Genre Theory in Information Studies 9781784412555, 1551741741, 9781784412548, 1784412546

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GENRE THEORY IN INFORMATION STUDIES

STUDIES IN INFORMATION (Previously LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE) Series Editor: Jens-Erik Mai Recent Volumes (Library and Information Science) Dania Bilal and Jamshid Beheshti New Directions in Children’s and Adolescents’ Information Behavior Research Christine Bruce, Kate Davis, Hilary Hughes, Helen Partridge, and Ian Stoodley Information Experience: Approaches to Theory and Practice Mark Hepworth and Geoff Walton Developing People’s Information Capabilities: Fostering Information Literacy in Educational, Workplace and Community Contexts Jung-Ran Park and Lynne C. Howarth New Directions in Information Organization Amanda Spink and Jannica Heinstro¨m Trends and Research: Europe Gunilla Wide´n and Kim Holmberg Social Information Research Dirk Lewandowski Web Search Engine Research Donald Case Looking for Information, Third Edition Amanda Spink and Diljit Singh Trends and Research: Asia-Oceania Amanda Spink and Jannica Heinstro¨m New Directions in Information Behaviour Eileen G. Abels and Deborah P. Klein Business Information: Needs and Strategies Leo Egghe Power Laws in the Information Production Process: Lotkaian Informetrics Mike Thelwall Link Analysis: An Information Science Approach Matthew Locke Saxton and John V. Richardson Understanding Reference Transactions: Transforming an Art into a Science Robert M. Hayes Models for Library Management, Decision-Making, and Planning Charles T. Meadow, Bert R. Boyce, and Donald H. Kraft Text Information Retrieval Systems, Second Edition A. J. Meadows Communicating Research V. Frants, J. Shiparo, and V. Votskunskii Automated Information Retrieval: Theory and Methods

STUDIES IN INFORMATION

GENRE THEORY IN INFORMATION STUDIES EDITED BY

JACK ANDERSEN Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

United Kingdom • North America • Japan India • Malaysia • China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2015 Copyright r 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78441-255-5 ISSN: 2055-5377 (Series) Cover photo courtesy of oneinchpunch/Shutterstock.com

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

Contents

List of Contributors

ix

Editorial Advisory Board

xi

Introduction

1. What Genre Theory Does Jack Andersen 1.1. The Social Study of Texts: The Precursors 1.2. Genre as Social Action 1.3. The Achievements of Genre Theory References

2. Re-Describing Knowledge Organization — A Genre and Activity-Based View Jack Andersen 2.1. 2.2.

Introduction The Knowledge Organization Situation — A Description 2.3. Re-Describing Knowledge Organization: A Proposal for a New Understanding 2.4. Knowledge Organization — A Genre and Activity-Based View 2.4.1. Knowledge Organization as Social Action 2.4.2. Knowledge Organization and Typification 2.4.3. Genre, Users and Knowledge Organization 2.4.4. Genre, Activity and Knowledge Organization 2.5. Concluding Remarks References

xiii

1 2 4 10 10

13 14 16 18 22 24 27 29 30 38 38

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Contents

3. Genres without Writers: Information Systems and Distributed Authorship Melanie Feinberg Genre Innovation as the Product of Purposeful Writer Intervention: Spinuzzi’s “Secret Sauce” 3.2. Genre Regulation in Cultural Heritage Metadata: The Role of Standards 3.3. Writerless Genre Change through Aggregation: The Case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin 3.4. Writerless Genre Change through Access Mechanism: Effects of Keyword Search 3.5. Conclusion References

43

3.1.

4. Genre and Typified Activities in Informing and Personal Information Management Pamela J. McKenzie

48 50 56 60 65 65

67

Introduction Literature Review Studies and Methods Findings: Setting 1. Informed Choice in Midwifery Care 4.4.1. Setting 4.4.2. The Informed Choice Discussion as an Oral Genre 4.4.3. The Informed Choice Genre Set 4.4.4. The Informed Choice Genre system 4.5. Findings: Setting 2. Keeping Track in the Household 4.5.1. Setting 4.5.2. Calendars as Genres in Course Planning 4.5.3. The Course Planning Genre Set 4.5.4. The Course Planning Genre System 4.6. Discussion Acknowledgments References

68 68 70 72 72 72 76 76 77 77 78 81 83 85 87 87

5. The Role of Calendars in Constructing a Community of Historical Workers in the Public Records Office of Great Britain ca. 1850s
1950s Heather MacNeil

91

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4.

5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4.

Setting the Scene: Background to the Large-Scale Publication of Calendars in the PRO The PRO Calendars The Ideologies of the PRO Calendars The Role of Calendars in Constructing a Community of Historical Workers

95 96 98 104

Contents 5.5. The Decline of the PRO Calendars 5.6. Conclusion References

6. Organizational Records as Genres: An Analysis of the “Documentary Reality” of Organizations from the Perspectives of Diplomatics, Records Management, and Rhetorical Genre Studies Fiorella Foscarini 6.1. 6.2. 6.3.

Introduction The Nature of Records The Documentary Reality of Diplomatics and Records Management 6.4. Recordkeeping from a Genre Perspective 6.5. The Ideology of Records 6.6. Records between Stability and Change 6.7. Record Interactions: Abstract vs. Situated Approaches 6.8. Records as Forms of Life — and a Methodological Note 6.9. Conclusion References

7. Genres of War: Informing a City Laura Skouvig 7.1. A Few Words on Genre Theory and Information History 7.2. The City of Copenhagen, 1800
1815 7.3. From City to Fortress: Information-of-War 7.4. Sitting Out a Siege: Vigilant and Alerted 7.5. Writing up a Defeat and Listing up a Siege 7.6. Concluding Remarks Acknowledgments References Appendix

8. Utterance and Function in Genre Studies: A Literary Perspective Sune Auken Acknowledgments References

vii

108 110 111

115 116 117 119 120 121 122 124 126 128 129 133 136 138 141 144 147 149 150 150 154

155 174 174

Final Summary: Genre Theory in Information Studies

179

Index

183

List of Contributors

Jack Andersen

Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Sune Auken

Dr. Habil., Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Melanie Feinberg

School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Fiorella Foscarini

Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Heather MacNeil

Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Pamela J. McKenzie

Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

Laura Skouvig

Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Editorial Advisory Board

Professor Donald Case University of Kentucky, USA Professor Chun Wei Choo University of Toronto, Canada Associate Professor Ron Day Indiana University, USA Assistant Professor Melanie Feinberg University of Texas, USA Professor Schubert Foo Shou Boon Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Associate Professor Jonathan Furner University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA

Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, USA Professor Diane Nahl University of Hawaii, USA Professor Diane H. Sonnenwald University of Copenhagen, Denmark Professor Olof Sundin Lund University, Sweden Professor Elaine Toms University of Sheffield, UK Professor Dietmar Wolfram University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA Professor Christa Womser-Hacker Universitat Hildesheim, Germany

Introduction

The intention with this book, Genre Theory in Information Studies, was in the first place to bring together a small network of researchers in information studies and literature who in some way or another are working with rhetorical genre theory. Particularly for those coming from information studies, there had been felt a growing need for a systematic book-length treatment of genre since the review provided by Andersen (2008). Among other things, this review demonstrated how genre research in information studies at that time was both scattered and rather accidental. In order to push the agenda for a place for genre theory in information studies, some of the contributors to this book have during the years and on various occasions been organizing sessions and workshops about genre at international information studies conferences (CoLIS, 2013; iConference, 2014). In addition to that, some of the contributors to this book (Foscarini, MacNeil, and McKenzie) also contributed to a special issue of Archival Science, Genre Studies in Archives edited by Duff and Oliver (2012) and Kwasnik and Crowston edited a special issue of Information Technology and People on the relation between genre and digital documents (Kwasnik & Crowston, 2005) while Kjellberg analyzed scholarly blogging from a genretheoretical point of view (Kjellberg, 2009). All these initiatives have with their individual touch and together paved the way for this book on genre theory in information studies. Six of the contributors to this volume have their home base at departments of media or information studies in Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In this book, all of these six contributors have their point of departure in the rhetorical theory of genre, and they also have their own take on genre in their individual chapters. In Chapter 1, I offer a small hint at how rhetorical genre theory’s concern with texts and their corresponding social actions are compatible with selected writers based in the social sciences. Hence, while rhetorical genre theory and its concepts historically have had its roots in the humanities, the theory of genre proposed by Miller (1984) and followers have their affiliates

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in the social sciences. According to me, this may also explain the explanatory power in rhetorical genre theory. With the suggestion for a concern with “de facto genres” or everyday genres (cf. Miller, 1984), and hence a move away from classical rhetorical genres (deliberative, forensic, epideictic genres) and a move further away from literary genres, rhetorical genre theory has shown itself relevant and usable to many fields (outside rhetoric and composition) that have an interest in the many forms of texts/ information and their social and communicative effects. In Chapter 2, I propose a re-description of knowledge organization based in genre and activity theory. The argument here is that in knowledge organization research, there is a need for understanding what constitutes concrete knowledge organization activities in order to account for knowledge organization as a human activity. With this, I offer an understanding of knowledge organization in which the actions of people, tool-use, and object of human activities serve to illustrate what constitutes and causes knowledge organization activity. Melanie Feinberg, in Chapter 3, offers the argument that information systems can function as sites for manipulation of genre resources but without the purposeful actions of specific writers. Instead, Feinberg emphasizes the notion of “writerless” actions, that is, the actions of those people responsible for organizing information in information systems by following rules and standards. These seemingly “writerless” actions, Feinberg argues, can affect genre change just as much as the purposeful actions of specific writers. With this argument, Feinberg demonstrates how we can understand information systems and the actions making them possible in light of genres and genre change. Information seeking and information management have for years been classic areas of research in information studies. In Chapter 4, Pamela J. McKenzie examines and challenges these two classic areas by means of rhetorical genre theory. McKenzie sets out to examine information seeking and informing in a clinical setting and personal information management in the household. As McKenzie’s two case studies show, with a genre approach we are able to transcend the dichotomy between workplace and everyday life typically held in information studies research. Genre theory, McKenzie argues, offers an approach capable of illuminating the contexts of information activities. The two following chapters by Heather MacNeil and Fiorella Foscarini both have archival study as their point of departure. In Chapter 5, MacNeil undertakes a historical case study of one particular archival finding aid genre, that is, the calendar, to demonstrate how rhetorical genre theory helps deepen and extend the emergent understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts as opposed to the traditional conception of them as neutral tools for facilitating access to archives.

Introduction

xv

Foscarini continues the archival line in Chapter 6 but on a more conceptual level. Foscarini identifies certain limitations inherent in the perspectives offered by diplomatics and records management. Through a review of the basic ideas associated with the notion of an organizational record, Foscarini identifies certain limitations in the notion of a record. By means of rhetorical genre theory, Foscarini makes the point that a genre approach can help “… to expand both the scope of diplomatics and to provide records management with new and more sophisticated tools to explore how records are made, used and transmitted in the workplace.” Thus, both MacNeil and Foscarini use rhetorical genre theory as a tool of discussion and as a means of challenging established ideas and concepts in archival studies. Chapter 7 continues the historical line of thinking present in the two previous chapters but now from the point of view of information history. Laura Skouvig discusses the information network of the city of Copenhagen in the beginning of the 19th century. Skouvig’s argument is by looking at the different genres and genre systems we can come to understand how citizens of different classes at that time got informed. In view of that, Skouvig demonstrates how information is formed by different genres, born in particular genre system and how information in this entered an information network in Copenhagen. Accordingly, Skouvig illuminates the dialogical nature of genre, information, and the social world: “… that information is formed by the specific contexts in which they occur but that genres shape and form information and thus affect its given contexts.” Thus, with rhetorical genre theory, Skouvig provides an analytical and empirical approach as to how to study historical phenomena in the emergent field of information history. Being the only one coming from a field outside (i.e., literature) information studies, Sune Auken presents a valuable argument about genre that deserves attention in information studies too. Auken initiates a discussion of the relationship between rhetorical genre theory and literature. Recognizing the merits of rhetorical genre theory, Auken reminds us that rhetorical genre theory may have forgotten on its successful journey an emphasis on the formal and thematic aspects (i.e., the utterance) of genre as opposed to the emphasis on function only. Coming from literature, Auken makes the argument that while genre research in literary studies has stagnated and literary genre studies to some extent seem to be unaware about rhetorical genre theory, the rhetorical theory of genre tends to ignore the formal and thematic sides of literary and non-literary works, and some writers in the field of rhetorical genre theory even explicitly excludes a concern with literature/fiction from the theory. Given that there exist more complex genres (i.e., literary genres) than Miller’s everyday genres, Auken argues, a concern with function only is therefore not enough or even

xvi

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desirable because a literary understanding of genres cannot abandon the internal organization of thematic and formal elements in genre determination. Hence, Auken’s argument is that such kind of understanding of literary genres can actually also be unfolded within the frames of rhetorical genre theory but that the theoretical frames of rhetorical genre theory at the same time also must be modified so as to not to be “obsessed” with function as the only determining factor in a theory of genre. Thus, in the chapters to follow we are witnessing a concern with genre theory from various points of view. In some way or another, all the chapters are pushing and stretching genre in directions where rhetorical genre theory may not have been before or have ever dreamt of being taken to. Conversely, information studies is now in a possession of a body research on genre that raises new questions, gives rise questions to be asked to this book, or offers new ways of thinking about what paths information studies may take in the 21st century. Jack Andersen Editor

References Andersen, J. (2008). The concept of genre in information studies. Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, 42, 1
42. Andersen, J., Skouvig, L., McKenzie, P., Mak, B., MacNeil, H., & Foscarini, F. (2014, March). Refereed workshop presented at the iConference, Berlin. Duff, W., & Oliver, G. (2012). Genre studies and archives: Introduction to the special issue. Archival Science, 12, 373
376. Kjellberg, S. (2009). Scholarly blogging practice as situated genre: An analytical framework based on genre theory. Information Research, 14, 410. Retrieved from http://www.informationr.net/ir/14-3/paper410.html. Accessed on October 3, 2014. Kwasnik, B. H., & Crowston, K. (2005). Introduction to the special issue: Genres of digital documents. Information Technology & People, 18, 76
88. MacNeil, H., Mak, B., McKenzie, P., & Foscarini, F. (2013, August). Provocations of genre in LIS-related research. Panel presented at conceptions of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151
167.

Chapter 1

What Genre Theory Does Jack Andersen

Abstract Purpose
To provide a small overview of genre theory and its associated concepts and to show how genre theory has had its antecedents in certain parts of the social sciences and not in the humanities. Findings
The chapter argues that the explanatory force of genre theory may be explained with its emphasis on everyday genres, de facto genres. Originality/value
By providing an overview of genre theory, the chapter demonstrates the wealth and richness of forms of explanations in genre theory. Keywords: Genre theory; social action; de facto genres

This introductory chapter to the volume sets out to elucidate what rhetorical genre theory does as a theory about communication, about texts, about users/readers, and about society and culture, and what it tries to explain and why it has been so successful in doing that. In particular, I am going to go back to the article that triggered modern rhetorical genre theory, Carolyn Miller’s now famous article Genre as Social Action (Miller, 1984). But I am not going to make a comprehensive review of genre theory since 1984 (for reviews, see Andersen, 2008; Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010; Devitt, 2004 among others). Rather, I want to develop the argument that genre theory has turned into such a strong approach to understanding texts and textual interaction because of its insistence of what Miller (1984) called “de facto”

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 1
12 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011002

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genres, our everyday genres. I think that this concern for everyday genres deserves even more attention today where we live in a world where we constantly attend to complexes of textual-informational forms and where many forms of institutionalizations require even more texts to be produced and not least responded to. I develop my story in three steps. First, I am going to take a brief look at what may be considered as the sociological precursors to genre theory. From here, I am going to do a short review of genre theory before ending with a pitch on why genre theory seems to have become so widespread as it shown by, for instance, Bawarshi and Reiff (2010).

1.1.

