s review. 
The third round of collaborative reviewing took place the day EAS received the first 
proof from the design studio.  The hub for the day’s reviewing was Elaine’s office.  Each core 
member individually reviewed the proof, focusing on her area of expertise. Cassie checked the 
ads; Elaine compared the content list to the proof until she was satisfied that all the content was 
there.  Elaine gathered the copies of the revised and reviewed proofs with margin comments, 
then consolidated all of the individually-made comments onto a clean copy of the proof.  If any 
90 
 
conflicting revision advice came up, Elaine said she either makes the revision decision herself, 
discusses the different revision suggestions with Terri, or discusses the revision suggestion with 
the person who suggested the edit or the person who originally wrote the item.   Terri came to 
Elaine’s office later in the day to jointly review the margin comments and revision suggestions.  
As with previous sessions, this revision session included hallway chatter and several office visits.  
During this round of review and revision, EAS’s legal counsel, Tim, reviewed the proof for any 
potential legal issues.   
The fourth round of collaborative review and revision hit a slight snag early in the day: 
the designer was late in returning the second proof, the one which incorporated the previous 
round of revisions, to Elaine.  When she finally received the proof, Elaine compared the second 
proof to the first one to ensure that all corrections were done properly; after that, she did another 
read-through of the proof.  The other three core members of the review and revise group also 
read through the proof.  Cassie and Elaine discussed on several occasions some factual 
corrections to the proof, both in Elaine’s office and through hallway chatter.  In this round, 
Elaine did much of the local-level editing, including tasks such as consulting the Associated 
Press Stylebook for advice on whether the phrase “P.O. Box” requires periods (it does), looking 
up on the Web the correct name for the Centers for Disease Control, and verifying the proper use 
of the word “principles” with a dictionary. 
The fifth and final round of collaborative review and revision resulted in only minor 
changes to the third proof.  Terri and Elaine normally do this last round together face-to-face, 
without the other two core members. During this study, however, Terri was out of town, so the 
two women reviewed the proof over the telephone. Elaine made all final changes to the proof 
and returned it to the design studio first thing the next morning. 
91 
 
Margin Comments 
For this project, “margin comment” is defined as any mark written on the draft by a 
reviewer.  A “substantive margin comment” is a margin comment which has a rhetorical 
meaning, as contrasted with, say, a spelling correction or the deletion of a word to save space.  
The modes, or categories, used for analysis are based on Kleimann’s (1993) case study of the 
review processes at the GAO.  Analysis of the modes allowed for the detection of patterns, such 
as which reviewer made the most comments, how many comments were direct changes, and how 
often statements and questions were used.  Such information, according to Kleimann, provides 
an indication of the influence of social context, which includes organizational identity, on the 
process of review.  As shown below in Table 6: Modes and Frequency of Margin Comments, 
margin comments were classified into four modes: Statement, Question, Direct Change, and 
Non-Word Symbol. 
Table 6: Modes and Frequency of Margin Comments 
Name of Reviewer Statement Question Symbol DC Total 
Dan   0   0   0   0   0 
Tim   4   0   4   6  14 
Terri  47 13  41 96 197 
Elaine  34 10    7      174 225 
Cassie  17 22  74 25 138 
Melissa    8 16  13 142 179 
Subtotals 110 61 139 443 753 
 
In addition to classifying margin comments by their modes, I also examined the 
substance of the reviewers’ comments in order to establish the presence of connections between 
the review and revise group’s revision suggestions and EAS’s organizational identity and 
communicated values.  As can be seen below in Table 7: Communicated Values Reflected in 
Substantive Margin Comments, substantive margin comments were classified into six categories: 
92 
 
EAS Membership, Providing Accurate Information, Political Influence, Communication with 
Membership, Retirees, and EAS Employees.  Data analysis shows that the category with the 
most occurrences is EAS Membership at 30%, meaning that 30% of all substantive margin 
comments made by the review group were made specifically with the membership in mind.  
However, if one were to consider three other categories – Providing Accurate Information, 
Communicating with Membership, and Retirees – as indicating the review group’s focus on and 
concern with the EAS membership, then about 70% of all substantive margin comments were 
made with the EAS membership in mind.  These large percentages indicate that the review 
group’s revision suggestions are connected to EAS’s communicated values and organizational 
identity, particular in the group’s focus on the EAS membership.  
Table 7: Communicated Values Reflected in Substantive Margin Comments 
Communicated Value Occurrences Percentage 
EAS Membership 23 30% 
Providing Accurate Information 18 23% 
Political Influence 17 22% 
Communication with Membership   7   9% 
Retirees   6   8% 
EAS Employees   5   7% 
 
Where appropriate, I incorporate into the presentation of the examples of the modes some 
specific examples to illustrate how the group’s margin comments are a reflection of EAS’s most 
important organizational identity traits or characteristics.  As a reminder, these characteristics of 
EAS’s organizational identity are EAS’s membership, retired members in particular, and, to a 
lesser extent, political influence and EAS employees.  Naturally, any revisions made to an 
organization’s official documents can be interpreted as being for the benefit of the document’s 
intended audience.  Because the primary intended audience for The Informer is the EAS 
membership, one could assume that all revision suggestions regarding the newsletter would be 
93 
 
made with the EAS membership in mind.  However, in this section I will point out specific 
instances where the comments are directly related to the organization’s valuation of EAS 
membership.  Some examples are provided and briefly discussed in this section; a more detailed 
discussion appears in a later section of this chapter. 
Examples of Statements 
 On a page with three brief articles with photos, Melissa made a statement requesting 
uniformity among the articles.  Her statement said, “all 3 either need bylines or contact info or 
both.”  Each of the three articles was written by an EAS employee and the topic of each article 
was an EAS member (one of whom was also an employee).  Melissa’s call for uniformity 
reflects not only a desire for a professionally-presented document, but her comment also shows 
the organization’s emphasis on providing ways for the membership to communicate with EAS 
employees. 
 During his review of the front-page article, legal counsel Tim added a statement to the 
draft noting some rhetorical issues to be addressed by later revisions.  The original sentence read, 
“…we requested very detailed and specific records or ‘convincing evidence’ that [the state 
treasurer’s] office acted responsibly and reasonably as required by the public records law…”  
Tim circled part of the sentence and wrote, “sounds like a new request – sounds like we received 
specific documents – neither is true, totally.”  Tim also suggested adding either the word 
“reiterated” or “repeated” to indicate the records had been requested more than once but the 
request received no response from the government agency.  Tim’s margin comments illustrate 
not only his desire to present accurate information, but also the organization’s doggedness in 
influencing public policy in the state and its desire to wield its political influence for the benefit 
of all state employees, including the EAS membership. 
94 
 
Examples of Questions 
 On a column written by EAS President Lydia Southern15, Cassie questioned the plural of 
the word BlackBerry, the mobile device.  Southern had pluralized it “Blackberries,” but Cassie 
wrote on her draft, “Blackberry’s?”  (After consulting the BlackBerry website, Elaine discovered 
the preferred plural is BlackBerrys.) 
 On an article of “external copy” written by an EAS member, Terri asked for help from 
the other reviewers clarifying an important point. The article was about the annual enrollment for 
the state’s health plan.  Terri wrote, “Article confuses me – must people ‘switch’ or will they be 
automatically switched to 80/20 or another plan if they do nothing?”  Terri’s question regarding 
the clarity of the article’s information illustrates EAS’s responsiveness to the needs of its 
membership, as well as the organization’s attention to the benefits and welfare of state 
employees.  In this case, Terri wanted to ensure that the audience understood exactly what they 
must do in order to benefit from the state’s health plan.  
Examples of Direct Changes 
 In an article she had written about an EAS member’s bid for a General Assembly seat, 
Terri inserted additional material to provide more information about the incumbent.  The original 
sentence read, in part: “The [state] Center for Public Policy Research ranked Rep. [Smith] 116 
out of 120 [in terms of effectiveness].”  Terri’s direct change made the sentence read this way: 
“…ranked Rep. [Smith] 116 out of 120 in 2005 and 119 out of 120 in 2003.”  Terri’s margin 
comment shows that the incumbent representative was not an effective leader for the previous 
several years.  In the context of the article, her comment illustrates EAS’s attempt to wield 
                                                 
