I begin by tracing the development of intellectual property and authorship, pointing out the material and theoretical conditions contributing to their development, as well as offering a critique of such notions. In subsequent chapters I use two different theoretical frameworks to examine multi-authored authorship, pointing out both the benefits and liabilities of this type of scholarship. The first framework is a postmodern one that critiques notions of knowledge as the product of individual control, the writer as a rational, autonomous, stable self, and the bureaucratic system of ownership and authorship; the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard are part of this framework. Because the postmodern enthusiasm for collaboration is often uninterrogated, I turn to critical work in British organizational theory that sees postmodern calls for the valuing of multi-authored scholarship as naïve and misguided, a framework supported by the work of writers such as James Barker, Harry Braverman, Martin Parker, and Mike Parker. These calls, rather than giving faculty more scholarship choices, more freedom, may actually play into the hands of bureaucrats (masquerading as postbureaucrats) working to weaken the power and autonomy of university faculty.

Turning from theoretical considerations to current practices, I discuss the results of a survey sent out to the department heads of 150 graduate programs (M.A./M.S. and Ph.D.) in rhetoric/composition and in technical/professional communication. In this survey, I asked about graduate program guidelines, hiring practices, and tenure and promotion guidelines-specifically, if those guidelines and practices addressed the issue of multi-authored scholarship, whether in print or online, and if so, how. My discussion also includes an analysis of guidelines sent to me. In my closing chapter, I summarize my major findings and argue that both theories and institutional practices are in transition, resulting in disciplinary situations seemingly fraught with irreconcilable contradictions. Rather than viewing these negatively, I contend that they represent positive dialectics, ones that Patricia Bizzell sees as "opportunities to imagine liberatory change."

The use of two different theoretical frameworks helps me provide a more balanced and critical view of multi-authored scholarship in composition studies, one acknowledging that an epideictic rhetoric of such scholarship, if used carelessly and uncritically, may ultimately do more harm than good-an acknowledgment recently made by Andrea Lunsford in her May 1999 College English article. And taking into account both theory and practice reflects what I have found to be the dynamic synergy between them. Like Joe Harris' critique of the idea of community, my study affects how we approach the notion of collaboration and how we examine our institutional practice.