The Social Study of Texts: The Precursors

The study of texts (oral or written) has, of course, traditionally taken place in the humanities and has had a dominant place in the various versions of hermeneutics. Besides rhetoric and composition, film and literature, rhetorical genre theory has had its precursors in the social sciences in which the emphasis has been and is on the social context of texts and textual interaction. I will point to four precursors to genre theory: Max Weber, Dorothy Smith, Jack Goody, and Harold Garfinkel. These are of course a selected few but they do present views on texts, social action and human activity that to a large extent have become prevalent in genre theory. I do not claim that their influence is directly traceable in the literature of genre theory. But what I do claim is that what has come to concern genre theory is compatible with the social sciences and does not have its roots in the humanities as such. I mention Max Weber because he seems to be the first sociologist to pay attention to the role of documents in connection with his elaboration of the concept of bureaucracy, in particular the modern office, about which Weber states that “… the management of the modern office is based on written documents …” (Weber, 1968, p. 957). Although Weber’s concern was with modern forms of bureaucracy, he does seem to be aware that bureaucracy as we know it cannot function without the activity of documents and files. That way Weber slightly foregrounds what genre theory and its concern with “de facto genres” and its concern with situating and understanding texts in the particular and local circumstances. Dorothy E. Smith is not unknown to genre theory. She did publish two texts, The Social Construction of Documentary Reality (1974) and Textually Mediated Social Organization (1984), both dealing with issues that have come to characterize genre theory: how texts relate to forms of social organization and how texts make up social reality. In her 1974 article, the

What Genre Theory Does

3

opening lines go like this: “Our knowledge of contemporary society is to a large extent mediated to us by documents of various kinds. Very little of our knowledge of people, events, social relations and powers arises directly in our immediate experience” (Smith, 1974, p. 257). This claim about knowledge and how it comes to us in mediated forms may not sound revolutionary to us today. However, seeing documents as materializing social actions and social organization was not mainstream in social sciences and the humanities 40 years ago. For genre theory, this has become its raison d’etre. The emphasis on recognizable forms in genre theory was also stressed by Smith back then: “The social construction of social phenomena in their familiar and recognizable forms, as they appear to us, is in large part a product of the reporting and accounting procedures of formal organizations which in various ways provide for how the society is governed” (Smith, 1974, p. 257; italics in original). By relating the recognizable forms to reporting and accounting procedures, Smith takes a step toward locating texts in other spheres than the text itself; like genre theory, Smith’s concern is with what texts accomplish. In Smith’s (1984) article, Textually Mediated Social Organization, she continues the line of argument presented in 1974 by making “… a phenomenon to which we have in the past been extraordinarily blind sociologically visible … it is the phenomenon of textually mediated communication, action and social relations” (Smith, 1984, p. 59). Again, Smith advocates the sociological importance of understanding texts as constituents of social organization and through this provides the initial building blocks of genre theory. In his book The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986), British anthropologist Jack Goody demonstrates how different cultures and different forms of early literate societies appropriated writing and through this how various textual forms (religious texts, book-keeping, tax accounting, law texts) were involved in establishing particular forms of societies and their power structures. With this, Goody, from an anthropological point of view, points to how texts are involved in the fabrication of social structures and their corresponding forms of social action. In sociology, Harold Garfinkel is known for ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). Briefly, ethnomethodology is a descriptive approach to understanding people’s everyday social and cultural interactions and how people make sense of everyday life. Methodologically, many studies in genre theory have taken their inspirations from ethnomethodology as the interest has been in investigating and understanding how it is that people and forms of texts accomplish something in human activity. This selective body of sources compatible with genre theory provides some disciplinary and historical clues as to how we can understand genre theory of today. The history of compatibility is of course not a linear history that has reached its intellectual culmination with genre theory as

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we know it today. Rather, I have tried to locate some selected views on social interaction, social organization, and forms of texts as they have been developed from a sociological point of view in terms of what these authors deem as important when trying to make sense of how it is that texts can do something in human activity and how our forms of social organization to a large extent are molded by many forms of texts. With genre theory, these views have a common ground from where to be articulated.

1.2.

Genre as Social Action

The study of genre is a traditional approach to literature in literary theory. While the study of genre now and then has been called off in literary theory, it has flourished in rhetoric and composition since the mid-1980s. The rhetorical theory of genre has over the years been developed by genre scholars such as Miller (1984), Bakhtin (1986), Bazerman (1988, 1994, 1997), Yates (1989), Schryer (1993), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), Russell (1997), Bawarshi (2000), and Devitt (2004) among others. With modifications, the common assumption held by this community of scholars is that genre is a typified communicative action linking together writers and readers in a shared space of meaning and activity. Genres and genred activity arise because particular social and institutional arrangements produce forms of action guided by the particular interests and ideologies of these arrangements. Any action and interaction of these arrangements materialize in a communicative form the users of these must act in accordance with. When Carolyn Miller published her now very influential article Genre as Social Action, she gave rise to an understanding of genre that went far beyond an emphasis on the formal features of texts, the relationship between content-form and the idea of texts belonging to a particular class of texts as a crucial issue in genre theory. Among other things, Miller argued that the world is complex and genres “change, evolve and decay” (Miller, 1984, p. 163). With this, Miller attacked the common notion of genre that literature and rhetoric had had in common: that texts belong to particular classes of texts and these classes are what we mean with genre. Moreover, while literary theorists may discuss the importance of the relationship between content (or substance) and form, Miller went a step further and argued for the importance of function, or action, as the determining force in a theory of genre: “… on the action genre is used to accomplish” (Miller, 1984, p. 151). This article thus triggered a new direction for the theory of genre in rhetoric and composition. One can read Miller’s article as a critique of genre theory at the time and as an article claiming that genre theory back

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then had reached a dead end. Miller suggested that genre research ought to pay (more) attention to what she called “de facto genres”: This approach insists that the “de facto” genres, the types we have names for in everyday language, tell us something theoretically important about discourse. To consider as potential genres such homely discourse as the letter of recommendation, the user manual, the progress report, the ransom note, the lecture, and the white paper, as well as the eulogy, the apologia, the inaugural, the public proceeding, and the sermon, is not to trivialize the study of genres; it is to take seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves. (Miller, 1984, p. 155) This claim about the importance of “de facto” genres is what moves genre theory beyond classical rhetorical genres (deliberative, forensic, epideictic) and into the everyday life of ordinary text and language users and their communicative struggles with the genres of society and culture as a whole. Miller rejected, or at least questioned, an understanding and theorizing of genre as classification and form. Understanding genre as classification and form only was too limited, Miller argued, because such an understanding did not capture how and what texts do in human communication. As rhetoric always had been interested in how communication works and with what means, this interest had mainly been concerned with the communications of, for example, presidents or court room judges or ancient speakers (and writers). Miller’s article was a response to these kinds of studies in rhetoric that were not concerned with rhetorical action performed by everyday people in their everyday lives. Therefore, Miller argued for an understanding of genre that emphasized “… the action it [i.e. genre] is used to accomplish” (1984) and conceptualized genre to be “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller, 1984, p. 154). Such an understanding of genre clearly breaks with any notion of genre as classification or form. Miller’s understanding emphasizes the communicative or, more precisely, the rhetorical, actions that are typified and recurrent in specific situations. It is not just any communicative action but only actions that are typified and recurrent that is of interest in this view of genre theory. What recurs and what is typified requires an observation of an activity where people are involved. In addition, to observe what is recurring and what is typified requires inquiring into how texts make recurrence and typification possible. What is important now in this view of genre is the ordinary use and ordinary users of genre and how genres typify human communicative activities. This is what Miller suggested to be the focus of genre theory. Consequently, Miller paved the way for subsequent genre theory and studies of genre. Very soon after Miller’s article, Bazerman (1988) published his

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influential book in genre studies, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article (Bazerman, 1988). The book is representative of genre as social action but it also offers a historical analysis in terms of how a particular genre emerged and what conditions that genre had in emerging. The three words in the main title and subtitle of this book says it all: shaping, genre, and activity. Written scientific knowledge is not (only) discovered, produced or reported. It is shaped. Being shaped, given form, by humans and their corresponding, and historically developed, activity contexts, Bazerman wanted to “… argue that close attention to the textual form of written knowledge will tell us much about what kind of thing knowledge is, that the written form matters” (Bazerman, 1988, p. 18). Contrary to Miller, but as an analytical consequence of her work, Bazerman (1988) traced the emergence of the experimental article and how its historical development came to typify ways of communicating and arguing for scientific findings. This is not only a historical study of the emergence of a given form of scientific communication. It is also a way of pointing out how regularities in arguing, reading and writing are shaped in a dialectical activity through the actions and responses of the people and institutions involved. Thus, where Miller (1984) introduced a sociological way of thinking of genre, Bazerman (1988) added to this a historical sense of how a genre emerges and develops by the actions of people and communities. With Miller (1984) and Bazerman (1988), steps are taken toward what later came to be known as an activity-based view on genre (cf. Berkenkotter, 2001; Geisler, 2001; Russell, 1997; Winsor, 1999, 2001). But in between Miller (1984) and Bazerman (1988), Bakhtin’s Speech Genres & Other Late Essays (Bakhtin, 1986) is translated into English but written in the 1950s. In here the essay, The Problem of Speech Genres, is found. Clearly influenced by the Marxist school of thought, Bakhtin presents a deep and thoroughly argued concept of genre, one that is pretty much in line with both Miller and Bazerman. Bakhtin is very clear about the relationship of genres to spheres of activity. In the very opening line of the essay, he stresses that “All the diverse areas of human activity involves the use of language … and … the nature and forms of this use are just as diverse as the areas of human activity” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). Consequently, each sphere of language use “… develops its own relatively stable types” of utterances, of speech genres, as Bakthin calls them (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). The correlation between activity spheres and genre is further underscored when Bakhtin (1986, p. 64) posits that Each sphere has and applies its own genres that correspond to its own specific conditions. There are also particular styles that correspond to these genres. A particular function (scientific, technical, commentarial, business, everyday) and the particular conditions of speech communication specific for each sphere give rise to particular genres.

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This connection between activity spheres and corresponding genres is not that present in Miller. But Miller and Bakhtin nevertheless are very much in line with each other as they both emphasize typical forms of genre. They also seem to agree that you cannot enumerate and classify once and for all the genres in society because genre: … does not lend itself to taxonomy, for genres change, evolve, and decay; the number of genres current in any society is indeterminate and depends upon the complexity and diversity of the society. (Miller, 1984, p. 163) Bakhtin (1986, p. 60) remarks that The wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the various possibilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex. With Bakhtin we also see an opening toward the concern with activity in genre theory. Now genre was (and is) a question of how particular texts come to regularize particular human activities and how texts themselves become regulated; that is how texts become typified and typify human activities based on the use and production of texts. Theoretical and empirical attention is on how texts actually manage to do something for people involved in diverse typified communication activities, be that scholarly communication, workplace writing, tax accountants, organizational communication or public genres. The theoretical and empirical consequence of Miller’s article and its followers was what could be termed a “sociologization of text and textual practices.1 Social theorists such as Giddens (Bazerman, 1997; Miller, 1994; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992) now enter the picture. But also the pragmatic turn in the philosophy of language (e.g., Wittgenstein and Austin) begin to inform genre theory. More recently, Russian activity theory has also influenced genre theory (e.g., Bazerman, 1997, 2013; Russell, 1997; Spinuzzi, 2003; Winsor, 1999). Broadly speaking, what is in common for the chosen social theorists, pragmatic philosophy of language and activity theory is the interest in and the emphasis on human agency and social structure. The conception of genre suggested by Miller and others fits perfectly in the relationship between human agency and social structure, even though genre is sometimes claimed to be action and at other times to be social structure and at other times

1. We cannot say “the sociology of text” as that covers a direction in textual criticism (cf. McKenzie, 1986).

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genre is claimed to be mediating between human agency and social structure. Thus, with this understanding of genre promoted by Miller and others genre is situated in a different theoretical space than it classically has been and a bit different from how genre is conceived in literary studies (cf. Derrida, 1980). During the succeeding years, scholars in genre theory have developed useful concepts show concerning how not only one genre works but also how genres coordinate activity together or how one or two genres may activate genres across different activity systems. One such concept is “genre set,” first developed by Devitt (1991). Devitt set out to investigate the work of tax accountants and the set of texts that made them do their work: “In examining the genre set of a community, we are examining the community’s situations, its recurring activities and relationships. The genre set accomplishes its work … This genre set not only reflects the profession’s situations; it may also help to define and stabilize those situations” (Devitt, 1991, p. 340). What Devitt investigates here is how a particular form of work located within a particular profession gets done by individuals by means of a particular set of texts, genres. Therefore, identifying a genre set means identifying a large part of a person’s work (Bazerman, 2003, p. 318). Elaborating on Devitt’s notion of genre set, Bazerman (1994) elaborated the concept of “genre system.” About genre systems, Bazerman (1994) stated “These are interrelated genres that interact with each other in specific settings.” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 97). With genre systems, some genres are, or must be, invoked simultaneously in order to act appropriately within a specific setting. But we do not know which genres in advance. For instance, when I teach a course, I prepare reading lists, syllabus, evaluation forms, lecture notes, assignments, etc. The students use these and respond to these by participating in class, taking notes, asking questions, discussing readings and turning in papers. These are the genre set of the course. However, if some students fail the class, they must go and activate other genre sets such as filling out an application form for re-examination, signing up for re-examination and go to the re-examination by for instance re-submitting their revised written paper. Thus, they activate other activity systems and their sets of genres, sets of genres that do not belong to the genre set of the class but are suddenly interconnected with the class genre set. Therefore, “Only a limited range of genres may appropriately follow upon another in particular settings …” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 98). That is, we cannot prescribe the order of genres to be invoked in a genre system. But given genred activities will on certain grounds reach out to other genre and activity systems. With the concept of genre system we are able to see how texts organize knowledge-based activities and how these activities are dependent on texts as their mediational means.

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Speaking from the view of organizational communication, Orlikowski and Yates (1994) introduced the idea of “genre repertoire.” It is similar to Devitt’s genre set but whereas the notion of genre set start with the set of texts an individual works with, genre repertoire rests on the assumption that given community members use a variety and multiple genres over time “… to understand a community’s communicative practices, we must examine the set of genres that are routinely enacted by members of the community. We designate such a set of genres a community’s ‘genre repertoire’…” (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994, p. 542). Accordingly, with the notion of genre repertoire the perspective is developed from the community and not the individual. Further developing the basic idea of genre as social action and connecting it with other contexts or spheres, both Bazerman (1997, 2003) and Russell (1997) turned to activity theory as developed by, for instance Lev Vygotsky and Alexei Leont’ev. Activity theory, in short, provides the means of showing how the actions of people are goal-directed and as such are shaping the structure of activity systems and yet shaped by the structure of the activity system. By having “… a focus on what people are doing and how texts help people do it …” (Bazerman, 2003, p. 319), the opening towards activity theory during the last two decades has elevated our thinking of genre into planes of human activities and how these activities both configure and are mediated and constituted dialectally by means of genre and other mediational means. Schryer (1993) also captured this when she proposed a view of genre as “stabilized-for-now.” Genre set, genre repertoire and genre and activity systems all pay attention to what goes on between texts, between sets of texts in concrete settings and how texts call on other spheres of activity. Bawarshi (2000) introduced “genre function” in order to have a concept that can account for how and why it is texts can do all these things. Responding to Foucault’s author-function, Bawarshi argues that we need a concept capable of accounting “… for how all discourses function” (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 338), not just privileged literary authors and their texts, as implied by Foucault. Genre function, following Bawarshi (2000, p. 338), “… constitutes all discourses’ and all writers’ modes of existence, circulation, and functioning within society …” With genre function, Bawarshi provides an understanding of how genre constitutes texts and their contexts and of how writers and their contexts are functions of the genre (Bawarshi, 2000, p. 335). Consequently, genre in Bawarshi’s account is not a concept limited to nonliterary texts only but covers both literary and nonliterary texts. This little history of the trajectory of genre theory since the mid-1980s has pinpointed how genre theory of today conceives of genre as understood by those using them in their everyday activities and how genre use may activate or generate actions in others spheres of activity.