15
  Pseudonym 
95 
 
political influence, in part by getting state employee-friendly political candidates – in this case 
Rep. Smith’s opponent – elected to the General Assembly. 
 On the column by the EAS President, Melissa made a direct change to the punctuation of 
a sentence.  The original sentence read: “The association is at a crossroads, we just have to make 
our minds up what we really want for our employees we represent…”  Melissa corrected the 
comma splice to make the new passage read: “The association is at a crossroads.  We just have to 
make our minds up…” 
Examples of Non-Word Symbols 
 Cassie’s area of focus during revision sessions is fact-checking.  On an article 
announcing the candidacy of an EAS member/employee, Cassie fact-checked several items: a 
state representative’s name and title, his political affiliation and the name of the county he 
represented, and the date of his party’s primary.  Over each of these items, Cassie placed a 
checkmark to indicate these facts were verified.  In addition to illustrating the review and revise 
group’s scrupulous attention to factual accuracy, Cassie’s margin comment shows EAS’s 
attention to electing state employee-friendly representatives, in part by providing accurate 
election-related information to the EAS membership. 
 On one of the designed proofs, Elaine noticed a discrepancy in the kerning of the front 
page article.  She drew an upward arrow ( ? ) on the proof to indicate the spacing needed to be 
pushed up a bit. 
Oral Exchanges in Review and Revise Sessions 
For this dissertation, the term “oral exchanges” includes only spoken discourse.  While 
Rachel Spilka (1990) defines oral discourse to include “writing resembling speech, such as 
comments written in margins” (p. 45), the project at hand distinguishes between what I call 
96 
 
margin comments and those comments made face-to-face or on the telephone between two or 
more members of the review and revise group.  These oral exchanges included telephone 
conversations, hallway chatter, a meeting, group review and revise sessions, and what I call “the 
office pop-in,” which is similar to hallway chatter, but occurs when one person is in her office 
and a person in the hallway simply “pops” her or his head into the office to make a quick 
statement or ask a question.  To make analysis easier, digital audio recordings were transcribed, 
supplemented by handwritten field notes, to produce a written document.  Upon reviewing the 
information, I found that Kleimann’s (1993) suggestions regarding characteristics of a 
collaborative process could be found, to varying degrees, in the oral exchanges of the review and 
revise group.  These characteristics helped form the basis of the categories of analysis, as shown 
below in Table 8: Frequency of Oral Exchanges Categories in Review and Revise Sessions.  The 
categories are 
• Advice-seeking, 
• Negotiation / Discussion, 
• Agreement / No Discussion, and 
• Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience. 
“Advice-seeking” occurred when advice was sought by a member of the review and 
revise group; often the advice was sought on the basis of a member’s specialized expertise, like 
legal training or knowledge of language mechanics.  Sometimes the asker simply needed another 
set of eyes (“Does this look right?”  “Should I use this word or that one?”).  Advice was sought 
from within the review and revise group, from other EAS employees, and from texts like a 
dictionary, a style guide, or a website. 
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“Negotiation / Discussion” occurred during discussions among members of the review 
and revise group.  Different options for solving a problem were expressed by one or more 
members, followed by a discussion regarding the pros and cons of the option(s).  The members 
taking part in the discussion negotiated until a solution or a best option was chosen.  
“Agreement / No Discussion” occurred when the group members agreed to a particular 
change to the text without discussion or negotiation, or an option was chosen with no discussion 
of different options. 
“Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience” occurred when the group members 
used their knowledge of EAS or their experience within the organization to solve a problem.  At 
other times, a newer member asked to be taught something about how the organization works, 
allowing her to “expand [her] knowledge of the organization” (Kleimann 65). 
Table 8: Frequency of Oral Exchanges Categories in Review and Revise Sessions 
Category Occurrences Percentage 
Advice-seeking 29 39% 
Negotiation / Discussion 22 29% 
No Discussion / Agreement 15 20% 
Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience  9 12% 
 
Examples of Oral Exchanges 
 Following are specific examples of how the four categories of oral exchanges occurred 
during face-to-face collaborative review and revise sessions.  A brief introductory paragraph will 
provide some context for each of the exchanges, including information about the session, the 
participants, and which category is exemplified.  I also point out, where appropriate, how the 
examples of oral exchanges reflect the four important characteristics of EAS’s organizational 
identity. 
  
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Example 1: Advice-seeking 
This example of advice-seeking took place during the third review and revise session. 
After written margin comments were made to the articles and to the designed proofs, Terri and 
Elaine met in Elaine’s office to consolidate the margin comments made individually by the 
review and revise core group members.  Elaine made changes to an electronic version of the 
document on her computer, while Terri sifted through the four or five versions of the hard copies 
containing the handwritten margin comments.  At various times during the session, the other 
members of the review and revise group stopped by or telephoned Elaine’s office, usually to ask 
a question or provide an answer to a question Terri or Elaine had asked earlier.  In this segment, 
Elaine and Terri discussed a portion of text, but found they could not make a decision without 
seeking Tim’s advice related to his legal expertise: 
 Elaine: You told me Tim need to add something about court? 
 Terri: Yes, he mentioned that. 
 Elaine: I’ll touch base with him about that. 
 Terri: I think [this phrase is] confusing. What do you think? 
 Elaine: He didn’t mention it to me.  He just told me [voices overlap]. 
Terri: I mean, we talk about this whole lawsuit, and then we say, “and we filed a friend of 
the court.” 
 Elaine: Does that mean…I don’t know what that means. 
Terri: It’s just like we’re saying we support this effort, which we state without stating.  
Then we filed a friend of the court.  I don’t know. 
Later, Tim came to Elaine’s office to offer his advice regarding the correct legal wording of the 
phrase.  The phrase was changed to reflect Tim’s expert opinion. 
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Example 2: Negotiation/Discussion 
This example of Negotiation/Discussion took place during the fourth review and revise 
session held in Elaine’s office.  Terri and Elaine negotiated the wording of an article which was 
reprinted from another source.  Both women noticed an error in the text, but they were reluctant 
to change the text from a previously-published article.  Elaine offered an option for changing the 
text; Terri countered with a reason for sticking with the original.  Elaine backed off, presumably 
in acknowledgment of Terri’s higher position in the hierarchy, but Terri reconsidered Elaine’s 
suggestion and accepted it.  This segment illustrates the centrality of the EAS membership in two 
ways: Firstly, the large number of members is important to the reviewers and they want that 
number to be accurately stated; secondly, out of respect for the article’s author, an EAS member, 
the reviewers are reluctant to change his article without an excellent reason for doing so. 
Elaine: Okay, good.  Right here where he says 54,000 members.  I didn’t know if we 
could put in brackets, “more than”?  Or is that actually all right?  We have more than 
54,000 members.  
Terri: It’s 55,000 members. 
 Elaine: Or we could change it to 55, but this is directly from his. 
 Terri:  If he’s saying 54, and this is his flyer he sent out… 
 Elaine: Okay, that’s fine. 
 Terri: If you want to put in brackets, “more than.” 
 Elaine: That would be my suggestion. 
 Terri: Okay. 
  
