An ethnographic study used M. M. Bakhtin's language theory of socially rooted multiple voices to compare the group-writing processes of two corporate documents. Data were collected during a 5-month participant observation of the production processes of a 504-word executive letter, which took 55 days from first draft to approval, and a 1,851-word corporate annual plan which, although recounting largely the same story of the letter, required only 15 days from first draft to approval. Observation of the groups and Bakhtin's discussion of utterance as the process of articulation yielded three views of collaborative writing: (1) group writing as cacophony; (2) group writing as monotone; and (3) group writing as symphony. Examination of the differences (in purpose, audience, message, and process) revealed that the chief reason that the letter took over three times as long to write as the longer report was because of the gradual consolidation of power occurring in the corporate culture, fostering first a cacophonous and finally a monovocal writing process. Furthermore, neither process was particularly successful because important information was ignored or suppressed as people talked past each other or became mouthpieces of the most powerful member of the hierarchy. (Two figures and two tables of data are included; a 19 references are attached.) (KEH)