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The Achievements of Genre Theory

I will claim that genre theory has gained success because it has been able to move a concern with genre from the classical rhetorical genres and the concern with text categorization to the “de facto genres” and their function in various everyday activities and practices in which the use of texts is implicated. Such a move makes genre a public concern as it is able to illustrate to us that whenever we meet or are confronted with a form of text, that text demands something from us in order to equip us to act appropriately in a particular social context. Such an interest applies to numerous situations and they cannot be enumerated or categorized once for and for all. Moreover, through the concepts of genre sets, genre and activity systems, genre repertoire and genre function we learn the situatedness of every form of textual interaction. Thus, with genre theory we are able to understand the regulative and communicative force of texts, how texts are bound up in networks, local practices and macro systems of activity. We get to see how textual study can actually tell us something about ourselves as private persons and citizens actively participating in activities and practices demanding writing and reading texts as part of actions. In other words, to take seriously the “de facto genres” is to take seriously the historically developed demand for communicating experience, motives, interests, knowledge, information or ideas without which society cannot grow. So, the next big question for genre theory is where to move on from here and with what means. This book is an attempt in that direction.

References Andersen, J. (2008). The concept of genre in information studies. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 42(1), 339
367. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem of speech genres. In V. W. McGee (Trans.), C. Emerson, & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60
102). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bawarshi, A. (2000). The genre function. College English, 62(3), 335
360. Bawarshi, A., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research, and pedagogy (Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition). Colorado and Indiana: Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse. Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge. The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79
101). London: Taylor & Francis.

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Bazerman, C. (1997). Discursively structured activities. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4(4), 296
308. Bazerman, C. (2003). Speech acts, genres and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices (pp. 309–339). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bazerman, C. (2013). A theory of literate action: Literate action (Vol. 2). Forth Collins, Colorado: Parlor Press & The WAC Clearinghouse. Berkenkotter, C. (2001). Genre systems at work: DSM-IV and the rhetorical recontextualization in psychotherapy paperwork. Written Communication, 18, 326–349. Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Derrida, J. (1980). The law of genre. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 55
81. Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the professions. Historical and contemporary studies of writing in professional communities (pp. 336
380). Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Devitt, A. J. (2004). Writing genres. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Geisler, C. (2001). Textual objects: Accounting for the role of texts in the everyday life of complex organizations. Written Communication, 18, 296–325. Goody, J. (1986). The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKenzie, D. F. (1986). Bibliography and the sociology of texts. The Panizzi Lectures 1985. London: British Library. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151
167. Miller, C. R. (1994). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 67
78). London: Taylor & Francis. Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (1994). Genre repertoire: The structuring of communicative practices in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39(4), 541–574. Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society. An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4), 504
554. Schryer, C. F. (1993). Records as genre. Written Communication, 10, 200
234. Smith, D. E. (1974). The social construction of documentary reality. Sociological Inquiry, 44(4), 257
268. Smith, D. E. (1984). Textually-mediated social organization. International Social Science Journal, 34, 59
75. Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations. A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weber, M. (1968). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

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Winsor, D. A. (1999). Genre and activity systems. The role of documentation in maintaining and changing engineering activity systems. Written Communication, 16(2), 200
224. Yates, J. (1989). Control through communication: The rise of system in American management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. J. (1992). Genres of organizational communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media. Academy of Management Review, 17(2), 299
326.

Chapter 2

Re-Describing Knowledge Organization — A Genre and Activity-Based View Jack Andersen

Abstract Purpose
This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those activities and practices constituting and causing concrete knowledge organization activity. Genre and activity theory is put forward as a framework for situating such a re-description. Findings
By means of genre and activity theory, the chapters argues that understanding the genre and activity systems, in which every form of knowledge organization is embedded, makes us capable of seeing how knowledge organization, as a genre, both can be a tool and an object in genred human activities. Originality/value
In contrast to much research into knowledge organization, this chapter does not emphasize techniques, standards, or rules to be the sole object of study. Instead, an emphasis is put on the genre and activity systems informing and shaping concrete forms of knowledge organization activity. With this, we are able to understand how knowledge organization activity also contributes to construct genre and activity systems and not only aid them. Keywords: Genre theory; activity theory; activity systems; knowledge organization

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 13
42 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011003

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Introduction

In information studies, there is a strong and powerful history of research into the organization of knowledge.1 Many concepts, standards, rules, and techniques have been devised (see, e.g., Svenonius, 2000). Moreover, knowledge organization is by many seen as a distinct professional practice of information studies resting on the assumptions of modernity (Mai, 2011). In today’s digital culture, we are witnessing an abundance of activities having to do with the access to and organization of knowledge. With Manovich’s claim about the database as the cultural form of our digital age (Manovich, 2002), we can say that knowledge organization is no longer a particular professional practice belonging to the ethos of a particular profession but a social and cultural practice carried out and shaped by many people in their everyday lives with information; it is a social reality, and information access has become a cultural category in its own right (Manovich, 2002, p. 217). Thus, one would expect research into the organization of knowledge to burgeon these days. But this is not the case. We have not yet developed the appropriate tools for addressing knowledge organization as a social and cultural practice. With notable exceptions (e.g., Bowker & Star, 1999; Feinberg, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Furner, 2007; Hansson, 2013; Hjørland, 2003; Mai, 2011; Tennis, 2012), it seems like the subject is still being researched exclusively as a distinct professional practice. This puts the scholarly understanding of the cultural and social importance of the subject in the shadow. We need to recognize knowledge organization as a social and cultural practice shaping us in our daily encounters with the worlds of social and cultural communication. The importance of research into knowledge organization reaches far beyond the academy, as our everyday lives are saturated with computer and media-based activities relying heavily on the easy access to information provided by information systems. Or as Bazerman (2012) reminds us, while recognizing the social importance of effective search engines and other systems of structuring knowledge and inscribing writing, we still need to understand the activity contexts of those producing and using knowledge

1. Nowadays it is sometimes labeled information architecture (cf. Rosenfeld & Morville, 2002) but I will stick to the old, knowledge organization. My use of knowledge organization may be uneasy for some readers as I deliberately use it in a broad sense from indexing/classification systems through databases and search engines to libraries or institutions performing like libraries. For pragmatic reasons, I find it productive to have such a broad notion as it opens to us an array of practices and activities having to do with access to and organization of knowledge. We should not delimit ourselves in a time where these practices and activities are the real “stuff” people are experiencing in their everyday interactions with e.g. search engines. As Bowker and Star (1999, p. 13) argues, “… it is central to social life.”

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and information because no matter how fragmentary, how automatic, and how fast information comes to a user, the very user (herself/himself placed in an activity contexts) must ultimately make sense of the information found and that sense cannot be made without understanding the various contexts of activity (and the practices) producing that information (Bazerman, 2012). Mai (2011) has made a similar call for further research in knowledge organization: … in the late-modern society where the diversity of human experience is becoming increasingly prevalent and it is accepted that any fact has multiple interpretations, and where pluralism flourishes, we need to rethink the conceptual foundation of classification work and theory and build a foundation that starts from an interpretive, pluralistic assumption. (Mai, 2011, p. 711) To this, one might add that human experience is to a large extent articulated in the many diverse textual forms produced by many diverse activity contexts. Textual forms produced and used in a variety of activity contexts are what we call genres. Thus, what I am going to be concerned with in this essay is to offer an account of knowledge organization based in genre and activity theory; an account of how these diverse socially formed human experiences and their corresponding realizations in a variety of textual forms and how the actions of these textual forms shape and develop knowledge organization as a human activity. While my main focus is on developing a theoretical re-description of knowledge organization, I am also aware that the transmission, storing, and handling of knowledge is also a practical endeavor. With regard to his argument about the importance of placing writing in a central role in a new agenda for rhetoric, Charles Bazerman, for instance, maintains … a commitment to the practical rhetorical project of providing tools for reflective, strategic use of language … providing a new direction for the way forward as we begin to address the practical needs of composing communications in new media. To do that, however, we must first come to terms with the world of writing which has become infrastructural for modern society, even as modern society is venturing into new digital ways of being. (Bazerman, 2013, p. 5) I also maintain a commitment to the practical project of providing tools for thinking reflectively and strategically about the access to and organization of knowledge. There is a rich vocabulary and a rich conceptual toolbox already established for this purpose. But we must take a step back and add a theoretical level in order to understand how knowledge organization too “… has become infrastructural for modern society.” Access to and organization of digital forms of communication is crucial to many of our

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professional, everyday life, and private activities. Genre studies, as developed in rhetoric and composition studies as well as in business and technical communication during the last three decades, provide us with a possibility for locating our understanding of the organization of knowledge in a theoretical context where social action and textual interaction is underscored. Knowledge organization is both a way of serving social action and textual interaction and a way of producing social action and textual interaction. For instance, the widespread use of written communications during the last centuries has in effect produced at least two other corresponding written genres controlling and organizing writings, tokens or items: the bibliography (Andersen, 2008a, 2008b) and the list (Goody, 1977); the list, or the activity of ordering symbols or items, has even argued as the invention of writing (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992). These genres of inscribing and organizing writing did not only represent and store these writings. By representing and storing writing, this very activity of organizing became itself part of the diverse activities using writing for some social action. So, in what follows, I will re-describe knowledge organization in light of how modern views on how genre is understood in terms of social action and activity contexts. This re-description will be carried out in four main steps. First, I will very concretely describe the knowledge organization situation in order to make a case for how we might see it in genre terms. Then I will describe the challenge presented to knowledge organization by modern information systems and how genre theory may be a way of confronting this challenge. By consequence, my final step is to analyze knowledge organization in view of genre and activity theory.

2.2.

The Knowledge Organization Situation — A Description

Imagine this: A collection or list of items (e.g., documents, concepts, knowledge, data, information, text, or other cultural artifacts) is present. Those items are put into some sort of structure or order; that is, they are arranged according to some sort of relationship. The items are described using some sort of language; for example, a controlled vocabulary (thesaurus, taxonomy, list of selected index terms, a subject headings list), the language of the items themselves, or of those describing the items, that is, the natural language vocabularies. The purpose of describing these items in the collection with a chosen form of language is, from a strictly information studies point of view, retrieval — so the literature goes at least. Thus, there is a belief that some sort of phenomena (the items) can be described and

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ordered by means of a transparent use of language. Those phenomena can again be found using language when searching for them. This is a very, very simplified version of the knowledge organization situation. What do we have here? First of all, a fundamental belief in, or need for (or at worst, an obsession with), the necessity of describing and organizing a collection or list of items. “To classify is human,” says Bowker and Star (1999, p. 1). As human beings, as social agents and, consequently, as users of language we classify when we are engaged with language. “Where is that K-Mart, you talked about the other day?” one asks. The reply is: “oh, it is up on Hollister.” Here we classify and talk about a particular store, not any store; what we really have said is this “I want to know where THIS place is and NOT any place.” The reply we get is also classificatory in nature. It points to a particular road, not any road. Thus, with language we classify. But we classify because we use language to accomplish something. That something is engendered by our actions, knowledge, responses, motivations, needs, intentions, arguments, consciousness, creativity, and by those we want to accomplish something with or address. As a result, retrieval is not the only purpose of classifying or organizing items in a given collection, as sometimes stated in the knowledge organization research literature. Social action is the purpose and retrieval is one out of many means of carrying out a social action. Secondly, if the collection is already established, there is some set of order already in place. A decision has been made that this particular collection is needed for a given purpose on these grounds. That is, some outside action and activity have led to the production of the collection. Yet, these actions and activities are not “outside” the collection but inside the collection as they constitute the collection. They have been internalized by the collection. Some people with some interests, motives, and arguments have decided that this collection is important, useful, or relevant for a purpose the collection can help to accomplish. The items to be included in the collection must be described in relation to the items, and their assigned descriptions, already there in the collection. That is, the structure of the collection shapes how and in what ways the items to be included are going to be described. Decisions must be made about how to justify why the incoming item is going to be assigned that word or concept, or to that category. In other words, for what kinds of items have these words, concepts, or categories typically been applied so far? When included, the newly arrived items become part of the new structure of the collection; a structure that is going to determine the description of future items. Thus, categories and structures carry out genred-activities as they are “stabilized-for-now,” as Schryer (1993) called genres. Thirdly, we have a belief in that items can actually be described linguistically (or symbolically). Why do we want to describe items linguistically given our collection? We want items to have a form they do not yet possess because we want the items to be able to be part of

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the typified social actions the collection is generating or is aiding in accomplishing. All these actions on and decisions about collection, items, and descriptions of items are made by people, organizations, or algorithms, itself a product of human activity, on behalf of other people, communities, or organizations and are as such to be conceived of as social action. A particular form of social action is carried out by structuring and organizing knowledge. But the very social actions mediated by a collection are of course potentially multiple and unpredictable in advance. With this rather simple-minded description, I have tried to make an opening regarding how it is possible to produce a re-description of knowledge organization from a genre and activity-based point of view. This initial description suggests that there are practices and activities constituting and generating the very act of organizing knowledge and we must come to terms with how we can account for these practices and activities in order to paint a picture of knowledge organization activity in society and culture. Thus, I will now go a step further and account for what motivates such a re-description of knowledge organization.

2.3.

Re-Describing Knowledge Organization: A Proposal for a New Understanding

Knowledge organization is a practical field. You store, index, and organize some documents or some information with some assigned words or labels, nowadays in many cases done by algorithmic means. This very activity of storing, organizing, and assigning words or labels to documents is, fundamentally, a social and human activity as it is the actions, motivations, choices, intentions, practices, or purposes of some people or groups of people (algorithms or not) that determine how, why and what kinds of documents are stored and organized (or not) in particular activity contexts. As a field of research, knowledge organization must among other things critically analyze these human activities constituting knowledge organization as a human activity itself. This gives us the opportunity to situate knowledge organization as a purposeful goal-directed activity in a framework where the interactions of the forms of knowledge, forms of texts, and social worlds of people are at the frontage: genre theory. Humans are social and communicative beings participating in and transforming their social worlds by means of symbolic tools like texts, utterances, ideas, and information technologies. Studies of orality (cf. Havelock, 1963; Ong, 1982) tell us that there are indications of ways of structuring and retrieving knowledge by means of rhymes, songs, and other repeatable actions in oral cultures. Moreover, these scholars suggest that

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oral literature was a way of controlling and organizing the myths, stories, and knowledge of oral cultures in order to ensure social structure, hierarchies, and heritage. From a knowledge organization point of view, we can use this for pointing out the connection between human activity and knowledge organization and how the latter both was a product of the former but also an activity itself sustaining human activity as such. With the invention of writing some 5000 years ago, humans slowly began to externalize their memory and storage activity and began creating new practices based on writing such as record-keeping (Goody, 1986, 1987). With printing, the standardization of textual works became possible and bibliographies could be printed enumerating texts in some sort of standardized way (Eisenstein, 1979). Computers, digital, and networked media re-enforced the social and cultural effect of organizing of texts or information because of the database structure embedded in such media (Finnemann, 1999, 2011, 2014; Manovich, 2002). Thus, the history of media has changed knowledge organization activity because the history of media is a history of how texts or information have been inscribed and stored differently depending on the available means for production, storage, and retrieval. Now, we live in an age where it might be tempting to view the activity of organizing knowledge as old-fashioned and irrelevant to our digital culture as search engines and similar media systems do the work of knowledge organization and, therefore, we do not need to reflect on or theorize on these matters. The former is to a large extent true whereas the latter is too hasty a conclusion. We (the users, the searchers, the readers, the writers, the public etc.) may not perceive of it as knowledge organization. But organizing knowledge, and our reliance on it, takes place as an everyday social and cultural practice as digital media that is surrounding us relies on the database (a genre of knowledge organization) as its communicative form (Manovich, 2002). For that reason, we should care about knowledge organization whether we call it by that name or not. When we for instance use search engines for some purpose, we also use a form of knowledge organization as it is accomplished by the very search engine and its algorithm (Gillespie, 2014; Halavais, 2009). We are only able to find those documents or that information that is stored and described in the database of the search engine. This situation also applied if we would be using library catalogues or online bibliographies or the like. But there is one main and crucial difference: what “feeds” the search engine is quite different from what “feeds” a library catalogue or an online bibliography. The search engine and its underlying robot technology and algorithm harvest the Internet for web sites representing, for instance, private or public institutions, government agencies, web sites of private people, universities, NGO’s, web sites in different formats (e.g., pdf, html, word-document, Wikipedia entries, .org, .com, .edu) and store and index what is found in a database in order to