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Example 3: Agreement/No Discussion 
This example of Agreement/No Discussion occurred during the fourth review and revise 
session held in Elaine’s office. Terri and Elaine discussed where to place an announcement for a 
district-sponsored golf tournament / fundraiser.  The Informer contains similar announcements in 
every edition, so the women were accustomed to the routine of placing them in the most 
appropriate section.  Their oral exchange was brief, supplemented with points and nods, and the 
two arrived quickly at an agreement about where to place the announcement.  The reviewers 
illustrate their concern for retired members by placing the announcement of the golf tournament 
– an activity popular with retirees – in the retirement section of the paper. 
 Terri: I mean, maybe the golf… 
 Elaine: [could go] Here on the retirement page. 
 Terri: Only because that works. 
 Elaine: Perfect. 
 Terri:  Yeah. 
Example 4: Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience 
 This example of Sharing Organizational Knowledge or Experience occurred during the 
third review and revise session, which took place in Elaine’s office.  Cassie popped in to Elaine’s 
office with a question about a woman who wrote a special article for The Informer.  EAS’s 
policy is that anyone who writes an article for the newsletter must be a member of EAS.  Cassie 
could not locate the woman’s name in the member database.  Using their organizational 
knowledge of EAS, Elaine and Terri were able to offer some hints on finding the writer’s name 
in the database.  This segment illustrates the centrality of the EAS membership, and the 
importance of communication with the membership, to the review and revise group.  Because 
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membership is valued, the reviewers only want employees or members to write articles for its 
member-directed publication. 
 Cassie: [when the writer spoke to you, Terri,] Did she talk to you as a member? 
Terri: She, when I told Leslie Foster16 that we didn’t accept things from people who are 
not members, she was upset about that.  And then photocopied her membership card and 
gave it to [an EAS employee]. 
 Cassie: She did? 
 Elaine: Yes.  Maybe she had a different last name. 
Cassie: I wondered if she had a different last name.  There’s no Foster in the database. 
 Terri: Is that why I didn’t see it. 
 Cassie: Maybe she’s been married and she never changed her name. 
Elaine: If you looked it up by number maybe it would be there.  Maybe it was Foster-
 something. 
Terri: Yeah because once I did that, I was like, oh no [I can’t find it].  It’s in District 40, I 
do remember that.   
After her discussion with Elaine and Terri, Cassie went back to her office to search the member 
database again.  Owing to Elaine and Terri’s knowledge of the EAS member database and how 
to manipulate it to get information, Cassie was able to find Leslie Foster’s name.  The writer was 
confirmed to be an EAS member, and was therefore eligible to have her article published in The 
Informer. 
 
  
                                                 
16
  Pseudonym 
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What Are the Characteristics of the Review and Revise Group’s Culture? 
 Using Kleimann’s framework (1993), a set of characteristics which help define the 
culture of the review and revise group can be seen.  As previously mentioned, Kleimann’s 
framework has been adapted slightly to work with the EAS review and revise group.  As shown 
below in Table 9: Collaborative vs. Hierarchical Cultures, three features characterize what 
Kleimann calls a collaborative culture: the structure of the review process, the nature and 
frequency of meetings, and the modes and frequency of margin comments.  The following 
sections examine in some detail each of the characteristic features exhibited by the EAS review 
and revise group. 
Table 9: Collaborative vs. Hierarchical Cultures (Based on Kleimann’s framework) 
Process Feature Collaborative Culture Hierarchical Culture 
Structure of Review 
Process 
• Concurrent review 
• Flattened hierarchy 
• Written guidance available 
to all group members 
• Stipulated due dates 
• Sequential review 
• Vertical hierarchy 
• Reliance on unwritten 
guidance 
• Due dates can be 
stipulated or not 
Nature and Frequency 
of Meetings 
• Formal meetings between 
editors / reviewers are 
required 
• Formal meetings between 
editors / reviewers are not 
mandatory 
Modes and Frequency 
of Commenting 
• Made fewer margin 
comments 
• Nearly half (48%) of EAS 
margin comments were 
statements and questions 
• Made nearly twice the 
number of margin 
comments 
• About 75% of GAO 
Division 2 comments were 
direct changes; about 20% 
statements and questions 
 
Structure of the Review Process 
 The EAS review and revise group utilized a concurrent review structure, as contrasted 
with a serial or sequential review structure.  In a sequential structure, one reviewer sees the draft 
at a time.  The reviewer makes changes and written margin comments on the draft, then sends 
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the draft to the next reviewer, who incorporates the comments as s/he sees fit, makes his or her 
own changes or comments, then sends the draft to the next reviewer.  While a sequential 
structure does not necessarily set up an ineffective process, it does tend to quash negotiation; in 
fact, editors or reviewers may never know whether their changes were accepted or rejected or 
why.  A collaborative culture will more often than not utilize concurrent review (Kleimann, 
1993, p. 64).  In a concurrent structure, a draft is sent to all reviewers at once.  Each person 
makes changes to and adds comments on their draft, then the comments are reconciled to 
produce a revised draft, which may or may not then be returned to the reviewers for more 
comments and changes.  All four of the EAS review and revise group core members received the 
first draft of text at one time, and each person made changes and comments.  Although each 
person individually revised text, the group members also spent a great deal of time talking to 
each other, engaging in what Jack Selzer (1983) calls “communal brainstorming” (p. 180).  After 
individual revisions were done, either all four core group members or Terri and Elaine would 
consolidate and/or reconcile the margin comments.  Each round of revision followed a similar 
pattern: individual revision supplemented with oral exchanges or communal brainstorming, 
followed by a consolidation of comments. (These oral exchanges will be discussed in the next 
section.)  This type of concurrent structure, according to Kleimann (1993), “flattens the 
hierarchy, because it suggests that reviewers have different but equally important information” 
(p. 64).  This flattened hierarchy within the review and revise group seems to echo the larger 
organizational value of communicating with and providing information to the EAS membership, 
in that a flattened hierarchy emphasizes the importance of multiple perspectives and the 
distribution of information. 
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 Two other features of a collaborative culture evident in the EAS review and revise 
group’s review process which help flatten the hierarchy are widely-available written guidance 
and stipulated deadlines.  The EAS review and revise group uses the AP Stylebook as its 
standard; any stylistic questions can be answered by referring to it.  The group also has a widely-
 available policies and procedures guide overviewing their review process.  These types of written 
guidance can settle many editorial disputes before they even begin, as when Melissa changed 
commas in a text.  When asked by Terri to explain why she changed the commas, Melissa 
referred to the AP Stylebook.  The availability of written guidance helps to equally distribute 
information, and consequently power, amongst the review and revise group members, 
encouraging a flattened hierarchy.  In addition, the equal distribution of information reflects the 
larger organizational value of communicating with and providing information for its 
membership. 
Stipulated deadlines also encourage a flattened hierarchy, allowing group members to 
know exactly when they are expected to have their review comments ready.  For the EAS review 
and revise group in particular, deadlines are very important, as evidenced by the tight production 
schedule and publication cycle of The Informer.  The newsletter is published in sync with the 
state’s General Assembly schedule – highlighting EAS’s desire to influence the politics of the 
state – and content is based, in large part, on that schedule.  For instance, before an election The 
Informer will contain articles endorsing candidates, and before a major legislative vote is 
scheduled the newsletter will contain information about the issue at hand and about how EAS 
members can lobby the Assembly.  Additionally, the review and revise group members 
acknowledge that the stipulated deadlines – stipulated up to a year in advance, in fact – help the 
105 
 
