ABSTRACT
The accounts of chapter 6 begin to situate authorship in the socially distributed activities of collaborative invention and authorship attribution. Although these accounts complicate simple, idealized images of the solitary writer or the writer-reader in literate conversation, they still fall well within our broader sociocultural repertoire of accounts—structures of cooperative team work (or, for that matter, forced labor). As narratives, they conform to the conventional folk model of action that locates agency in individuals: People act individually, even if in concert; things are acted on; and the environment is a stage, a fixed passive context, on which action take places. To articulate a fuller account of mediated authorship, I must take up the harder task of describing ways that sociohistoric tools-in-use actively participate in authorship, ways that they operate to enable, channel, and constrain both the substance and participation frameworks of literate invention. I can list diverse tools implicated in the Project sociologists’ work: disciplinary and everyday language, genres, and concepts; mathematical systems; computer hardware and software; psychometric and sociometric scales; the nested institutional structures of seminar, research team, department, university, profession, and state; social identities; institutional forums for disciplinary communication (conferences, journals, books); and so on. Proximal or distal, such tools-in-use must form the fabric of literate practices and textual artifacts. However, to move beyond chanting such lists of mediational means as a kind of sociohistoric mantra, we need to weave tools into specific accounts of writing, to give these silent tools a voice in the constitution of activity.