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make it retrievable by those using the search engine. The library catalogue or online bibliographies do a different kind of harvesting: they do not do it automatically only; their algorithms are the policies of the institutions of the catalogues and bibliographies and the persons representing those institutions that are responsible for selecting those documents that are relevant to the purpose of the catalogue or bibliography. What provides content to library catalogues or bibliographies are usually the products of the publishing industry mainly: books, magazines, journals, etc. As for library catalogues and bibliographies, documents are described for retrieval by so-called bibliographic records describing those documents; that is, the bibliographic record, the text of knowledge organization, served as a kind of text mediating between the very document and the search of that document in a library catalogue (Andersen, 2002). The bibliographic record does not exist in search engines even though the kind of text (i.e., metadata) provided by the bibliographic record is also attached to digital materials. But contrary to a library catalogue or bibliography you do not search in a pool of bibliographic records when searching a search engine. You search among the “real” documents or information attached with some metadata. What makes up search engines are the social worlds of people, collectives and organizations and their communicative actions with forms of digital information. A search engine like Google “… digitizes real-world information, from library collection to satellite images to comprehensive photo records of city streets” (Gillespie, 2014, p. 170). To this, we may also add full texts such as scholarly articles, academic books, references to books, information from commercial sites such as travel agencies and online shops. In a print world, these forms of communication would be separated due to their social and institutional character. In a digital world, they are still separated. But as items in a search engine, they appear as forms of information on par with each other. As such full texts (re)present themselves. Here is another big difference. Library catalogues and online bibliographies can and could not provide access to full text material because many of the documents represented did not exist as digital materials and if materials are available as digital materials, library catalogues and bibliographies may not be allowed to provide access to them. Search engines work from the opposite point of departure: in most cases, they digitally store and describe digital materials only (Finnemann, 2014), no matter whether these materials are academic documents, commercial sites, or private web pages. The activity contexts producing and making up content for search engines are very active in their efforts to get included in the search engines because they want our attention turned to the contents or products they offer (Halavais, 2009). The activity contexts competing for producing

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content or products to be included in search engines do not perceive of the search engines as a medium for storing and providing access to knowledge only. To them, search engines are also a market place for trade and businesses. Likewise the producers of search engines also view them as business products and their corresponding concept of search engine quality is customer satisfaction (Van Couvering, 2007). This, too, suggests how knowledge organization is social action and as such is part of other social actions. What can be found, or expected to be found, with the use of search engines is of a quite different nature than what can be found in a library catalogue or online bibliography because the respective activity contexts producing content for inclusion are different. Therefore, attention to the activity contexts producing content seems crucial. Recently, this has also been argued by Gillespie: “Understanding what is included in such databases [databases on the web] requires an attention to the collection policies of information services, but should also extend beyond to the actual practices involved” (Gillespie, 2014, p. 170; my insertion). The question of what and who provides content to the knowledge organization activity of systems like search engines and the like, and why and how it is done, is what I want to address by means of genre theory. All this suggests a need for a re-description of knowledge organization that is capable of providing an understanding of the social actions and activity contexts informing knowledge organization, itself a form of social action in society. We can, I argue, address “the actual practices involved” by turning to genre theory. The provision of content is done by the diverse genre and activity systems constituting knowledge organization activity. At the same time, knowledge organization activity also co-constitutes diverse genre and activity systems as it is coordinating the actions of people, texts, and knowledge driving the very genre and activity systems. It is this duality I consider as a re-description of knowledge organization. What necessitates such a re-description of knowledge organization is that we have access to so many complexes of forms of texts, knowledge or information that we stand in danger of losing sight of the fact that knowledge or information always come in a form and that different forms of knowledge and information are tied to human activities based on the production, storage, and use of texts or information (Bazerman, 2012; Spinuzzi, 2003; Yates, 1989). For theoretical and practical reasons, we cannot afford not to re-describe knowledge organization. In order to provide a theoretical counterbalance to the mere technicalities of modern information systems, we need to see knowledge organization as embedded in human communicative activities and we need to understand the rules, algorithms, and techniques of knowledge organization as expressing, or shaping, particular forms of social actions. We need to demonstrate this in

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order to make ourselves aware of that searching for and organizing knowledge do not come out of the blue but are historically developed practices enacted on by the motivations and actions of people, systems, and texts involved in goal-oriented activities. With genre theory, we put knowledge organization into a new perspective from where it may be able to act on the challenge facing knowledge organization: that much our knowledge comes to us as organized in and mediated by social structures, human activity systems, texts, people, and media such as search engines. Thus, what does knowledge organization look like when we re-describe it from a genre and activity perspective? This is what I am going to examine in the next section.

2.4.

Knowledge Organization — A Genre and Activity-Based View2

In examining knowledge organization from the perspective of genre and activity, I will derive the consequences of genre and activity theory as it was outlined in Chapter 1. In four steps, I will be discussing what genre as social action entail for knowledge organization, the notion of typification, the implication of the user-oriented nature of genre, and the activity-based view on genre. That is, what follows is an interpretation of knowledge organization when looking at it using central concepts from a genre and activity view. Attempts at understanding knowledge organization in genre-theoretical terms have been made in information studies (e.g., Andersen, 2004, 2008a, 2008b; Crowston & Kwasnik, 2003; Feinberg, 2009; Foscarini, 2013; McKenzie & Davies, 2012). By means of genre theory, Andersen (2004, 2008a, 2008b) proposed a theory of knowledge organization arguing that it would help us understand the role of knowledge organization in relation to larger forms of social organization. Crowston and Kwasnik (2003) suggested using genre in document description as that would enhance an understanding of the use of documents. Feinberg (2009) examined information systems as documents and argued for an understanding of genre as a communicative mechanism for information system design. McKenzie and Davies (2012) illustrated how personal information or records management in a private household connected to other institutionalized systems of genre and activity, thereby pointing to how personal records can be understood and analyzed while Foscarini (2013) initiated a dialogue between the field

2. My background for this section is outlined in Chapter 1 where the different concepts in genre theory are presented.

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of records management and genre studies. All in all, these studies point to how genre is capable of taking us in directions that may help us to understand the contexts of knowledge organization because they point to things that we may not have been able to see before. Knowledge organization research is not used to other fields calling upon it. However, in 2001, a group of writing and genre researchers published an article in which they introduced the concept of IText to cover “… information technologies with text at their core …” (Geisler et al., 2001, p. 270). They discussed concepts like literacy, rhetoric and workplace writing with regard to IText. About genre and IText they said Genre is also an important device for locating and organizing forms of information in indexing and accessing archives. Genre defines the forms in which information enters into people’s communicative activity and understanding of the socio-symbolic world. Without the orientation genre provides, people would not know where to look for information or what that information might mean. (Geisler et al., 2001, p. 278) Geisler et al. (2001) rightly point out that genre can be an important device in the organization of knowledge. But they also remind us that genre bring something additional to our understanding of knowledge organization. Information comes in a genre-defined form and as such shapes people’s further social interaction. Not knowing the forms of information and their functional place in communicative activities, our ability to locate and make sense of information is impeded. These two latter arguments have as such nothing to do with the internal workings of knowledge organization. But they do suggest that genre as defining the forms of information and as a means of orientation is also a key in unlocking knowledge organization as social action. One would think that there is an obvious connection between knowledge organization and genre theory. Clearly, many forms of knowledge organization systems handle genres. Many document or records management system may even have their classifications built around genres instead of topics as the primary organizing principle simply because topic in the classic sense of a document having one or more topics does not necessarily apply in a company or organization context. In addition to that, we must remember that … catalog users are never indifferent to genre, though they might not themselves put it that way. One never really wants just any kind of book on a topic, though one may not be able to say just what kind one does want. Providing content descriptions in terms both of topic and of kind is simply recognizing the ordinary relevance of

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Jack Andersen information about kinds of books. (Wilson & Robinson, 1990, p. 38; emphasis in original)

This quote still applies. Whether we use modern forms of knowledge organization such as search engines, we are never unconcerned with genre. In fact, in the moment we engage in a literate activity of reading, writing, and searching for texts, we begin to become a function of genre (cf. Bawarshi, 2000) and a part of an activity system. Our modern challenge is that so many complex forms of text and information speak to us that we tend to miss the genre game.

2.4.1.

Knowledge Organization as Social Action

Understanding knowledge organization as social action requires that we remind ourselves of the basic tenets of modern rhetorical genre theory: that genre is more than not a matter of classification and form. Genre goes beyond the traditional Cartesian split between substance and form and sees both form and substance in terms of the social action the genre is used to accomplish. But what does it mean to understand and theorize knowledge organization as social action, what does knowledge organization accomplish? At first glance, knowledge organization might seem troubled when claiming that genre is not principally about classification or categorization. Of course knowledge organization has to do with classification or categorization. However, recognizing knowledge organization as social action takes us in another direction than knowledge organization as classification or categorization only. It requires us in information studies to examine what sorts of social action is knowledge organization part of or supporting. Identifying knowledge organization as social action demands that it is action on behalf of somebody and for somebody. As social action, knowledge organization is situated in given activities and in given contexts. As social action knowledge organization must be understood through the action knowledge organization is used to carry out and how knowledge organization mediates human activity. Genre theory provides knowledge organization research with a perspective that sees knowledge organization as situated in typified and recurrent activities. Consequently, we are forced to understand the social activity of knowledge organization as broader than retrieval. Genre compels us to recognize how knowledge organization (always) is situated within particular localized typified human activities. Looking at knowledge organization as social action takes us in directions where will have to locate and understand who carries out social actions, what is at stake in these forms of social action and what are the

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broader institutional structures for social action. Bazerman (2012, p. 378; italics added) puts it this way: Of course great gains are made by rapid search of wide electronic resources, and we can learn much from atomized pieces brought together in a single space, yet for many other purposes we need to understand provenance, genre, activity context, and social and institutional structures from which the information arises and in which it is intended to be used. As we develop tools, systems, and concepts to draw together more heterogeneous pieces from more heterogeneous circumstances, we also need to develop tools, systems, and concepts to see information in its particular circumstances of use. I will make an attempt to develop these tool and concepts that makes us see information in its particular circumstances of use. Understanding knowledge organization as a form of social action means that something is at stake and your activity is oriented toward something or someone. It means that someone has made a decision about having an organized collection of information or a standardized list of items. As a result, we need to understand “… how an information provider thinks of the data collection it undertakes” (Gillespie, 2014, p. 170). How an information provider thinks of its collection is part of another social action in which the very collection is a means. This social action is what constitutes the organized collection. The question of what makes up a given system for knowledge organization has been investigated by Bowker and Star (1999). They looked at how the system of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is not a universal way of classifying diseases but rather an ongoing negotiations among the interests of the diverse local and social worlds (statisticians, government, public health sector, industry) coping with the production and use of information of medical diseases. During its historical development, the ICD coordinated the actions of these social worlds and their efforts to make ICD adopt their different representations of medical diseases. Bowker & Star’s argument (1999, p. 138) is that a list such as ICD is “stitched together genres forming a genre system.” As such the construction, the maintenance and negotiation of ICD, like Schryer’s argument on records as genre (Schryer, 1993), can be seen as a discursive practice constituted by the work and ideologies of the involved social worlds expressed through genres. Thus, the representations and configurations of information can be seen as the result of the social actions around the ICD and consequently become the social action of ICD. With genre as social action, we also come to recognize how texts and forms of information help organize people, activity, and knowledge (Bazerman, 2004). Particular texts used in particular activities have

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particular purposes. That means that the knowledge these texts mediate, codify, and organize shapes the very purpose and subsequent activity of the texts. A given genre or system of genres structure and mediate activity and through this genres also structure knowledge. That is, genre is an expression of a particular form of knowledge organization. Genres organize and codify knowledge in a particular way according to the typified activity a genre is part of. This produces an understanding of knowledge organization as having to do with how organized knowledge is based in typified human activities and recurrent situations by means of various artifacts (e.g., texts, media or information systems) and particular user collectives. As a result, genre tells us how knowledge is organized in repeated patterns of use of forms of information. In addition to this, we can make two further points about what genre brings to us. First, viewing genre as a category of knowledge organization in knowledge organization research provides us with an opportunity to expand the concept of literary warrant (Beghtol, 1986, 1995; Hulme, 1911) with a concept of genre warrant. While literary warrant holds that the collection and its words and concepts going to be used in indexing and classifying texts must appear (have warrant) in the texts being indexed and classified, genre warrant would be sensitive to the many forms of texts available and their regularized patterns of use. That is, the words and concepts chosen may not necessarily appear in the single forms of texts but in the very actions (e.g., instructing, giving orders, advising, synthesizing, lecturing, explaining, exploring) the texts accomplish on behalf of their user communities. Genre warrant is a way of recognizing not only content and words used in text types, because when “… recognizing a text type we recognize many things about the institutional and social setting, the activities being proposed, the roles available to writer and reader, the motives, ideas, ideology, and expected content of the document …” (Bazerman, 2000, p. 16). Genre warrant, in other words, is a way of recognizing how texts (and words and concepts) belong to communities and their activities. Second, genre makes us see that the content or the information in text is not only to be found inside very these forms. Content is an expression of repeated communicative actions produced by people involved in order to accomplish a given social task in a given social and institutional setting. Thus, being the product of socially developed ways of producing and communicating information, genre can prove to be a valuable analytical tool for knowledge organization research and practice. One means of social action is the text or a group of texts. Thus, understanding text in genre theory is not to view the text as an isolated or autonomous text. Rather, the text is understood in its local practices and the social and historical conditions contributing to make the action of the text realizable through typified actions. More precisely, from a genre point of

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view you try to understand the situation first and its social structures, its recurrent forms of action, the people involved in that situation and in these actions, and the means (e.g., texts) they may use in achieving the goals of the situation. In addition to this view on text, a genre is not defined by certain formally text features expressed by a given group of texts but, once again, defined by the purposeful and typified social action the genre is used to accomplish (Miller, 1984). Taking that understanding of genre and relocating it to our study of knowledge organization suggests that we must understand knowledge organization as situated in concrete, recurrent, and typified actions of people and institutions through the use of texts or other forms of information. What does this mean for us theoretically and methodologically? It means that in coming to terms with knowledge organization as a research object, we must understand the concrete situations and activities in which the knowledge organization activity is located. What are the repeated patterns of communicative action of the people and organizations in the recurrent situation, we must ask. Through this, we see how knowledge organization activity is part of these actions, both in constituting them and being constituted by them. Also, we get a very precise idea of the user collectives toward which knowledge organization activity is also oriented. When we understand the very same user collectives as performing typified actions (i.e., reading and writing reports, agendas, memos, business letters, and other forms of text), we not only understand what they work with, their genre set (Devitt, 1991), we also come to understand how these genre sets make up the organizations genre repertoire (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994), how they connect to other genre systems (Bazerman, 1994)3 and how these different forms of text serve different purposes and how they are valued differently. Since these forms of text to a very large extent are recognizable to the members of the user collectives in terms of the actions the texts accomplish, these members know to which situation fits a certain number of texts. Hence, a classic subject approach to organizing these texts may not be appropriate here as such an approach would detach texts them from their sites of activity and making them less recognizable to the user collectives using and relying on these texts in their typified actions and typification is an important element in understanding genre. 2.4.2.