group maintain its focus and cohesion.  As Terri noted, “Everyone knows everyone else’s 
deadlines, everyone knows they need the others [reviewers], so no one gets let down.”   
Oral Exchanges to Consolidate and/or Reconcile Comments 
Orality played an important role in the group’s review and revise sessions.  As noted 
above, the entire review and revise process hinges on the group members’ ability to discuss 
revision options or choices, negotiate through any differences in opinion, and seek advice from 
any reliable source (including experts or texts).  Throughout the first three review and revise 
sessions, all the core group members – Terri, Elaine, Cassie, and Melissa – spoke to each other 
quite often; the other two members, Dan and Tim, were consulted as necessary.  The fourth 
session saw Terri and Elaine do much of the revision, with some input from Cassie and Melissa.  
For the final review and revise session, Elaine took the lead, but consulted with Terri as she 
“neatened up” (Elaine’s phrase) the final proof.  Every session, whether all four core group 
members participated or only Elaine and Terri participated, relied heavily on oral exchanges 
between the group members. 
These scheduled face-to-face sessions are an important characteristic of the EAS review 
and revise group’s process.  According to Kleimann (1993), these types of meetings “create 
ownership of the [document….and] encourage collaboration” (p. 66).  In the five review and 
revise sessions and meetings, the participants used Advice-seeking (39%) and Negotiation / 
Discussion (29%) to solve the largest majority of revision problems.  They sometimes simply 
agreed with each other (20%) or had similar ideas about how to solve problems, and they 
occasionally used or shared their organizational knowledge (12%) to solve problems.  The 
emphasis on advice-seeking and negotiation/discussion indicates that group members respect 
each other’s opinions and expertise, a crucial ingredient in a collaborative writing group’s 
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culture.  This respect for a variety of perspectives and expertise allows the group to more 
effectively contribute to The Informer; consequently, the group is better able to communicate 
with the EAS membership in more effective ways. 
Modes and Frequencies of Margin Comments 
A large number of statements and questions often indicates a level of respect between 
group members regardless of his or her position in the hierarchy.  It can also indicate that 
individual expertise and knowledge of the group members are valued.  Direct changes, “in some 
cases…set up a hierarchical relationship of ‘I know and you don’t’…[amongst] the team.  In 
other instances, the direct changes are part of the collaborative effort…to create a best product.  
The [GAO] division’s culture seems to determine which interpretation dominates” (Kleimann, 
1993, p. 66). 
In the core group, the two higher-ranking members of the team wrote more statements 
and questions compared to the two lower-ranking members: Terri wrote 60 margin comments 
which were either statements or questions; Elaine wrote 44 which were statements or questions.  
The lower-ranking members wrote statements and questions, too, although to a lesser degree 
than the higher-ranking members: Cassie wrote 39 margin comments as statements or questions, 
and Melissa wrote 24 as statements or questions.  The total percentage of statements and 
questions was 22.7% of all the written comments.   
Direct changes (DC), on the other hand, leave little to no room for negotiation or 
discussion.  In this case, however, most of the direct changes are in spelling or punctuation, or 
deletions and word changes to decrease space; rather than purposefully shutting out discussion, 
many of these DCs may simply be a matter of practicality.  As noted by Kleimann (1993), the 
culture of the review and revise group could help determine which interpretation of the number 
107 
 
of DCs is most likely.  Some examples of these direct changes include the deletion of a 
descriptor phrase to decrease space (“House Bill 779, an agency bill drafted by Retirement 
Systems staff, was introduced by…”); a spelling correction (“principles” rather than 
“principals”); and a correction in punctuation (“Annual cost of [state] Medicaid enrollees; 
obesity: $864 per person.” A note indicated the semicolon should be changed to an apostrophe).  
The EAS review and revise group actually displayed a proportion of statements and questions to 
direct changes similar to the GAO division which Kleimann identified as hierarchical.  However, 
because many of the EAS group’s direct changes were related to practical, easily-solved matters 
(like saving space or changing punctuation to align with the AP Stylebook), and because, as 
Kleimann notes, the culture of the workgroup helps “determine which interpretation dominates” 
(p. 66), one could – and, in fact, I do – interpret the large number of DCs as an indication of a 
“collaborative effort…to create a best product” (p. 66). 
As shown in Table 6 on page 91, the margin comments of the reviewed documents (text-
 only and proofs) contain more than twice as many direct changes as statements and questions.  
The seemingly high percentage of direct changes (58.8%) could be interpreted that EAS relies 
heavily on a hierarchical structure; however, as noted, an organization’s culture influences how 
the percent of direct changes is interpreted.  As previously discussed, the observations of the 
review and revise sessions indicate that a great level of respect exists between all hierarchical 
levels of the group.  The margin comments written by individual group members seem to be 
understood to be a starting point for discussion, not an ending.  These margin comments, 
particularly those expressed in statements or questions, get ironed out and negotiated through 
during the oral exchanges, whether they are in meetings, in telephone calls, or in hallway chatter. 
108 
 
The highest-ranking member of the hierarchy, the executive director Dan, did not make 
any margin comments at all.  His role in the review and revise process was limited to approving 
the content list, occasionally being consulted by other members of the group, and providing final 
approval of the publication.  The second highest-ranking member, the legal counsel Tim, only 
contributed 14 comments, mostly related to his area of expertise.  The next two members in the 
hierarchy, the editor-in-chief and the managing editor, each contributed roughly the same 
number of comments as each other: Terri (#3 on the hierarchy) made 197 comments, while 
Elaine (#4) made 225 comments.  Of those comments, Elaine’s comments were 77% direct 
changes, while Terri’s margin comments were 49% direct changes.  The two lower-ranking 
members of the hierarchy, the associate editor and the advertising manager, differed hugely in 
their proportions of direct changes: Cassie’s margin comments were 18% direct changes, while 
Melissa’s were 79% direct changes.   
 The proportions of direct changes could be related to each member’s area of expertise.  
Most of Melissa’s direct changes can be attributed to her area of expertise, mechanics.  In order 
to make these changes, she simply corrected mechanical errors or typos by referring to EAS’s 
style guide, the AP Stylebook.  For example, when Terri questioned Melissa’s deletion of some 
commas, Melissa simply referred to the AP Stylebook.  Cassie, whose focus is on fact checking, 
made most of her direct changes to correct factual errors.  For example, while revising the text of 
an article, Cassie changed a member’s title from “Mrs.” to “Dr.” to reflect the woman’s correct 
title; another of Cassie’s DCs corrected an EAS district number.  Terri often made direct changes 
related to punctuation or grammar, but her focus is on rhetorical content.  For instance, in one 
direct change to an article about a rival union, Terri inserted a descriptive clause with additional 
information to help the audience understand what the union meant to EAS: “…a union 
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competing against [EAS] to represent state employees….”  Elaine also made many DCs 
regarding punctuation and content, but her main focus during revisions is grammar.  For 
example, she directly changed the tenses in part of an article to maintain consistency.  The 
original sentence read, in part, “…they believe our request is fulfilled…;” Elaine’s DC changed 
the sentence to read, “…they believed our request was fulfilled.” 
The members of the EAS review and revise group seem to focus on their collective and 
individual ownerships of the document they are creating.  There is a sense of collaboration in 
which the members engage in substantive interaction, they take responsibility for the document, 
and they negotiate, coordinate, and resolve questions (Allen et al., 1987; Bosley, 1989; Galegher 
& Kraut, 1994).  In other words, the human interactions which make up the writing process – the 
“collaboration” – are as important as the written text(s) the group produces.  With one exception, 
the EAS review and revise group exhibits all the characteristics Kleimann (1993) assigns to a 
writing group with a collaborative culture.  The EAS group utilizes concurrent review, flattens its 
hierarchy, makes written guidance available to all group members, stipulates its due dates well in 
advance, and requires formal meetings between reviewers.  The only characteristic that is 
different is that the EAS review and revise group uses roughly the same proportion of direct 
changes to statements and questions in its margin comments as a group that exhibits a 
hierarchical culture.  One explanation for this anomaly is that Kleimann’s study focused on the 
review process after copyediting had already been completed.  Consequently, her study 
participants may have been more concerned with global-level or rhetorical issues, rather than on 
punctuation or spelling requiring direct changes.   
  
