At your business, do you regularly "recycle" portions of reports for other reports?

Question

I'm wondering if reusing pieces of text from reports is a common business practice in the USA. If students in school copy from their school papers or journalists copy from previously written articles, it's often considered plagiarism. But I'm wondering if expectations and practices in the business world are different. What's your experience with this practice?

Answer 1

I used to write proposals for two different aerospace companies. It's not called "recycling" but using boilerplate. It is common practice in the business world. And it's not plagiarism. If your company produced the report, you own the copyright, you can't plagiarize yourself. It is an inefficient use of resources to write the same things over and over and over. You write it once, then use it when you need it. You often have to massage it a bit to make it fit the circumstances exactly, but it's a smart business practice.

Answer 2

I used to write reports for a management research think tank. We would recycle portions of other reports (mostly our own), but always note what we "copied." That often helps put topics into context.

I now work in labor policy and we routinely do this; it makes for more continuity in thought within an organization. There's no need to reference in certain instances, while in others annotation is necessary.