Knowledge Organization and Typification

Since Miller (1984) introduced the sociological notion of typification, from Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, it has had a central place in genre

3. See chapter 1 for an overview of the concepts of genre set, genre repertoire, and genre systems.

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theory as it provides a means through which we recognize not only how situations recur but how typical situations recur; that is, situations with recurring and repeatable actions carried out by people, texts, systems or organizations. Appropriating a given form of knowledge organization is to become typified by it. As an instantiation of typification, as a stabilized-for-now form of action, knowledge organization typifies the objects, items, or forms of information by assigning a symbol and a particular place among other organized objects, items or forms of information. That is, with typification knowledge organization at one and the same time creates an expectation of what the assigned symbols mean and thereby making organized forms of information act habitually. To a certain extent, this is also to make forms of information invisible because by typification things become routine and standardized (Bowker & Star, 1999). But this also implies that typification ensures the social action of knowledge organization. With this, typification comes to serve two things. From a social and cultural perspective, knowledge organization speaks to us through typification and exhibits its habits of discourse, its genre function so to speak (Bawarshi, 2000). Moreover, through typification knowledge organization socializes and acculturates the organized forms of information. Socialization of forms of information does, however, not happen by knowledge organization alone. Some other forms of social action and social organization have already socialized the forms of information through its repeated use in a given sphere of human activity. For instance, my university wants to record all my activities having to do with research, publishing, refereeing, committee membership, grants, etc. These are deemed important for my university, for my department, and for me. For the university as a whole, these activities become part of the activity of the university and can be used in measurements of research efforts of the university. My department can use these activities as displaying their own overall research activity in terms of the actions of its faculty members. This can be used in comparative analyses of the departments inbetween at the university and financial support may be granted on this ground. Further, it can be used for measuring my personal research record and if I perform well I may be assigned more research time or given an additional payment. I know that the system recording my research activities will be used as just described on all levels and my research activities are therefore conducted with this in mind. Because the administrative levels above me have chosen to value exactly these activities, these are also the main access points in the information system recording my research activities. I am not able to submit anything else that I personally would value. I can but it is not counted. Thus, while the knowledge organization activity here have typified the way research activities are recorded, it has done so because the social actions (of the university and of the department)

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constituting knowledge organization have made a choice as to what kinds of activities that are deemed relevant. Consequently, at one point, we get to see the actions that knowledge organization is accomplishing through typification. But we also get to see how the typification of knowledge organization is part of and a response to other typified and recurrent social actions. With typification we come to an understanding of knowledge organization as social action based in typified and recurrent situations. But with typification and its “stabilized-for-now” tendency, this also speaks to us in a naturalized way. From an analytical, theoretical, and practical point of view, we are accordingly provided with an understanding that things could have been organized differently. This we know very well in knowledge organization research (Bowker & Star, 1999; Hjørland, 1998; Mai, 2011; Olson, 2002). However, typification takes us further than that. It provides us with a way of asking questions about the social and cultural effects of knowledge organization activity; it makes us aware of the choices, motivations, or interests guiding knowledge organization activity and, finally, typification makes us understand that bias is not supposed to be or can be eliminated. In fact, as a form of typification and social action, bias drives knowledge organization. But as analysts, we should be critically scrutinizing bias that deliberatively impedes the organizing and access to forms of information. A conclusion to such analyses can never be, however, that bias must be eliminated because then we ignore the fact that knowledge organization is social action and for knowledge organization to act like that it needs a way of treating things that will further and stabilize social action and that is typification. 2.4.3.

Genre, Users and Knowledge Organization

Genre also brings a new dimension to the notion of user studies in information studies. Studying users of forms of knowledge organization is a crucial step in trying to understand and develop more efficient access. However, there has been a tendency in user studies that somehow isolates the user, knowledge organization, and other tools used in this interaction conceptualizing users as cognitive and passive individuals. With genre we get to understand users as emergent bodies of sense-makers capable of formulating and mobilizing action. In connection with genre and genre users, Devitt (2004, pp. 2
3) writes that genre theory of today … sees genres as types of rhetorical actions that people perform in their everyday interactions with their worlds […] genre should be redefined rhetorically according to the people who participate in genres and make the forms meaningful, a shift from genre as defined by literary critics or rhetoricians to genre as defined by its users.

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People’s rhetorical actions with the genres defined and understood by them is what is at stake in genre theory. The classification of genre is ethnomethodological as it “… it seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates” (Miller, 1984, p. 155). Devitt (2004, p. 9; my insertion) underscored this aspect about genre when stating that … studying genres is studying how people use language to make their way in the world. Examining genres as defined by language users rather than by scholars or critics [or by information professionals/ information scholars] gives us quite different answers to such questions as which classificatory systems are best and how many genres there are. The study of language use, of genres, is to try to understand what people do with language and how they accomplish what they do when using language. In other words, user studies in this perspective are trying to understand how users use genres and other tools in order to achieve their goals in human activity. Users are a function of genres as Bawarshi (2000) put it. The user is shaped by the language, and genre, and the action shaping the goal. Thus, what is studied is not texts in isolation, the user in isolation, or the context as bucket but the complex interaction between users as social agents, their tool-use and their goal-directed and typified activities and how they shape each other in a dialectical activity. The epistemological interest is what knowledge users make use of in their everyday genred interactions with their world. What is proposed so far is an understanding of knowledge organization as the means and not the goal. Sometimes in knowledge organization research one gets the impression that the very construction of a given system of knowledge organization is the ultimate goal. This may be so. But through such a conception we will never be able to produce an understanding of knowledge organization as a form of social action and of uses knowledge organization for which purposes. Conflating the means and goals in knowledge organization research makes invisible to us the social actions forms of knowledge organization are performing. This seems detrimental to knowledge organization in a time where we have easy and rapid access to many complexes of forms of information but stand in real danger of not knowing “… information in its particular circumstances of use” (Bazerman, 2012, p. 378). These particular circumstances of use can be further addressed through the notions of genre sets, genre and activity systems, and genre repertoire. 2.4.4.

Genre, Activity and Knowledge Organization

From a knowledge organization point of view, the notion of genre sets, genre and activity systems, and genre repertoires (see Chapter 1) are

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powerful analytical tools for examining the organization of texts, work, knowledge, and human activity and how all this gets typified. However, we may note that the systems or media for storing, coordinating, and organizing these sets of texts and actions of people and texts are a bit absent in these concepts of genres and their interconnections. These genres, given their discursive and epistemological value in communicative actions, form the basis for other present and future actions; a person may need to look something up in order to make the other texts work in the set or the person may need to store a text in the system in order to ensure documentation and to make that text usable in a possible future use of sets of texts. So, an information system may contain the whole genre set or be connected with other systems and as such are confronted with multiple genres, audiences, and uses (Russell, 2010). Knowledge organization is thereby part of and co-constituting the genre activity and this is what I am now going to go further into. I have been discussing knowledge organization as social action and argued how knowledge organization is constituted by other genred forms of social action. However, we still need to account for what spheres of activity are enacted with social action. People involved with genres, activity, and forms of knowledge organization are separated in time and space. Understandings of genre and activity system are important because it enables us to analytically re-construct the communicative situation constituting knowledge organization. For this purpose, we can turn to activity theory as developed in genre theory. My use of an activity-based theory of genre to knowledge organization is an attempt to look at knowledge organization from a perspective where typified communicative actions are the social actions of people engaged in some recurrent activity using tools; that is, a way of analyzing and understanding knowledge organization activity. Some forms of knowledge organization are done by algorithms (in search engines for instance), some forms of knowledge organization is a mix of human and algorithmic approaches (e.g., library catalogues), and, finally, some by humans only, for instance entries in Wikipedia. Whatever form it takes, these forms of knowledge organization are fundamentally human information labor, as argued by Downey (2014), and must be understood and analyzed as such. Thus, the question of whether to have automatic or humanly based forms of knowledge organization that has haunted library and information studies is not the question. It is not an either-or. They are both forms of social action and must be understood and analyzed as such. Looking at knowledge organization from an activity-based genre theory, my modest hope is to theoretically expose knowledge organization in such a perspective and try to pin point where this takes us in knowledge organization research. Genre theorists like Bazerman (1997) and Russell (1997)

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were among the first in genre theory attempting to connect the social action view of genre with activity theory as a way of understanding in what ways genre was doing something as social action and what this action motivated, generated, or connected to and the implications for learning, or getting to know, genres. David Russell provided a comprehensive analysis of genre and activity systems in order to understand the relationship between writing in school and writing in other social practices and “… the powerful institutions they serve” (Russell, 1997, p. 505). Russell’s objective is to understand how school writing and writing in other social practices are interconnected in various ways. I want to replace writing with knowledge organization here and try to suggest how we can understand the relation between forms of knowledge organization and other social practices are interconnected. Let us briefly recapitulate Russell’s arguments before using them in an analysis of knowledge organization. Going against the Bakhtinian dialogical face-to-face conversation metaphor as a unit of analysis, Russell pointed out that “… because writing is used to organize ongoing actions over much larger reaches of time and space than does face-to-face conversation, mobilizing material tools [nonlinguistic tools; my addition] in much more regularized and powerful ways” (Russell, 1997, p. 507). What Russell here points to is that because of the space-time dimensions in writing, theorizing writing is different from theorizing face-to-face conversation because … many collectives, such as disciplines, professions, governmental and educational institutions, have long-term objectives and motives beyond conversation, which constrain and afford participants’ actions (including writing) in powerful ways. In this broader level of analysis, the object(ive) of dialog is not ordinarily the conversation itself (as it might be in casual talk among friends or literary productions) but some shared object and long-term motive of the dyad or collective, to do some things to and with some things beyond talking … (Russell, 1997, p. 507) For this reason Russell turns to activity theory and the concept of activity system. Activity system is here referred to as “… any ongoing, objectdirected, historically conditioned, dialectically structured, tool-mediated human interaction […] These activity systems are mutually (re)constructed by participants historically, using certain tools and not others, including discursive tools such as speech sounds and inscriptions” (Russell, 1997, p. 510). We can make use of Russell’s analysis when re-describing knowledge organization. The analysis and argument provided by Russell can help us in situating knowledge organization and its interconnectedness with other social practices based on the production and use of information. We can

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also add to the model of activity Russell depicts. While Russell intends to account for the whole forms of activity systems informing school writing, his focus is obviously not the practices and activities of knowledge organization involved in making writing accessible. Russell does note however that “… written genres very often are powerfully linked to genres in other media as well, either directly or indirectly” (Russell, 1997, p. 514). I take these genres to be, among others, the genres of knowledge organization. Let us look at how knowledge organization looks like in view of genre and activity theory. Activity theory is a theory about the formation of human consciousness and how consciousness is shaped by, and shapes, the organized human activities by means of the active involvement of humans and tool-use in goal-oriented activities. Activity theory is particularly useful for understanding and describing how people actively make use of and appropriate particular tools (including documents, signs, institutions) in particular social practices in order to accomplish the goal of the activity in question. We use tools to think with and do things with and as such tools become part of us when appropriating them. The goal of the activity prescribes the directions and tool use made by the involved participants. However, using tools in specific (typified) ways helps not only to stabilize activity but also to transform activity and its goal(s) in the long run. Thus, tools mediate, stabilize, and transform human activity by the purposeful use made by people in particular typified actions. Activity theory can also be understood as a theory of knowledge organization as it is concerned with how knowledge is embodied in consciousness, in tools, in experience, and in human activity. This not only suggests that knowledge is organized through typified (genred) human interactions before entering a particular form of knowledge organization but also forces us see to how and in what ways our idea of knowledge organization in information studies connects to human activity consisting of subjects, tools, and an object forming the activity. It provides us with the means to locate our view of knowledge organization in a theoretical context where we able to see what constitutes knowledge organization activity. That is, to those other activities knowledge organization connects to. Both knowledge organization as object and as tool tells us how it is that knowledge organization is constituted by and is connected to other practices and activities. With a genre and activity-theory perspective, we have two ways to approach knowledge organization. First, we can understand knowledge organization as the object/outcome of an activity system. Second, we can understand knowledge organization as a mediational means (as tool) in human activity. For this purpose, I adopt Cole and Engestro¨m’s (1993) concept of activity system as outlined by Russell (1997).

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If we put knowledge organization as the object/goal of the activity, we have the designer’s point of view. The designer is the subject. The tools are texts, concepts, users, or other forms of knowledge organization. This activity picture (Figure 2.1) of knowledge organization identifies what informs or configures knowledge organization; it identifies how knowledge organization is the object of a tool-mediated activity. When viewed as object we see how user collectives or society as a whole through its use of written genres serve as a precondition for the construction of any form of knowledge organization. A designer of forms of knowledge organization cannot escape traveling through the tool-use activity of other activity systems and user collectives and the designer has got to be sensitive to what genres the user collectives have names for their discursive activities in order to respond appropriately with the design of the form of knowledge organization. In other words, a designer’s activity is not unmediated. It is mediated by both the artifacts/knowledge to be organized and by other activity systems. However, at the same time, any given form of knowledge organization cannot avoid pooling and standardizing the many written genres and their different activity systems (other scholarly fields) with different, or opposing, communicative needs. This happens at the cost of potentially making the relevant information unintelligible and inaccessible to its intended readers and their discursive activities. This contradiction (or tension) we must live by and the solution is not more standardization as it will recur. Bowker and Star (1999, p. 139), in connection with lists, referred to this situation as one of “… a permanent tension between attempts at standardization of lists and the local circumstances of those using them […]. The problem here is generic to all such efforts where diversity is the central issue in representing

Texts, concepts, culture, institutions, information systems, users, other activity systems

Designer

Knowledge organization

Figure 2.1: Knowledge organization as object.

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information.” This permanent tension referred to by Bowker and Star (1999) corresponds to the notion of contradictions in activity systems. Contradictions in activity systems cannot be erased but is rather seen as part of the dialectics of activity systems driven by the interests, motives, and desires of the various social agents and their tool-use. Thus, from an activity theory point of view, we can point to how any form of knowledge organization is the product of contradicting activities or multiple contexts and how it at the same time connects to these contradicting activities or multiple contexts (Russell, 2010). As such, knowledge organization corresponds to what Star and Griesemer (1989) called a boundary object; an object communicatively and epistemologically serving different social worlds. Moreover, as for the dialectics, knowledge organization as object also show us how any form of knowledge organization is caught between stabilization and de-stabilization over time, as shown by, among others, Tennis (2012). Tennis (2012), for instance, investigated what he called subject ontogeny; the change of a subject over time in an indexing language. Tennis’ case of eugenics is particularly useful here. Because of the move from a science to a non-science, Tennis shows how eugenics is treated in DDC over time and what problems it creates for collocation (i.e., the literature on the topic of eugenics is scattered in different versions of DDC). While recognizing the social conception of eugenics over time and the literatures producing knowledge about eugenics, Tennis nevertheless keeps focus on the change within the DDC. Viewing knowledge organization as object in activity-theory terms, we would have to look at the change in activity systems: Subjects organized by any form of knowledge organization change over time because the direction of the activity system changes. Not because of the desire or free will of designers. Thus, when understanding knowledge organization as an object in an activity system, we can add to Tennis’ concept of subject ontogeny and suggest how an analysis of the ontogeny of a subject could benefit from considering both the activity system(s) producing the subject and the forms of knowledge organization indexing that same subject. When looking at knowledge organization as tool (as mediational means), the activity system looks as shown in Figure 2.2. Knowledge organization as tool forces us to understand forms of knowledge organization as something people make use of, on par with other tools, in their goal-directed activities. Whereas information studies may have forms of knowledge organization as its object, for people participating in other discursive activities where text or knowledge production is a principal activity, knowledge organization acts as one tool among many. For this reason, we must try to see knowledge organization in ethnomethodological terms: what are people doing with it and for what purposes? Russell (1997) analyzed how cell biology students appropriated and operationalized

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User collectives

Locating arguments, organizing and coordinating activity

Figure 2.2: Knowledge organization as tool.