110 
 
Substance of Margin Comments 
Although I am deviating slightly from Kleimann’s (1993) framework, an examination of 
the substantive margin comments is useful.  Kleimann did not examine in detail the content of 
the margin comments written by the GAO writing groups, and so did not include specific content 
changes in her characteristics of a collaborative writing group culture.  However, for the EAS 
review and revise group, the content of their comments reveals not only a collaborative culture, 
but also a strong identification with EAS’s communicated values and, consequently, EAS’s 
organizational identity.  This identification will be examined at length in the next chapter. 
The substance of the review and revise group’s margin comments indicates that each of 
these values is considered during the review processes for The Informer.  For example, the 
largest proportion (30%) of substantive changes made to the text of the newsletter showed a 
concern for the EAS membership, while 23% of substantive changes were made to improve the 
delivery of accurate information to the EAS membership and 22% were made to enhance or 
showcase EAS’s influence over state politics.  These values-related substantive changes indicate 
a sort of “buy-in” amongst the review and revise group members in regard to EAS’s 
organizational identity.  As noted, a further exploration of the identification of the group 
members to EAS as an organization will be provided in the next chapter. 
Chapter Conclusion 
As with any organization, EAS communicates its values through its official documents, 
like its newsletter, mission statements, and bylaws.  An analysis of these documents showed that 
some of the most important communicated values of EAS are the centrality of its membership, 
the providing of information to and communication with its membership, political influence on 
behalf of its membership, the centrality of retired state employees and EAS members, and the 
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importance of EAS employees.  In this chapter, I explored the processes undertaken by the EAS 
review and revise group in the production of the EAS newsletter, The Informer, and discussed 
the results of my inquiries into the culture of the workgroup.  Ultimately, I characterized the 
culture of the review and revise group as a collaborative one.  As previously noted, the next 
chapter focuses on making visible any significant connections between EAS’s organizational 
identity and the processes of the review and revise group.  Additionally, Chapter 6 offers a 
discussion of some disjunctions or disconnections between the organization’s identity and the 
processes of the workgroup. 
 
CHAPTER 6: ANALYSIS 
Introduction 
 My research into EAS’s organizational identity and collaborative writing processes 
proved a fertile soil rich with questions.  As with most interesting research, the questions raised 
outnumber answers provided.  In this dissertation, I have examined the organizational identity of 
the Employees Association of the State and explored the culture and processes of the EAS 
review and revise group.  In this chapter, I will make visible the connections between these two 
elements – organizational identity and the review and revision processes within the organization 
– in order to discover the implications of those connections.  I will also make visible any 
disconnections between EAS’s identity and its writing processes.  Before I go any further, let me 
directly ask the obvious questions: Why should these connections be examined?  In what ways 
does an organization benefit if its actions (for instance, as in this case, review processes) are 
reflective of the organization’s identity?  Two answers became evident during my study.  Firstly, 
an alignment of the review and revise group’s processes (as a representation of organizational 
actions) and EAS’s organizational identity means a stronger, more credible, and ultimately more 
effective ethos for The Informer and, consequently, for the organization.  Secondly, the 
organization benefits from an alignment in terms of collaboration, cooperation, and commitment 
to the organization on the part of its employees.  If employees identify with the organization, if 
they buy in to the organization’s ethos and its values, they are more likely to be productive 
organizational members. 
The Voices of EAS 
Although somewhat controversial (see Peter Elbow’s 2007 article in College English), I 
argue for the existence of an organizational voice which expresses the organization’s character, 
its organizational ethos, as part of both its image and its identity.  For workplace writing studies, 
112 
 
the idea of organizational image relies on the assumption that organizations can control, at least 
to some extent, what external constituencies perceive about the organization.  One way 
organizations can control their image is through a consistency of messaging (Argenti, 2009).  
That is to say, the organization must “speak” with a consistent voice in order to craft its image.  
One of the most effective ways for an organization to speak is by communicating its 
organizational values via its official documents, like its newsletter.  The processes of EAS’s 
review and revise group help the organization to speak consistently with its own voice, because 
the goal of any review process is to produce a document that “messages” with an institutional 
voice.  Kleimann (1993) writes that, “In any organization, the review process is designed to 
create an institutional product.  As such, it deals not only with context but also with 
organizational values” (p. 67).  The voice of the institutional document needs to convey the ethos 
of the organization. 
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, my study raised many interesting 
questions.  In this section, I will ask and answer several of the most salient.   
• What do the communicated values “say” about EAS’s organizational identity?   
• What does the employees’ perceived organizational identity “say” about EAS’s 
organizational identity?      
• What does the review and revise process “say” about EAS’s organizational 
identity?   
EAS’s Communicated Values 
What do its communicated values “say” about EAS’s organizational identity?  Aust 
(2004) writes that “communicated values are intrinsic to an organization’s identity” (p. 522).  
Communicated values, like those expressed in EAS’s mission statement or shown by the topics 
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of its newsletter or expressed in its bylaws, are supposed to reflect essential or central – that is, 
intrinsic – characteristics of the organization.  These communicated values are usually 
constructed by organizational leaders, and Aust notes that “[i]t’s important for those responsible 
for constructing and transmitting external messages, that they form a collective voice by which 
the organization is known” (p. 530).  These externally-directed messages can project as a 
“harmonious chorus” if the messages are consistent or congruent, or the messages can project as 
a “multiple-headed monster” (p. 530).  In the case of EAS, the examined messages which 
communicate organizational values do seem congruent and consistent.   
In this study, I examined three official documents from EAS: its mission statement, the 
purpose article in its Bylaws, and its newsletter.  Each of these official documents communicates 
in its own way what EAS values.  EAS’s mission statement is a succinct encapsulation of its 
purpose and values: “[EAS] is committed to protecting and enhancing the rights and benefits of 
current, retired and future state employees.”  The mission statement communicates that EAS 
values state employees.  “Article II: Purpose” in EAS’s bylaws states that EAS’s purpose is to 
work for all state employees (not only its membership), including promoting their best interests 
and promoting professionalism.  Article II also requires EAS to communicate with state 
employees and EAS membership, including providing information, providing a forum for 
discussion, and facilitating communication.  Article II communicates that EAS values state 
employees, and especially values communication with and among state employees and EAS 
membership.  My analysis of the types of articles published in The Informer indicated that 
member participation is a central value of the organization.  Other values communicated through 
the newsletter included providing transparency to the EAS membership about how the 
organization is run, and responding to the needs of its membership.  The commonality between 
114 
 
these three official documents is their emphasis on the value of state employees and the EAS 
membership.   
Organizational Members’ (EAS Employees’) Perceived Organizational Identity 
What does the employees’ perceived organizational identity “say” about EAS’s 
organizational identity?  The central aspect of EAS’s organizational identity from the employees’ 
perception is that the membership is the most important thing.  The EAS membership is also 
considered one of its enduring characteristics.  The distinctive characteristic mentioned most 
often is the membership, especially the large number of members.  In particular, EAS employees 
believe that the organization does an excellent job at promoting the best interests and welfare of 
both current and retired state employees; in fact, this was the only area in which 100% of survey 
respondents indicated agreement, showing a very strong perception that EAS carries out its 
stated mission. While the perceived organizational identity of EAS does focus on the EAS 
membership, which is consistent with EAS’s communicated values, some inconsistencies do 
exist. 
Although the general perception of EAS employees regarding EAS’s organizational 
identity is that the EAS membership is the central, enduring, and distinctive characteristic of the 
organization, results were mixed in regard to how well EAS communicates with its membership.  
These mixed results seem to indicate a disjunction between what EAS says it values – 
communication with and among members – and how some EAS employees perceive that value is 
actually manifested.  Another area of mixed results was in the employee perception of EAS’s 
responsiveness to the needs of its membership and its employees.  EAS employees also think that 
EAS membership is consistently encouraged to participate in the organization, but another 
disjunction can be detected regarding how consistently the EAS staff are made to feel like 
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owners of EAS.  Other mixed results indicate a disjunction between EAS’s desire to influence 
public policy and its success at actually being influential.  Despite these slight disjunctions, EAS 
employees generally seem to believe that it is the EAS membership which is the central, 
enduring, and distinctive characteristic of the organization.  Together, these perceptions say that 
overall EAS employees buy in to the communicated values of EAS, especially when it comes to 
valuing the membership of EAS. 
Culture and Processes of EAS’s Review and Revise Group 
What does the review and revise process “say” about EAS’s organizational identity?  Are 
the perceived organizational identity and the communicated values manifested in the review and 
revise process, or are some other values manifested in the process?  The review and revise group 
appears to exhibit the features of a collaborative culture.  By utilizing a concurrent review 
structure, the group says that “reviewers have different but equally important information” 
(Kleimann, 1993, p. 64).  The concurrent review structure helps to flatten the hierarchy within 
the group.  By providing widely-available written guidance (such as a style guide) and stipulated 
deadlines, the group acknowledges that non-subjective standards are important, so that all group 
members share in the same knowledge of what is expected.  Regularly scheduled face-to-face 
meetings between group members say that the group wants to “create ownership of the 
[document…and] encourage collaboration” (Kleimann, 1993, p. 66).  The only area of 
inconsistency was in the number of direct changes made by the reviewers, which indicates a 
more hierarchical culture than a collaborative one; however, I believe this can be explained by 
my conflation of the revision process – which included proofreading – and the review process.   
Overall, the processes of the review and revise group, with its collaborative rather than 
hierarchical culture, indicate that the group values each other’s expertise and skill.  As the 
116 
 
