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The changes in technical communication education between 1950 and 1998 have led to disciplinary maturity: the development of academic programs and of a body of innovative research. This disciplinary maturity parallels the professional identity and growth of numbers of technical communication practitioners. As a thriving multidiscipline with many direct research and pedagogical connections to the workplace, technical communication can uniquely influence workforce values, providing a new, evolving disciplinary model for higher education. However, technical communication's disciplinary maturity also means a movement away from practice and from the service course, the foundations of technical communication as a discipline and the sources of its workplace influence.
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Katherine Staples (1999) studied this question.
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