genres. That is, applying them in typical ways as typified responses to their discursive needs. From a knowledge organization point of view, we must ask the question: what typical ways and to what discursive needs can we expect people (e.g., students, scholars, blue-collar workers, the public) to use forms of knowledge organization in a way in which other tools (e.g., books) are not appropriate or helpful? We can of course act normatively and say that people should use forms of knowledge organization. But that does not bring us any closer to an understanding of knowledge organization as tool, as practice. Let us take university students as an example. Socially and communicatively what we learn students is particular (typified) ways of reading and writing (e.g., the cell biology students in Russell’s case). This is done through regularly reading scholarly texts and by regularly writing papers in accordance with some style approved by the field. Through this students learn, or appropriate, the genres of their field. They are getting genre knowledge (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995). They may not become fully experienced and knowledgeable readers and writers as scholars in the field. But they are introduced to the way of thinking, of taking action and communicating in their particular field of study in order to be better to understand and to better make sense of the doings of their field. In short, students are learning the cultural repertoire of their field and through this students get to develop their own perspective on topics and through this also help shaping the field. Another part of this cultural repertoire is also getting to know how the knowledge of the field in question is organized; what are the available means of relevant search engines, databases, encyclopedias, archives, and libraries. Now we can reframe the former question: how can students get to know, appropriate, the available means for locating for what is to them useful

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literature (i.e., of how the literature is organized and to be found)? What can students expect from forms of knowledge organization in their own activities? Through library instruction or information literacy courses, for instance, students are shown how to use certain databases, and other forms of knowledge organization, in terms of creating expectations as to what can be found, and cannot, in what ways is the literature indexed (e.g., doing a keyword search in traditional citation databases may be a bad thing because they do not index by keywords as their main activity but by citations), what kinds of access points are available and what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of certain access points in particular databases covering particular documents. For instance, in some fields title-based searches may be more appropriate than in others, where titles can tend be of a more rhetorical or symbolic nature (cf. Hjørland & Kyllesbech Nielsen, 2001). What is indexed? Is the particular field of study mainly a journal-based field or book-based field (as many fields in the humanities) or both? Through using a form of knowledge organization, students also get to see how the tensions or contradictions in-between different journals or different fields they have been witnessing when reading some of the literature of the field, are to some extent re-articulated in knowledge organization. The literature indexed is indexed at a particular point in time and space by a person or algorithm using a particular language. What appears as similar or related topics to students may not at all be treated alike in knowledge organization because people, algorithms, and language change over time (cf. Tennis, 2012). Even though particular ways of organizing the literature may seem irrational or dubious, it still may be a good idea to get sense of why the literature is organized as it is in order to use the form of knowledge organization in a beneficial way. It is not a question of whether the way the literature is organized is epistemologically correct or whether we should blindly accept it. It is a question of making sense of what knowledge organization is doing and how it is doing it.4 Formulated in genre terms, it may be a good idea to recognize the forms of typification articulated or displayed by knowledge organization. But students (and users and the public in general) are not passive users of knowledge organization because, as activity theory reminds us, activity is “… an ongoing, object-directed, historically conditioned, dialectically structured, tool-mediated human interaction” (Russell, 1997, p. 510). In a historical-dialectical process, users of a given form of knowledge organization are also its producers because they produce the ideas, beliefs, meanings, values, and knowledge to be embodied in and organized by

4. I am paraphrasing the book “What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices” by Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior (2004).

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knowledge organization; that is, users’ use of knowledge organization is it itself contributing to transforming knowledge organization as users are active agents participating in human activities in which they strive to achieve a goal through the use of particular tools. Thus, learning to know how the texts and the forms of information in a given field of activity are organized is also a way of being socialized into, or being typified by, a field on par with learning to read and write texts in the field. Knowledge organization is a tool among others in the genre repertoire of a field and as a tool knowledge organization also helps mediating the activity of the field in question.

2.5.

Concluding Remarks

Knowledge organization in many ways not only represents a field but, in genre and activity terms, constructs a field. It marks out limits (always provisionally), sets out what can and cannot be considered, what can be done, and as Miller (1984) pointed out, what motives people can legitimately have. Through a genre and activity view, we are able to understand the spheres of activity surrounding and constituting every form of knowledge organization. Given that many more people than ever are in daily touch with forms of knowledge organization as part of their everyday activities, knowledge organization research is better equipped to understand these everyday activities with knowledge organization when looking at them from the point of view of genre and activity theory. Genre and activity theory forces us to look at what people are doing with various sorts of tools (e.g., forms of knowledge, culture, texts) in order to accomplish their social actions in structured human activities. This implies that we need to take a shift in focus from knowledge organization as an object to a tool among many used by people in human activity. If we want to know how people use tools, we need to see them in their local, situated, and genre-enacted practices. I have tried to point out what knowledge organization looks like when viewed as social action and what other actions and activities, knowledge organization may generate, is connected to or is constituted by. This suggests that we need to understand knowledge organization as part of human activities and we cannot bracket-off these human activities as just “context.”

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Chapter 3

Genres without Writers: Information Systems and Distributed Authorship Melanie Feinberg

Abstract Purpose
This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers. Findings
Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support. Originality/value
In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 43
66 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011004

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Melanie Feinberg genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change. Keywords: Genre; information studies; metadata; cataloging; digital libraries; standards

In the 30 years since Carolyn Miller’s landmark essay reanimated the notion of genre as a form of social action, the focus of genre studies research has shifted from the text in isolation to the context in which a text is produced (Miller, 1984). Current genre theory emphasizes the social processes by which genres develop, stabilize, and come to partially constitute activities. Historical studies, including Bazerman (1988) and Yates (1989), show how textual forms such as the academic journal article (Bazerman) and corporate memo and report (Yates) arise in response to particular social situations, and then, over time, come themselves to shape and regulate their associated enterprises. Scientific research experiments are designed to accommodate the accepted structural elements of journal articles, for example, because adherence to established genre conventions (such as clearly defined article sections for data collection methods) facilitates acceptance in peer review. Similarly, business outcomes are quantified according to metrics that are easy to express via the quickly scanned charts and graphs of executive summaries in business reports, and outcomes that are not amenable to such measurement accordingly become difficult to justify. In this approach to genre, writing knowledge involves more than the ability to construct precise, grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs. Expert writers are in a sense socially skilled; they are able to appropriately manipulate genre conventions to accomplish their rhetorical goals (Bawarshi, 2003). Genre mastery is ultimately demonstrated through the ability of texts to serve particular functions and facilitate the activities in which they are embedded. Extending this socially focused understanding of genre, one area of research has explored the ways in which multiple genres intersect to support and structure complex activities. Concepts such as genre sets, repertoires, systems, and ecologies have been advanced to consider how genres are deployed in both sequential and overlapping ways (Spinuzzi, 2004). To take full account of the activities structured by such genre assemblages, researchers have paid greater attention to informal, personal, and ephemeral forms of documents, such as to-do lists and scribbled annotations, and have placed less emphasis on traditional forms of writing, such as journal articles and business reports. To compare the various frameworks associated with genre assemblages (sets, systems, repertoires, ecologies),

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Spinuzzi presents the example of Ralph, a fictional employee at a telecommunications company. Ralph uses calendars, notebooks, sticky notes, customer lists, account databases, faxes, and more to accomplish the simple task of securing a customer’s late payment. Although Ralph uses a vast array of document genres in his work activities, his employment of these genres does not involve the kinds of formal writing skills associated with academic articles and corporate reports. Ralph writes names and phone numbers on a list, and annotates customer records with notes. Many of these textual acts, Spinuzzi suggests, are not primarily communicative in nature (they aren’t directed toward an audience) but are rather mediating (they support tasks). If recent genre research has expanded to encompass many varieties and purposes of writing, however, it has remained oriented around writers as the purposeful initiators of genre development — even if these writers don’t describe the work they do as writing, nor do they present their innovations as skilled accomplishment. Spinuzzi’s scenario with Ralph, for example, focuses around the various texts he uses and produces to accomplish his work tasks. Although Ralph refers to customer records in databases, Spinuzzi frames these documents through Ralph’s perspective as the primary actor, or writer: Ralph adds notes to a record, for example, changing its content. Ralph has agency to shape the genres he uses, potentially innovating new genres or initiating changes in existing ones. In contrast, the database in Spinuzzi’s example functions much like a pad of sticky notes: both are merely environments to support Ralph’s writing, which in turn supports his work activities. In a subsequent study of analysts at Semoptco, a search engine optimization (SEO) firm, Spinuzzi notes the significant role of a newly developed in-house information system in the preparation of client reports. Spinuzzi’s interest in the information system lies primarily in the work that analysts perform to create new types of charts and graphs that the system doesn’t currently support (Spinuzzi, 2010). Spinuzzi’s analysis implies that the textual work involved in producing a new chart is creative and interesting: it constitutes the rapid development of new genres in response to constantly changing business conditions. For Spinuzzi, once a textual action, such as the instantiation of a particular kind of chart, becomes automated through the firm’s information system, it has become regularized and stable, and, from his perspective, not interesting as the object of study. Spinuzzi keeps his attention focused on the analysts (writers) and the textual products (reports) that result from their continuous, creative innovation of genre resources. When Spinuzzi looks at the SEO firm’s information system, which he calls BRILLIANCE, he sees a kind of document factory that produces information components for the writers (analysts) to creatively manipulate. BRILLIANCE takes over the rote, repetitive aspects of the writers’ work. BRILLIANCE itself is not

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understood as a site of dynamic, ongoing innovation and flexible deployment of genre resources. In this chapter, I demonstrate how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects, including Spinuzzi’s example of BRILLIANCE — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. However, in the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers. Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support. Genre studies have long-considered cumulative effects of what might initially appear to be small changes over time; foundational authors such as Miller, Bazerman, and Yates emphasize the barely perceptible transitions of genre as social situations change gradually over long periods. Minor deviations enacted by individual authors are retained and aggregated by others in a dispersed process, as a tumbleweed gathers constituent plant matter into itself over its journey, losing some elements of its mass as it travels and gaining others. The more typical emphasis in genre studies, however, has been to trace and examine those changes as evidence of writer innovation within the limited flexibility of genre-mediated social action. This approach facilitates the education of skilled writers, a key concern of genre studies, which has been associated with the academic disciplines of composition and rhetoric and functional linguistics (Bawarshi, 2003; Bhatia, 2004). Accordingly, genre studies has been less likely to investigate document features that as they lie apparently dormant in realm of stabilization: elements that seem defined by regulation, of which automated systems like BRILLIANCE are an example. In a 2011 essay that reconsiders the Semoptco case via Manuel Castells’s distinction between generic and self-programmable labor, Spinuzzi clarifies this emphasis (Spinuzzi, 2011). Generic labor, which in the Semoptco case includes activities such as bookmarking Web sites with social media tools and generating automated “report cards” of search engine optimization keyword performance, is routine, low-skilled, and requires little operator discretion. From a standard genre perspective, activities that can be accomplished through generic labor can involve either official, or highly regulated, genres, or they can involve unofficial, more flexible genres. In contrast, self-programmable labor, which in the Semoptco example

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includes activities such as developing a new form of competitor table and creating client action items, is autonomous, less formalized, and requires operator judgment. Activities that require self-programmable labor can also involve both formal and informal genres. In Spinuzzi’s analysis, the emphasis is on the potential for automation of tasks that can be fulfilled through generic labor to increase the opportunity for innovative developments for those activities that require self-programmable labor. Spinuzzi suggests that when tasks evolve to be accommodated with generic labor and official genres, as with the Semoptco “report cards” that are generated through database queries, more effort can be spent in skilled, creative tasks, such as the creation of client action items (which may involve an official, regularized genre, but is nonetheless a skilled and creative task that requires writer judgment). In other words, when tasks become amenable to generic labor and official genres, they become opportunities to be automated and subsequently “black boxed,” forgotten in themselves. While these “black boxes” can form the basis for purposeful innovation of new document forms, such as new interfaces for database content, the “black box” itself does not seem interesting to open. As a complementary example, Spinuzzi refers to an example in which the “black boxing” of accident data entry and basic queries as the Iowa Department of Transportation moved from a paper system to a database enabled the development of more sophisticated data query tools and features. The development of new tools is an interesting genre situation, but the continued aggregation of data in the database remains in the black box. From the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, this orientation on writer agency is not just appropriate and sensible, but socially responsible: by automating tasks that require generic labor, people are free to exploit their talents and expertise in innovative ways. There is no reason to open the black box. From an information studies perspective, however, the black box is especially worthy of attention. In this essay, I look inside the black box of automated content generation and suggest how its workings, without becoming less regulated or more “self-programmable,” nonetheless form a site of genre development. These genre changes are highlighted in distributed systems such as digital libraries where the “document” that users interact with is, under the surface, the amalgamation of many component documents (for digital libraries, these components are metadata records). Genre change here results not from the actions taken to create any individual component document but from the aggregation of those components and associated changes in user access and interaction with those components. The writers of individual components are not making innovative changes in self-programmable fashion; they are following rules. However, unanticipated effects arise when various mundane differences in the creation of components are aggregated and new, unforeseen component relationships

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are instantiated in the compound system. In demonstrating such phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change. To make this argument, I first provide a more complete summary of Spinuzzi’s work with the SEO analysts, demonstrating how his continued interest in writers, and how their active choices shape genre development, echoes foundational genre scholars such as Bazerman and Yates. Next, I discuss efforts within cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) to regulate allowable expression for their associated information systems (catalogs and collections databases) through the development and application of metadata standards. These standards, I argue, purport to “automate” content development in a manner similar to that of the SEO firm’s information system, BRILLIANCE. I continue by demonstrating how, for cultural heritage information systems, actions that are undertaken as the mere application of established rules, and which might initially seem minor and unimportant, are amplified when many instances are aggregated into composite distributed systems, particularly when those instances span time, space, and institutional boundaries. I contend that these “writerless” actions, in which the apparently mundane decisions of content creators who are merely following rules are combined in distributed systems, can affect genre change just as much as the purposeful acts of writers responding to immediate exigencies. To further my argument, I show how decisions that are imagined as having no effect on the structure and content of information systems — changes to access methods across physical and digital environments — also can be seen as contributing to genre change. The shift from card-based, structured browsing for library catalogs to digital keyword search occurred without altering the structure or content of catalog records. And yet the genre of the catalog has been demonstrably affected by this apparently technical and instrumental change, without “writer” intervention.

3.1.