creators of one of EAS’s official documents, the group seems to manifest the organizational 
value of the central importance of the EAS membership, especially when it comes to 
communicating with them.  As noted in the previous chapter, the review and revise group make 
substantive margin comments which appear to be the manifestation of EAS’s organizational 
values.  For example, ensuring that contact information for EAS leadership and Informer article 
writers is provided to readers is evidence that the review and revise group values communication 
between the membership and the organization.  The group’s scrupulous attention to factual 
accuracy, particularly when it comes to matters such as district numbers and members’ correct 
names, shows the group is concerned with keeping the newsletter’s readers well-informed and 
with showing appreciation and respect for EAS members.  Some substantial margin comments – 
for example, verifying the date of a party’s primary or asking the difference between a bill and 
an act – focus on clarifying information with the goal of encouraging readers to participate in 
state elections and gaining political knowledge.  One of the reasons the writing group seems to 
function well is that they actually do identify with the organization and its communicated values.  
Because they buy into EAS’s communicated values, the group members decide to cooperate and 
to work well together; they decide to have a collaborative culture.  The substance of the group 
members’ margin comments is one strong indicator that the members buy in to EAS’s 
communicated values.  As a result of this buy-in, the review and revise group effectively 
contributes to the success of EAS and, as Kleimann might suggest, to the organizational identity 
of EAS. 
Ethos and Credibility 
An organization’s ethos is an important part of its organizational identity.  Roger Cherry 
(1988) characterizes ethos as providing a “[perspective] on self-representation in written 
117 
 
discourse” (p. 253).  In this dissertation, the “self” is an organizational one.  A rhetor, in this case 
EAS, constructs an ethos to represent him/her/itself to an audience.  Cherry writes, “Ethos refers 
to the need for rhetors to portray themselves in their speeches as having a good moral character, 
‘practical wisdom,’ and a concern for the audience in order to achieve credibility and thereby 
secure persuasion” (p. 253, italics in original).  In order to persuade its audiences, both internal 
and external, an organization needs credibility.  
Credibility is particularly important for EAS, because it relies heavily on its powers of 
persuasion.  For instance, if its membership does not buy in to EAS’s ethos, then volunteers 
might not be willing to donate time or money or passionate leadership.  If state legislators do not 
buy in to EAS’s ethos, then the legislators may not feel the need to respond to EAS’s attempts to 
secure better pay or benefits or working conditions for state employees.  If the media do not buy 
in to EAS’s ethos, then the organization may be portrayed negatively in the press, which could 
be particularly damaging in a state unfriendly to labor unions.  When an organization’s power to 
persuade is what keeps it afloat, credibility can be like a form of currency.  For a non-profit 
organization which relies on its identity as a type of social capital, loss of credibility can be 
especially harmful.  EAS’s success is not based on financial return; rather, a measurement of 
success for the organization is its ability to persuade various actors (legislators, media, its own 
membership) to act effectively on behalf of state employees.  EAS’s ability to persuade is 
inextricably tied to these actors’ perceptions of EAS’s credibility; the stronger the organization’s 
credibility, the stronger its persuasive power. 
Organizational ethos, therefore, is a valuable asset to an organization.  Michael Halloran 
(1982) points out that ethos “says in effect, Believe me because I am the sort of person whose 
word you can believe” (p. 60).  For any organization, its very life depends on whether its 
118 
 
audience perceives the organization as the sort whose word the audience can believe.  I argue 
that it is even more important for an organization like EAS – a non-profit labor association – that 
its audience and other actors (i.e., media, legislators) believe that EAS is trustworthy and 
believable, because it is EAS’s reputation that allows it to continue to work for the benefit and 
welfare of its members and other state employees.  EAS “sells” its reputation as an effective 
representative or voice of state workers; if that reputation is tarnished (that is, if its ethos is 
diminished) then EAS’s “product” is tarnished.  Halloran goes on to say that a speaker must 
“create in his audience a strong and favorable impression of his own character.  He does this in 
part by bringing to the rhetorical occasion a good reputation…” (p. 60, italics mine).  In other 
words, although the immediate communication at hand is important, in order to have a strong 
ethos a speaker – in this case, EAS – must bring a good reputation to the rhetorical occasion.  A 
speaker who brings a tarnished reputation cannot persuade audiences as well as it could with a 
sterling reputation. 
Cooperative Behaviors 
The communicated values of an organization are an important aspect of creating a good 
organizational reputation.  As noted, a good reputation is crucial for persuading external 
audiences (EAS membership, state legislators, media) and for persuading internal audiences like 
organizational members (EAS employees).  In addition to organizational image – the 
“impression held by a particular [external] group towards a corporation [or organization]” 
(Alvesson, 1990, p. 376) – and organizational identity, there exists a third way of looking at an 
organization: organizational identification (Whetten and Godfrey, 1998).  Identification with an 
organization or a group happens when an individual sees traits in the group that s/he wants to 
claim for her/himself.  For instance, if an employee sees that EAS is a family-oriented place to 
119 
 
work, and the employee himself values family, the employee may identify with the organization.   
Stronger identification with an organization will lead to more cooperative behaviors among its 
members (Dukerich, Golden, and Shortell, 2002).  The more an EAS employee sees desirable 
personal traits being exhibited by the organization, the more likely it is the employee will 
cooperate with other employees in order to contribute positively to the organization. 
It is through organizational processes, like the review and revise process, that 
organizational members contribute to the organization.  Cheney and Tompkins (1987) argue that 
if organizational members can identify with the organization, that sense of identity “directs the 
individual in terms of making contributions to the organization” (pp. 1-2).  If individuals do not 
feel in sync with the larger identity of the organization, and if that identity does not trickle down 
to individual processes like those of the review and revise group, then those individuals are less 
able or less likely to make strong contributions to the organization as a whole.  As a result, the 
whole organization suffers.  The members of the review and revise group contribute to EAS with 
their behavior and interactions with each other (margin comments, oral exchanges).  The group’s 
collaborative culture is another contribution made by the group members to the organization and 
its identity.  Similarly, Dukerich, Golden, and Shortell (2002) argue that “organizational success 
is partially determined by organizational members’ cooperative behaviors” (p. 508).  The 
stronger a member’s group identification, the more likely it is that the member will engage in 
cooperative rather than non-cooperative behaviors; these cooperative behaviors increase the 
likelihood of organizational success.  That is to say, if organizational members (like EAS 
employees in general or the members of the review and revise group specifically) perceive the 
organizational identity of their organization (EAS) as attractive, then there is a positive relation 
to cooperative behaviors.   
120 
 
