In studying these activities as ways of constituting social worlds, students are learning to examine

Dissertation Writers’ Negotiations with Competing Activity Systems Dana Britt Lundell and Richard Beach Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455 lunde010@umn.edu rbeach@umn.edu Abstract Previous research on dissertation writing fails to embed it within the context of different, and often competing institutional forces constituting the genre expectations associated with producing the dissertation. The purpose of this study was to examine the negotiations of dissertation writers in a large Midwestern research university across a range of different activity systems: the Graduate School, department, advisor, committee, employment, and potential job market as different "layered" (Prior, 1998) systems. Analysis of interview data of 11 writers indicated that writers perceived marked differences in the objects/outcomes, roles, norms, and genre tools to vary across these different systems. While the Graduate School and departments formulated one set of expectations, the advisor or committee articulated different expectations for completing the dissertation. Writers also experienced time conflicts between the demands of teaching and writing. And, they experienced conflicting outcomes for the dissertation related to writing for an advisor or committee as opposed to positioning themselves for the job market, creating ambiguity related to their dissertation audience. They also noted that the research university ...