Genre Innovation as the Product of Purposeful Writer Intervention: Spinuzzi’s “Secret Sauce”

Spinuzzi’s (2010) study of knowledge work in an SEO firm concentrates on the rapid pace of genre innovation that results from the SEO analysts’ need

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to respond to dynamic business conditions of the SEO environment. SEO firms craft strategies to ensure that their clients’ Web sites are prominently featured in search results for queries with relevant keywords. As part of their services, the firm studied by Spinuzzi created monthly reports for each client to document the success of current SEO campaigns. While the enterprise of SEO has been somewhat tainted by the activities of “black hat” firms who use devious maneuvers and trickery to drive traffic to client sites (see Segal, 2011), the firm that Spinuzzi studied, “Semoptco,” claimed to use sanctioned, “data-driven,” “evidence-based” SEO techniques to enhance client search rankings. This “reliable” approach constituted Semoptco’s “secret sauce.” To persuade clients of the continued potency of their approach, Semoptco analysts spent one-third of their work time creating client reports that convincingly established measurable outcomes for their SEO activities. Many elements of these reports were standardized in the form of templated document components, some generated through the firm’s in-house system for tracking client “analytics,” which Spinuzzi calls “BRILLIANCE.” Some of these automatically generated elements were targeted toward specific client situations by analyst intervention, via inputting additional information into the BRILLIANCE system. Other elements, particularly for bigger, more important clients who had purchased additional services, were more extensively created and customized by the analysts. In examining Semoptco’s production of these reports, Spinuzzi focuses on these elements of dynamic customization, noting how the analysts must perform rhetorical tasks of audience analysis and ethos-building to effectively develop the most persuasive SEO strategies, corresponding metrics, and associated report elements. Although the analysts do not consider their work to involve extensive “writing,” Spinuzzi makes the case that they are in fact exceedingly proficient “writers,” as business conditions force them to constantly innovate new report elements. To enable this creative innovation, standard elements are quickly “templated” and automated via the BRILLIANCE system and other regulating tools. Once a report feature becomes automated in this way, Spinuzzi suggests that it becomes regulated, or stabilized. The real “secret sauce” of Semoptco’s business, according to Spinuzzi, is not automation but the flexible customization that automation enables. For Spinuzzi, the knowledge work environment of Semoptco suggests that historical studies of genre development, such as those of Bazerman and Yates, need to be updated through additional study of current, continuously changing, fast-paced workplace contexts. The evolution of academic and business genres as described by Bazerman and Yates is slow, developing over periods of years, decades, or even centuries. In contrast, Spinuzzi asserts that in

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environments like Semoptco, genres and associated practices are being developed on a scale of weeks. Although the timescale is accelerated, the story that Spinuzzi tells is quite similar to Bazerman’s and Yates’s historical accounts. All three studies describe how, in response to changing social environments, writers take advantage of new technologies and adapt existing textual forms to serve evolving rhetorical purposes. The protagonist of these tales remains the innovative writer, who responds to dynamic conditions by manipulating available resources in new ways. Eventually, the genre, reconfigured, evolves as the result of these persistent actions, as they become recurrent. In the next section, I will begin to show how complicated genre systems can evolve even without specific intervention by writer-protagonists. As my example, I employ an information system, like the BRILLIANCE system described in Spinuzzi’s case study. The information systems associated with cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) are well suited for this purpose. Cultural heritage information systems, such as library and museum catalogs, as well as archival finding aids, comprise object metadata, or systematic descriptions of institutional holdings. Cultural heritage metadata practices are both complex and well documented, with extensive professional traditions. Moreover, cultural heritage institutions, particularly libraries, have established standards and processes meant to achieve stability and consistency: although the technical implementation might differ, these standards and processes are meant to “automate” and “regulate” document production in a manner similar to that of the BRILLIANCE system. Cultural heritage metadata standards aim to facilitate the interoperability of records, so that institutions can share, exchange, and aggregate them reliably. These goals are similar to those of BRILLIANCE for the creation of interchangeable and reliably consistent report elements. In the next section, I will describe how, despite the extensive regulatory environment promoted by these various metadata standards, genre development nonetheless occurs.

3.2.

Genre Regulation in Cultural Heritage Metadata: The Role of Standards

Cultural heritage institutions — libraries, archives, and museums — have a long tradition of creating documents (such as catalogs) to describe and provide access to other documents (such as the objects held by a particular museum). Metadata is a general term for such descriptions. Metadata facilitates searching and browsing for particular kinds of items. Metadata can comprise highly structured records, as with library catalogs, but it can also

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include loosely structured narrative descriptions, such as archival finding aids. Metadata can be in paper form, as with card-based catalogs or museum inventory books, or in digital form, as with museum collections databases. Traditionally, cultural heritage metadata describes an information object and indicates how that object can be accessed (through a library call number or archival series folder, for example). Some cultural heritage information systems include both metadata and a direct access mechanism for a digital copy of the item. Information systems that provide access to both metadata and the digital objects described by the metadata are sometimes called digital libraries. Andersen (2008) asserts that digital libraries and other cultural heritage information systems can be productively understood with genre theory. Andersen bases this claim on the perception that audiences, or users, of digital libraries will understand, interpret, and use them in similar ways for recurrent social purposes. Andersen explains: When we recognize a given digital library as such, we also know what to expect of it, that is, what it can do for users and what users can accomplish by using a digital library, as compared to other textual places on the Internet that perform similar actions. A genre understanding of digital libraries thus provides a means of understanding matters of knowledge organization, communication of symbolic activity, and information seeking. (Andersen, 2008) Accordingly, a digital library is a genre: it is a typified response to a particular social situation. A digital library, as a form of document, enables certain actions and constrains others; its genre conventions facilitate its use for particular activities while making other potential tasks less immediately salient. A digital library is a composite genre that is formed through the aggregation of highly regulated components, the metadata records. Quite similarly to the case of Spinuzzi’s SEO analysts, the people who create the metadata that constitutes the primary content of digital libraries and other cultural heritage information systems — library catalogers, document indexers, archivists, and so on — do not typically see themselves as “writing” when they generate metadata records. Andersen argues, as Spinuzzi does, that cultural heritage information systems are nonetheless documents whose structure and content are regularized in alignment with particular social activities. One of Andersen’s goals in making this case is to encourage, through awareness of digital libraries as documents, a critical stance toward their development and use (Andersen, 2006). Genre knowledge, as a form of information literacy, can help information seekers to more effectively understand and assess the nature of access enabled through cultural heritage information systems, as well as the documents provided

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by them. Likewise, genre knowledge can help information professionals develop systems that support this critical attitude. Professional practice traditions for cultural heritage metadata, however, are directly oppositional to Andersen’s implication that metadata creators should approach their work as a form of writing. While Spinuzzi’s SEO analysts were required by business conditions to continually develop new report elements and adapt existing ones for rapidly changing situations, professional practice for cultural heritage metadata does not endorse deviation from established conventions. Instead, excellence in metadata generation is more often located in adherence to standards. Consistency is valued over flexibility. (While consistency has been most strongly valued in libraries for the longest period of time, the digital environment, and its associated potential for aggregating cultural heritage metadata in unified systems, has encouraged increased attention to consistency for archives and museums as well.) In Spinuzzi’s case study of Semoptco, the information system BRILLIANCE produced standardized report data and other report elements. Spinuzzi does not further investigate this “automation” and how it was implemented and maintained. In cultural heritage information systems, this kind of regulation is enabled through an array of intersecting standards. These standards are meant to reduce individual variation between records and systematize metadata generation, similar to the function of BRILLIANCE. Because information objects and their attributes are quite complex, the creation of much descriptive metadata requires the skilled labor of educated catalogers; for many attributes, high-quality descriptive metadata cannot be generated algorithmically. (Computer-generated determination of subject terms for text documents, for example, remains inexact and inconsistent from item to item.) Although many aspects of metadata creation demand human judgment, however, standards are thought to guide and restrict that judgment, ensuring regulated, reliable output. Such consistency, enabled through standards, is considered necessary to achieve reliability and interoperability of records. If records are reliable, users of cultural heritage information systems will not only trust that the records are accurate; they will be able to identify, compare, and locate resources more quickly, effectively, and confidently. If records are interoperable, institutions can share them. This sharing enables work efficiencies, because a single record can serve as a template for similar items in many collections. It also increases user access, as it becomes possible to create aggregated collections with shared records from many institutions (as with the union library catalog WorldCat, which aggregates over 2 billion records from tens of thousands of libraries, or with the metadata gathered by Europeana, which aggregates 30 million records from libraries, archives, museums, and galleries across Europe). Instead of searching many library

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catalogs individually to locate a specific work or set of similar works, users can search a union catalog like WorldCat once. Gilliland (2008) categorizes the metadata standards that facilitate regulation into four basic groups. Structure standards define the elements (also called attributes, properties, or characteristics) by which an object is described. In a database, elements are the columns in a table. Structure standards may be called schemas. The Dublin Core schema is one example of a structure standard. Dublin Core is a simple element set meant to be appropriate for any sort of information resource. Content standards specify how the values associated with the structural elements are defined, expressed, and formatted. For example, Subject is a Dublin Core element (part of a structure standard) that is meant to describe what a resource is about. Content standards would specify how to determine a value for the subject (including such details as how many terms to assign, the level of specificity of those terms, their exhaustivity, and so on) as well as how to express and format the selected values. Content standards may also dictate that certain attributes should be expressed using controlled vocabularies, or restricted sets of allowable values; Gilliland calls these vocabularies value standards. The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is a value standard that may be used to assign values to the Subject element in Dublin Core. (The design of these controlled vocabularies is likewise guided by associated standards for their construction; this area of standards development is not discussed by Gilliland.) Finally, format/technical interchange standards specify various encodings by which structure standards are implemented for computer processing. Dublin Core, for example, can be implemented as RDF/ XML (the format associated with “linked data”) or even as plain text. Although these categories may not always be cleanly separated in actual practice, they are useful to understand the range of standardization efforts in the cultural heritage context. Because library cataloging standards have been evolving for over a hundred years, for example, their structural basis is not as systematically defined as more recently created systems, such as Dublin Core, and specifications associated with Gilliland’s structure and format categories are both encompassed within the catalog digital encoding standard, MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging). In the context of cultural heritage metadata, this array of standards constitutes the means by which genre conventions are regulated. Metadata standards are conceptual blueprints for “automated” content generation in the cultural heritage environment, similar to the underlying requirements by which a system like Spinuzzi’s BRILLIANCE produces content elements. BRILLIANCE itself may rely more on algorithmically produced content than most cultural heritage metadata — it’s unclear from Spinuzzi’s description — but one can think of these metadata standards as analogous to the specifications that define algorithmic processes and

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parameters. Metadata standards constrain the structure, semantics, and syntax of expression to significant degree, so that the creation of a record is perceived as a task more like scientific observation (such as identifying the material composition of a seawater sample) than creative interpretation (such as suggesting the meaning inspired by a poem’s figurative language). The standards are designed to make the activity of library cataloging more like analyzing seawater and less like interpreting poetry. Accordingly, Theimer (2012) argues that emphasis on standards inhibits creativity in library cataloging: The average cataloging environment is not naturally conducive to creativity. It is a profession of standards and judgment based on rules that describe how data is selected and formatted. Although specific rules change, the demand to adhere to the rules has remained constant. Creating quality records, and records that may be able to migrate and crosswalk correctly, relies on consistency of data, which requires adherence to standards, both national and local. (Theimer, 2012, p. 897) Hoffman (2009) likewise notes that while catalogers aim to be “usercentered” when creating records, they believe that following established standards is the best means to accomplish this goal, as opposed to customizing records for local circumstances. Hoffman explains that Catalogers also believe that cataloging standards have been crafted based on an understanding of users’ needs. To catalogers, standards represent users, so to follow standards is to meet users’ needs. Why do catalogers need to customize bibliographic records if the standards already meet users’ needs? (Hoffman, 2009, p. 635) In alignment with this perspective, the authorship of individual metadata records primarily involves the application of standards and associated ready-made components (such as controlled vocabularies). In determining the subject for a library item, for example, a cataloger consults the extensive rules for selecting terms from the LCSH controlled vocabulary. These rules include guidelines for subject exhaustivity and specificity (how many terms to select and their level of abstraction). The cataloger inserts these terms into a standardized place within the MARC record. The terms themselves (their spelling, capitalization, and so on) are dictated by the controlled vocabulary. While the question “what is this item about?” requires human judgment to answer, and answers will inevitably differ to some extent, the standards are meant to limit this variation as much as possible. The cataloger is not supposed to interpret the item’s subject in a new, provocative, or interesting way; the cataloger is supposed to interpret

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the item’s subject in the most predictable, “accurate” way possible. This is precisely the sort of process enacted by one of Spinuzzi’s SEO analysts when generating one of the “automated” elements supported through BRILLIANCE. The analyst makes some judgments in setting parameters and so on, but the system reduces the level of variation possible in expressing the output based on those parameters. Despite extensive sets of standards, professional belief in the necessity of their rigorous application, and a wide range of mechanisms to ensure adherence — copious documentation and practice literature, frequent rule clarifications and updates, academic courses and professional training, and so on — the regulation of cultural heritage metadata remains imperfect. The level of variation between records created according to the same sets of standards is greater than one might anticipate given the “templated” environment. Variation is particularly apparent across time. Tennis (2012), for example, describes how the concept of “eugenics” is moved from one place to another in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) across multiple editions of this controlled vocabulary, which results in books about eugenics being scattered across various numbers in the classification (it moves from biology to, in various contexts, social sciences, philosophy, and technology). The catalogers assigning the classification number for eugenics are undergoing the same process to describe books and selecting the same concept to represent the book’s “aboutness”; however, the number changes over time result in these books appearing in different locations (physical and digital) in the library, with different neighbors. This kind of situation is analogous to one of Spinuzzi’s analysts entering the same parameters into BRILLIANCE on multiple occasions, but the operations performed on those parameters slightly changing, as when one performance measurement is substituted for another — perhaps from number of clicks to click rate. In both situations, although each individual “writer” is performing the same regulated action — assigning a book to the current appropriate class that indicates a subject of eugenics, for the cataloging case, and demonstrating the success of SEO operations upon a particular search keyword, in the BRILLIANCE case — the expression of that act is slightly different. For generating SEO reports, however, the effects are negligible, because each report constitutes an independent communication to a specific client. For library cataloging, however, changing the underlying operation (here, the controlled vocabulary of the DDC) has a cumulative effect on the aggregated collection of records and their associated items. The books about eugenics are no longer collocated, and this affects all library users. Although Tennis discusses eugenics because it is “a strange case,” in that its many and significant movements across the DDC are unusual, Buckland (2012) asserts that the meaning of subject concepts is inherently unstable. Over and over again, terms are once used as objective descriptions are later

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understood to be pejorative: examples include “Gypsies” for “Roma,” and “Orientals” for “Asians.” But such shifts are endemic, even when terms do not cause offense. As Buckland remarks: Assigned names are … inherently obsolescent with respect to both the past and the future. Discourses and the librarians flow forward with time, but the assigned names have been inscribed for, and fixed in, a receding past. (Buckland, 2012, p. 157) When certain terms are determined to be socially inacceptable as subject descriptions, they are sometimes automatically replaced with new labels, so that all instances of “Gypsies,” for example, become “Roma.” But usually this does not happen, because these sorts of meaning shifts are subtle and apparently inconsequential. “Climate change” had a different meaning in the 1930s (when it likely referred to the climate changes occurring in prehistoric periods, such as ice ages, caused by natural forces) than it does now (when it more often refers to current conditions caused by human activities). But if the meaning of “climate change” as an element of descriptive metadata changes, and if this shift results in associated changes in relationships between records, causing topic scatter, these effects are “writerless”; they are caused by cascading effects of aggregation over time, and not as the result of purposeful action.

3.3.