Harmonious Chorus or Multiple-Headed Monster? 
When we hear everything that is being said by and about EAS, what are we hearing?  We 
are hearing the voices of the review and revise group speaking through its review process; we are 
hearing the voices of the EAS employees speaking through the survey; and we are hearing the 
voices of the EAS organization speaking through its official documents.  Do these voices speak 
in a “harmonious chorus” or as a “multiple-headed monster”?  I believe that, for the most part, 
EAS’s review and revise processes are reflective of EAS’s organizational identity as expressed 
through the perceptions of EAS employees and the values communicated by the organization’s 
official documents.   
EAS is definitely not a multiple-headed monster.  However, it is also not a totally 
harmonious chorus either.  The disjunctions that exist are disjunctions between EAS’s 
communicated values and the EAS employees’ perceptions of EAS’s organizational identity.   
And although it is the processes of the review and revise group which help create only one 
“note” in EAS’s communicated values, the processes themselves are in alignment – in harmony 
– with EAS’s organizational identity.  As a result of this alignment between processes and 
identity, the ethos of The Informer, and consequently of the entire organization, is stronger and 
more effectively persuasive.  And because the review and revise group buys in to EAS’s 
organizational ethos, the group contributes positively to the organization as a whole by 
cooperating and collaborating effectively, behaving as productive organizational members. 
Chapter Conclusion 
In this chapter I established the importance of organizational ethos and organizational 
identification as they relate to effective organizational processes.  I showed how alignment 
between organizational actions or processes and organizational identity increases the ethos or 
121 
 
credibility of an organization.  Such an alignment also increases the likelihood of cooperative 
behaviors by employees, which in turn increases the overall success of the organization.  In a 
final Postscript, I offer suggestions for additional research, focusing especially on the interesting 
but unanswered questions raised by this study.    
  
 
POSTSCRIPT: SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 
 As noted previously in this dissertation, few studies examine how organizational identity 
actually functions in terms of workplace processes.  I want to see more research of this type 
performed, particularly to discover how organizational identity influences collaborative writing 
processes within different types of organizations (i.e., community organizations, international 
corporations, etc.).  The question – Cross’s (1994) question – that originally made me curious 
about the connections between identity and processes has not been totally and completely 
answered by my research.  Cross wondered how different types of organizations, displaying 
different kinds of cultures, allow their collaborative writing processes to be influenced by their 
identity and vice versa.  As a case study, my experiment is not reproducible.  However, the 
information gathered from more case studies of different organizations, or even different 
workplace writing processes, could shed light on the relationship between organizational identity 
and workplace writing.   
 I suppose all researchers, at least the good ones, finish a study and immediately begin to 
ask, “What if?”  I have several “what ifs.”  I will present these questions in the hope that a future 
researcher may find a way to incorporate these into her or his own study – a study I would be 
most interested in reading. 
• What if I had studied the process of drafting the articles which were published in The 
Informer; what might have I discovered?  If different stages of collaboration were 
studied, would any differences emerge?  What if only the final document (the 
organizational newsletter, in this case) were studied, rather than the process which 
produced the document?  If only the final document had been compared to organizational 
identity, what results might have been found? 
123 
 
• What if I studied specific subcultures within EAS?  How many subcultures are involved 
in a small organization like EAS?  Kleimann’s (1993) study of the GAO and her 
discovery that two divisions within the same organization had different cultures is both 
intriguing and puzzling to me.  How can (or do) two distinct – almost opposite – 
subcultures both reflect the identity of the GAO?  Interviewee Tyler commented that the 
different departments within EAS had different approaches to their work.  Had I studied a 
different department at EAS, how/would the results have differed? 
• Regarding the electronic survey, what if I connected demographic information to the 
answers given?  I did not connect personal information to responses in an effort to offer 
respondents the highest degree of anonymity possible.  Had I made these connections, I 
could have broken down the responses into categories like male/female, length of 
employment at EAS, or management/staff.  Perhaps the perceptions of a ten-year 
employee differ significantly from those of a ten-month employee.  I strongly suspect I 
would have found significant differences between management’s perceptions of EAS’s 
organizational identity and the perceptions of the rank-and-file staff. 
• What if I had considered the EAS membership as the internal stakeholders or perceivers 
of EAS’s organizational identity?  In other words, what if I had considered the EAS 
membership, not the EAS employees, to be the organizational members?  What might 
have been the results if I had surveyed the membership for their perceptions regarding 
EAS’s organizational identity and compared those perceptions with the workplace 
writing processes of EAS?   Or perhaps compared those perceptions to other 
membership-directed processes, like the annual convention, a district meeting, or a 
membership recruitment workshop? 
124 
 
• What if there were any differences in the modes of margin comments (statements, 
questions, direct changes, non-word symbols) written depending on who wrote the 
article?  If someone high up in the hierarchy wrote the text of an article, would that have 
influenced the type of margin comments written by a lower hierarchy person?  Or vice 
versa? 
The answers to these questions would help us, as scholars and practitioners, understand more 
thoroughly how identity and processes are interconnected.  The deeper understanding would 
most likely lead to more effective workplace processes or behaviors. 
 
 
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University and Medical Center Institutional Review Board
 East Carolina University
 Ed Warren Life Sciences Building 
Greenville, NC 27834
 Office 252-744
 Chair and Director of Biomedical IRB:  L. Wiley Nifong, MD
 Chair and Director of Behavioral and Social Science IRB:  Susan L. McCammon, PhD
  
 
  
 TO:  Alexis Poe Davis, Student, Dept of English, 2202 Bate Building ECU
 FROM:          UMCIRB 
DATE: February 25, 2008 
RE:  Expedited Category Research Study
 TITLE: “An Examination of the R
 Collaborative Editing Processes” 
  
This research study has undergone review and approval using expedited review on 2.22.08.  This 
research study is eligible for review under an expedited category because it is on collection of data from 
voice, video, digital, or image recordings made for re
 or group characteristics or behavior (including, but not limited to, research on perception, cognition, 
motivation, identity, language, communication, cultural beliefs or practices, and social behavior) 
research employing survey, interview, oral history, focus group, program evaluation, human factors 
evaluation, or quality assurance methodologies. (NOTE: Some research in this category may be exempt 
from the HHS regulations for the protection of human s
 listing refers only to research that is not exempt.)
 Dr. S. McCammon deemed this unfunded
 review in 12 months. Changes to this approved research may not be initiated without UMCIRB review 
except when necessary to eliminate an apparent immediate hazard to the participant. All unanticipated 
problems involving risks to participants and others must be promptly reported to the UMCIRB.  The 
investigator must submit a continuing review/closure application to the UMCIRB prior to the date of 
study expiration. The investigator must adhere to all reporting requirements for this stud
  
The above referenced research study has been given approval for the period of 
approval includes the following items:
 • Internal Processing Form 
• Informed Consent 
• Interview Questions 
 
Dr. S. McCammon does not have a potential for 
 
The UMCIRB applies 45 CFR 46, Subparts A
 regardless of the funding source. 21 CFR 50 and 21 CFR 56 are applied to all research studies 
under the Food and Drug Administration reg
 International Conference on Harmonisation Good Clinical Practice guidelines. 
 
APPENDIX A: IRB Approval Materials 
 
 
• 600 Moye Boulevard • LSB 104 
 
-2914 • Fax 252-744-2284 • www.ecu.edu/irb 
 
 
 
elationship Between an Organization's Identity and Its 
UMCIRB # 08-0167 
search purposes. It is also a research on individual 
ubjects. 45 CFR 46.101(b)(2) and (b)(3). This 
 
 study no more than minimal risk requiring a continuing 
2.22.08
  
conflict of interest on this study. 
-D, to all research reviewed by the UMCIRB 
ulation. The UMCIRB follows applicable 
 
 
• 
 
or 
y. 
 to 2.21.09.  The 
130 
 
APPENDIX B: EAS Publication Review Cover Sheet 
 
Instructions: Complete and attach to publication/copy/art to be reviewed. Appropriate 
supervisor(s) must approve copy before being sent to [EAS] Communications/Public 
Relations Department.  Include artwork, photos, and proposed layout, if any.  
 
Department: _____________________________________________________________ 
Contact person: ___________________________________________________________ 
Review to be returned to department by (date):   
___________________________________ 
Project title: ____________________________________________________ 
Description of publication: ________________________________________________ 
Specific audience: _________________________________________________________ 
Printing deadline: _________________________________________________________ 
Printer: ______________________ ________________________ 
 
USPS contacted:      YES   NO                        (Circle or bold) 
This is a:       New Publication        Revised publication    (Circle or bold) 
 
Text approved by: 
Department Director: Date: 
CoS/General Counsel: Date: 
Executive Director: Date: 
 
Communications/Public Relations Review 
 
Text approved by Communications/Public Relations Department: 
_________________________________________________________________________              
(date and signature) 
 
Comments:_______________________________________________________________
 _ 
_________________________________________________________________________
 _________________________________________________________________________ 
 
Design reviewed by Communications/Public Relations Department: 
_________________________________________________________________________   
(date and signature) 
 
Comments:_______________________________________________________________
 _________________________________________________________________________
 _________________________________________________________________________
 _ 
 
 
Final Approval: I certify that the required changes have been made and the publication is 
ready for printing. 
131 
 
 
Signed:  
____________________________________Date:________________________________ 
[Terri D.], Dir. Of Communications/Designee 
 
____________________________________Date:________________________________ 
[Tim H.], CoS/General Counsel    
 
132 
 
APPENDIX C: EAS Publication Review Guidelines 
 
What has to be reviewed? 
All of the following, whether produced in-house or by an outside vendor: 
square4 Any external brochure, pamphlet, newsletter, booklet, poster, sign, invitation or 
similar publication, logos, ads, public service announcements and any promotional 
item (mugs, T-shirts, etc.) that is to be produced, printed or reprinted. 
square4 Presentations/TV radio presentations for use outside of [EAS] building. 
square4 All existing or revised materials when reprinted.  
 
What does not have to be reviewed? 
square4 Intra-communications such as e-mails, memos, instructions, manuals, letters 
square4 Web content.   
square4 When in doubt contact the Communications/Public Relations Director.  As a rule, if 
the publication uses the [EAS] logo and is for distribution outside of [EAS] please 
review. 
 
The Review and Approval Process: 
Department directors must ensure that publications originating within their departments are 
factual, accurate and conform to [EAS] policies.   The following multilevel review process 
will be followed: 
1. Review by department director for technical and factual accuracy. 
2. Review by Chief of Staff/General Counsel who will determine if publication requires 
review by Executive Director.  If not, Chief of Staff/General Counsel will initial and 
date in Executive Director’s signature line.  
3. Review by the Communications/Public Relations Office for overall AP style, 
readability, correct usage, design and compliance with logo policy.   
 
*Exception-Member discount ads and fliers will be reviewed by department director and 
communications/pr staff member only. 
 
Preferred Vendors: 
The Communications/Public Relations Department has selected preferred vendors with 
design, printing and addressing service vendors, which are to be used for all professional 
publications.  The Communications/Public Relations Department reserves the right to 
change vendors based on their affordability, service and product quality.   
 
Departments continue to be the primary liaison to vendors.  If your job is estimated at less 
than $1,000, pick one of the three vendors.  If printing jobs are more than $1,000, please 
remember to obtain a quote from each of the three preferred vendors.   
 
**Please meet with communications/pr staff prior to and during projects to ensure maximum 
communication and efficiency during projects.**   
 
United States Postal Service:  
133 
 
Contact the [EAS] USPS account manager before beginning a project to ensure that that your 
publication is designed and mailed in a cost-efficient manner.  [contact] can be reached at 
[contact]@usps.gov or [phone]. 
 
134 
 
APPENDIX D: Content List for The Informer 
 
Front Page – [Terri] 
square4 Treasurer’s Office records request filled or lawsuit 
square4 Photo 
square4 Timeline of records request 
 
Retirement (burgundy banner) 
square4 Retirement Lawsuit Reaches Ct. of Appeals – [Elaine] 
square4 Contributory Death Benefit Open Enrollment Feb.-May w/ pic of Sen. [Allen] – 
[retirement director] 
 
Public Policy (green banner) – [Elaine] 
square4 Quotes to Note 
square4 [EAS] affiliation/collective bargaining article (reprint) 
square4 Photo/cutline of Collective Bargaining Committee 
 
Health Care (purple banner) 
square4 [state] Alliance Health grant article – [intern] 
square4 SHP Open Enrollment w/ [Leslie Foster] thumbnail pic (provided by SHP) 
square4 Box for “what to do” to change to PPO plan – [Melissa] (not SHP board mtg) 
square4 SHP PPO session dates 
 
Center Spread – [Cassie] “[EAS] Members Give Back” (Member Action red banner) 
square4 District 5, 6, 7 Christmas parade (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 59 Christmas stockings (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 59 Alzheimer Walk?? (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 19 donation 
square4 District 43 Angel Tree (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 43/[EAS] Christmas party (article, photo and cutline) 
square4 District 60 fire victim donation (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 60 Relay for Life booth (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 66 Scholarship Raffle (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 37 DOT Christmas event (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 65 Christmas Tree project (photo and cutline) 
square4 District 65 Child Sponsor project (photo and cutline) 
Move items below to 3rd page of Member Action if needed 
square4 District 3 Save the Date Golf Tournament (box with graphic) 
square4 Scholarship apps due April 15 Ad (text from poster) – [Elaine] 
square4 [EAS member] Runs for [state] House – [Terri] 
square4 [EAS member] award w/ headshot – [Melissa] 
 
Columns – [Terri] 
square4 President’s Message 
square4 Executive Director 
square4 Counselor’s Comments 
135 
 
 
Back Page 
square4 See Strength, See Action, See Results ([EAS member] pic/quote from booklet) 
square4 Feature Member Discount Vendor (Perks) – [EAS staff] 
136 
 
APPENDIX E: Interview Protocol 
 
Participant Code: ________________________________________________ 
 
• Tell me about how you came to be involved with [EAS]. 
 
• Explorations might include: How did you first hear of [EAS]?  When did that happen? 
(Pay special attention to any words of phrases the participant uses to describe [EAS].)  
(addresses element of ‘enduring’) 
 
• What other types of organizations have you worked for?  Have you ever worked for 
another state employees’ organization?  Explorations may include: What were your 
experiences there?  How do they compare with [EAS]? (addresses element of 
‘distinctive’) 
 
• Has (or how has) [EAS] changed over the time you have been here? (addresses element 
of ‘enduring’) Explorations may include: What has not changed?  How do you feel about 
that?  Is that consistent with other things you see at [EAS]?  Could you elaborate on that? 
 
• Suppose I were new at [EAS].  Regardless of what department or position I worked in, 
what do you think I would find?  (addresses element of ‘central’)  If the participant asks 
what I mean, I may ask about what expectations supervisors have about job performance, 
what does management emphasize on the job, what is the general working atmosphere 
like?  Explorations might include: Say I worked in the executive director’s office.  How 
would that be similar or different to what you have just described? 
 
• In what ways do you believe [EAS] is different from other state employees associations, 
public worker associations, or unions that you are familiar with? (addresses element of 
‘distinctive’) 
 
• Does [EAS] claim to be different from other similar organizations, like state employees 
associations, public workers’ associations, or unions?  (addresses element of ‘distinctive’)  
Exploration might include: How does [EAS] show this? 
 
In concluding the interview, I may re-visit some of the words and phrases put together at the 
beginning of the interview, as well as any items or responses I found interesting.  I also may ask 
for any final thoughts, to make the participant feel listened to and maybe to catch anything not 
caught in the structured part of the interview. 
 
137 
 
APPENDIX F: Online Survey Instrument 
 
 
 
138 
 
 
139 
 
140 
 
141 
 
142 
 
143 
 
144 
 
145 
 
 
146 
 
APPENDIX G: List of Membership Eligibility Criteria 
 
 
Membership Type: Who is Eligible 
 
Active: Current state employees 
Retired: Retired state employees 
Associate: State Employees’ Credit Union employees or [EAS] staff 
Affiliate: Individuals or organizations who support the purposes of [EAS] and have been 
approved by the Board of Governors for membership