Writerless Genre Change through Aggregation: The Case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The cumulative effects of such variations can be extensive. In order to constitute genre adaptation or development, however, they would need to provoke a recurrent shift in reader perception of document structure and function. To demonstrate how this might occur, I refer to the application of subject headings in the library catalog records for three manifestations of the same work: novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe, a nineteenth-century American abolitionist, wrote the novel to advocate against slavery, and the dramatic tale was extremely popular worldwide. Additionally, although Stowe opposed slavery, the black characters in the novel are now seen to embody harmful stereotypes. In particular, the term “Uncle Tom” can refer (often derogatively) to someone who passively accepts or contributes to their own oppression. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an illustrative, but not uncommon, example of an important fictional work more known for its subject matter and historical importance than for its literary merit. Accordingly, many manifestations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin exist, and so there are many records to compare;

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additionally, subject access is demonstrably important and appropriate for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The subject headings for the three example editions appear in records for the library catalog at the University of Texas at Austin; these are not the only manifestations for Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the catalog, but they represent a range of subject headings applied. (Note: It is not possible from the catalog itself to determine when records are made or updated, so any references to historical trends must be inferred based on publication dates of the items and cannot be firmly substantiated.) In the following three examples, there is variation in the number and specificity of applied subject headings, with some expansion of content (as with the inclusion in Edition 3 of an access point for the character Uncle Tom). Some of these changes are likely due to the introduction of suggested (not mandatory) guidelines for providing subject access to fiction, published by the American Library Association in 1990 and revised in 2000. These guidelines supplement and extend official content standards and can be viewed, as the changes associated with eugenics in the DDC, as analogous to algorithm improvements or measurement enhancements in a system such as BRILLIANCE. • Edition 1 (published 1985). ○ Slavery
Southern States
History
Fiction. • Edition 2 (published 1998). ○ Plantation life
Fiction. ○ Southern States
Fiction. ○ African Americans
Fiction. ○ Slavery
Fiction. ○ Slaves
Fiction. • Edition 3 (published 2007). ○ Uncle Tom (Fictitious character)
Fiction. ○ Master and servant
Fiction. ○ African Americans
Fiction. ○ Fugitive slaves
Fiction. ○ Plantation life
Fiction. ○ Southern States
Fiction. ○ Slavery
Fiction. ○ Slaves
Fiction. More interesting than the introduction of entirely new subject headings (primarily the heading for Uncle Tom as a character whose influence extends beyond his role in the novel itself) is the way that the same content is deployed differently in the three editions. The first edition’s record condenses its subject description into a single faceted heading that incorporates, by implication, the ideas of all the separate headings in Edition 2,

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and most of the ideas of Edition 3 (with the exception of Uncle Tom and fugitive slaves). As a concept, “Slavery
Southern States
History
Fiction” includes within itself the notions of slaves, African Americans, and, arguably, plantations (these representing, in the novel, the people enslaved and the most commonly associated site of their bondage). Editions 2 and 3 represent this coordinated, complex subject concept as a set of individual elements. Concurrently, the notion of history in Editions 2 and 3 appears only by implication when considering the individual elements as a set. (“History” would not necessarily be associated with any of the separated headings on their own, but it does arise in their combination.) Purely from a content perspective, the changes between the metadata records for Edition 1 and Editions 2 and 3 appear minor. From Edition 1 to Edition 2, especially, we can assert inconsequential content changes as the implied aspects of Edition 1 (slaves, African Americans, and plantations) are made explicit in Edition 2, and as one explicit aspect of Edition 1 (history) is made implicit in Edition 2. From Edition 2 to Edition 3, two new content elements are added (Uncle Tom and fugitives) and another implicit content element is made explicit (masters and servants). In terms of general indexing principles, the levels of specificity and exhaustivity are not significantly modified from one edition to another. While the subsequent editions are more explicit, they are not more specific. Edition 2 does not clarify that slavery is presented from an abolitionist perspective in the novel, nor that slaves are depicted as wrongfully oppressed; Edition 3 does not indicate that the relationship between master and servant in the novel is enforced against the will of the servant. Although the structure and syntax by which the content of the subject headings varies significantly between the editions, the basic content is surprisingly stable. However, when relationships between items are considered, the differences between the metadata records for the three editions become much greater. In the composite document of a digital library, the expression of its genre character emerges through the aggregation of individual records and accompanying relationships between the records. In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, mundane variations in the structure and syntax of subject headings for individual records results in vastly different relationships between particular editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other works in the digital library. This different network of relationships changes the character of the underlying records, the actions that can be effectively performed with them, and the user interaction with the library system. These relationship changes form the potential substance of genre development for the digital library. In Editions 2 and 3, the subject headings must be understood in combination with each other to make sense in the context of the novel. If, for example, the heading of Plantation life
Fiction is considered on its own,

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without reference to other subject headings, then it need not be associated with the antebellum South, nor with slavery. In conjunction with any of the other headings applied, however, Plantation life
Fiction takes on a particular historical context. For each metadata record, in other words, the subject headings for Editions 2 and 3 cannot be considered as independent descriptive acts but only as integrated components of a synthetic description, even as their structure implies the opposite. Conversely, Editions 2 and 3 are at the same time placed into subject relationships with items that may address the individual components of the synthetic description quite differently from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the University of Texas at Austin library catalog, for example, the heading Plantation life
Fiction has been applied to novels set on tea plantations in India and sugar plantations in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Moreover, other novels in this subject group that are likewise set in the pre-Civil-War American south do not necessarily focus on slavery and its effects on the enslaved. Some of these items similarly described with Planation life
Fiction include such diverse points of view as a murder mystery focused around the artist James Audubon and a time-travel romance. Also in the University of Texas at Austin library catalog, items besides Uncle Tom’s Cabin also described with the heading Slavery
Fiction include historical novels set in Jamaica, Cuba, and colonial Guiana, and also science-fiction novels set in the imaginary worlds of Alta and Roshar, in addition to novels set in the nineteenth-century southern United States. Significantly, the meaning of these sets is contingent, dependent upon the composition of particular collections. At the University of Texas at Austin library, Plantation life
Fiction encompasses diverse settings and perspectives on plantations. At another library, Plantation life
fiction might be restricted to works similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: where “plantation” can only be the setting for the unjust and immoral slavery of African Americans. It depends on what that collection contains. In contrast, the meaning for the composite heading of Edition 1, Slavery
Southern States
History
Fiction, is constrained. With the subject description structured this way, Uncle Tom’s Cabin cannot be related to science-fiction novels set on Alta or mysteries featuring the artist Audubon. In the University of Texas at Austin catalog, the only items assigned to this subject heading are other editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the WorldCat union catalog, several other novels share this heading, but they are, of course, all focused on slavery in the American south. The heading for Plantation life
Fiction, on the other hand, is assigned to over 543 novels in WorldCat, representing even more diversity amongst the included items than in the Texas catalog. For example, an extensive series of popular romance novels (Brides of Montclair) is included; these are primarily located at public libraries, not at universities.

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As the structure of subject headings for fiction has changed from composite terms to sets of individual components, then, the function of the catalog also shifts, depending on the items included in any particular collection (either as part of a single institution’s holdings or via aggregation across multiple institutions). In smaller, more focused collections, the subject headings provide direct access to closely aligned works. In larger, more diverse collections, the subject terms demonstrate relationships between works that may have radically different perspectives on the assigned headings. The nature of subject browsing for fiction potentially becomes quite different. When the range of items assigned to a subject heading is constrained, the headings are primarily finding tools: they are best for locating items that satisfy a defined information need. When the range of items assigned to a subject heading is looser, the headings become browsing tools, oriented toward serendipitous discovery: they facilitate the development of the information need itself. I suggest that this type of change in supported user interaction may constitute a form of genre development, as “what users can accomplish by using a digital library,” in Andersen’s (2008) formulation, evolves, with browsing actions potentially replacing finding ones as results of subjectheading use. The functions enabled through the composite document of a digital library change, and with those functional changes, the genre of digital library may also change. I argue that this type of change does not result from the innovation of individual writers (in this case, catalogers) but from a change in “automation” (in this case, standards) that initially seems to be merely instrumental, or a matter of implementation details. The shift from composite headings to sets of self-contained components affects little in the context of individual catalog records. However, as these independent textual acts are aggregated across collections of various composition, the mode of user interaction enabled through the subject headings may shift, if the aggregated records are sufficiently diverse. Changes to the individual records seem — and are — relatively trivial until those changes are aggregated and the relationships between records are subsequently affected. Small, negligible changes to metadata records only become significant as they are automatically gathered together in the composite document of the digital library. In that context, however, apparently inconsequential structural technicalities lead to notable functional shifts.

3.4.

Writerless Genre Change through Access Mechanism: Effects of Keyword Search

The previous section showed how the aggregation of independent acts of textual production can catalyze the evolution of a genre (here, the digital

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library or catalog) without the purposeful intervention of writers. Regulated by an array of metadata standards, changes to individual records seem relatively minor even when the standards are revised over time, as the example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates. Evidence from the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests that the change from a single composite subject heading to multiple discrete subject headings appears primarily syntactic in nature, similar to changing the units for a quantified measurement, as when changing the representation of density from a composite measurement to separate notation of mass and volume. However, evidence from this case study also suggests that, as these changes accumulate in collections of varying composition, the mode of access enabled through the subject headings may likewise change, from a direct finding mode to a more open browsing mode. Genre adaptation manifests with this altered function. This section presents another site of writerless genre change, one independent of metadata record production. Here, I examine the functional evolution of the digital library (or catalog) as its primary access mechanism changes from paper card files to digital representation of the same information. Although my example case is once again drawn from library cataloging as having the longest history and greatest level of collaborative practice across institutions, similar effects may be seen also in the transition from paper to XML-based archival finding aids, and from paper to digital databases for museum collections. (The role of digitization in understanding the material element to textual interpretation has been more extensively studied in the domains of digital humanities and textual studies, where the editorial encoding of digital files became an opportunity to reexamine the material contributions to meaning. Bonnie Mak has written in this area, along with scholars such as Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, and Katherine Hayles, amongst many others.) Even though a new underlying data model for catalog information, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), was endorsed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) in 1998, the structure and content of library catalog records has remained remarkably constant since the days of printed card catalogs. Although the newest revision of the cataloging content standards, Resource Description and Access (RDA), nominally endorses the newer FRBR model, RDA’s continued alignment with the record structure enabled through the MARC digital format results in continued structural similarity with old paper cards, which MARC was originally created in the 1960s to duplicate (Coyle & Hillmann, 2007). In content and structure, the library catalog record as described with RDA is almost identical to the paper catalog card. However, although in many respects the catalog record has maintained its essential integrity over the years, the mode of access for catalog

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information has drastically changed as catalogs migrated to the digital environment. What might initially be described as a mere change in material instantiation of the records — from physical to digital — has had profound effects on catalog function, and these effects have proliferated as keyword searching, an access mechanism extraneous to the metadata record itself, has been introduced and increasingly emphasized in digital catalog implementations. Conceptually, the structure of library catalog records remains focused around three primary access points of title, author, and subject. In the card catalog system, these access points were the only means by which the catalog could be searched. For each item described with a catalog record, a separate card was created for each defined access point, which was printed at the top of the card. These access points were regularized via vocabulary control so that, for example, all the works associated with a particular author were filed together under an authoritative form of name, and not (or not only) under the form of name that appeared on the item itself. Often, the cards were separated into three separate banks of filing cabinets, one for each access point type of author, title, and subject. To search the catalog, one first decided on search mode — by author, by title, or by subject — and looked up records accordingly. If one conceptualized the seeking task as looking for fictional material about plantation life, then one went to the subject file and started with the Ps, but if one conceptualized the seeking task as locating that famous book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, one went to the author file and started in with S. In this system, the structure of catalog records and the nature of the seeking task were very much integrated. In order to progress with searching, a seeker had to think about the known attributes of what was being sought and identify which of the three access modes would best support one’s current conceptualization of the information need. Current digital library catalogs still maintain this underlying structure of access points. Vocabulary control is maintained, via “authority files,” for authors, subjects, and (sometimes) titles, and the basic content and structure of metadata records is remarkably similar in the current digital environment. A digital MARC record for an item is conceptually almost identical to the paper card for the “main entry,” or primary record, in a card environment. Even the conceptualization of search as being defined through selected access point has been maintained. Although separate banks of cards no longer exist, of course, this function has been shifted to separate digital authority files. A pure catalog search is a two-step process: one first searches the appropriate authority file (author, title, or subject) and locates a relevant controlled vocabulary item (such as “Planatation life
Fiction” or “Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811
1896” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). One then uses that controlled vocabulary item to produce a list of

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all resources associated with that access point (364 resources in the University of Texas at Austin catalog with the author “Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811
1896,” for example). If one searches the catalog in this manner, then both the means and matter of catalog searching is exceedingly similar in the digital environment to the physical one. It is merely much faster and more convenient to locate, sort, and select between items related under an access point, and to find additional relevant access points and associated items. Despite the continued potential for such consistent interaction modes with essentially consistent content, however, structured search via access points is no longer the predominant mode of access for library catalogs (Rose, 2012). Many users have no idea that the systematic precision enabled through the careful creation of catalog records and their rigorous specification of controlled access points even exists, a situation that was impossible with the card catalog. Instead, most users interact with the catalog via unstructured keyword search, which functions similarly to the implementation of Web search engines, such as Google. In a keyword search, all the text on a catalog record is taken as an undifferentiated bag of words. Using the keyword search for “Harriet Beecher Stowe” in the University of Texas at Austin catalog, for example, produces 632 resources (almost double that of the author search), with results that include material about Stowe as well as written by her, results included because her name is in the title, and so on. Following a growing trend, the current primary search mechanism for the University of Texas at Austin library system does not limit its keyword matching to the library catalog itself. The relatively new “integrated discovery” system, called SCoUT, produces aggregated results across the university’s catalog metadata records and across research databases for academic journal articles and other serials, so that records for individual articles are included. A keyword search for “Harriet Beecher Stowe” in SCoUT, as opposed to the library catalog proper, generates a results set of 65,439 records. The difference in scale and scope between the SCoUT results set of 65,439 items and the author search result set of 364 items is immense. Although the SCoUT interface provides a number of filters to narrow results, including a set of filters based on “subject,” these filters do not provide the same window into the underlying structure of the system as either the digital or physical implementations of the catalog authority files. Decisions regarding interface and access changes such as implementation and prioritization of keyword searching, and implementation and prioritization of integrated discovery tools like SCoUT are commonly performed independently of the cataloging process, and yet they have profound effects upon the access and interpretation of the records. Although the catalog’s

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structure as a precisely defined web of meticulously created relationships still exists, the refined searching and browsing functions enabled through this structure are no longer apparent to catalog users. In card form, and in its pure digital form, the catalog is a finely tuned research tool that rewards expert use with both efficient location of specific items and serendipitous discovery of aligned items. In contrast, when subsumed under broadly undifferentiated keyword search and aggregated with millions of records of individual journal articles that had previously been kept to separate research databases, the catalog becomes a lower form of Google. The catalog’s pure interfaces are oriented toward producing sets: relatively small groups of related items that bear close scrutiny and reward analysis of their inner logic (i.e., to determine the internal relationships that indicate why these items were filed together and accordingly to select the best items in a set or to identify attributes for a more appropriate set). The catalog’s newer, extended interfaces that result from keyword search are oriented toward producing quick individual hits, just like Web search. The user is not supported in determining the best items but in identifying those that are good enough. (That there are advantages to the second approach are clear, as well as to the first; I do not intend to endorse either in this essay, but merely to demonstrate the extent of their differences.) Although the adoption of features enabled via new technology has been extensively discussed as a means for genre adaptation — the classic historical studies of Bazerman and Yates being two examples — this process is more typically described as the manipulation of new technologies by writers to further their rhetorical goals, as when Spinuzzi’s SEO analysts use templating features of Microsoft Word to facilitate the customization of report elements. In this case, however, the technological features that produce ultimate genre change, in terms of perceived use function of metadata systems, are deployed independently from the “writers” and the generation of primary content. Moreover, the initial effects of a keyword search mechanism are compounded through aggregation, in a manner similar to that described for the subject-heading case study. The difference in scale between 364 results for a catalog-only author search and 632 results for a catalog-only keyword search is significant, but not tremendous. However, the difference between 364 results and the 65,439 results of keyword searching for the integrated discovery system is transformative. This leap in collection scale not only solidifies the keyword search as primary access mode, it makes the previous catalog function, of producing logically structured, individually interpretable results sets, effectively invisible. Just as with the subject-heading case, I suggest that “what users can accomplish by using a digital library” has changed, and, accordingly, the genre of digital library (or catalog) is likewise changed as well.

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Conclusion

In this essay, I have shown how genres can change even within the regulated environments of information systems. In contrast to classic studies of genre development, these changes do not result from the purposeful actions of individual writers, as they respond to changing conditions or take advantage of new technologies. These genre changes result from the aggregation of many apparently inconsequential actions as the regulatory environment remains apparently stable. Sometimes, the shifts in document function that emerge from these aggregated decisions result from changes in document content, as with the case study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sometimes, however, these functional shifts result from changes in access mechanisms or collection composition that are not conventionally identified as content-related, as the discussion of keyword search and integrated discovery tools demonstrates. The notion of “writerless” genre change as exemplified through the situation of information systems is, I submit, useful in providing another case where activities previously kept separate — such as the creation of textual content and the design of its material carrier — are shown to be much more inextricably entangled in the digital environment. Johanna Drucker, a scholar of both textual studies and visual book arts, notes how odd it would seem for a traditional literary critic to consider the typeface of a particular edition when interpreting it. As Drucker describes the prevailing approach to literary interpretation, graphic elements may be present in every text, but they are seen as mere distractions to the “real” content: “Material presentation is a necessary, maybe even interesting element of a work, but once we get serious we just ‘read’” (Drucker, 2006, p. 267). In the digital environment, scholars like Drucker contend, the meaningful relationship between content and presentation becomes increasingly apparent. In addition to content and presentation, this essay suggests that, especially in the context of unpredictable aggregation, the relationship between “automated” or “regulated” content and the means of its generation (whether via standards or algorithmic production) must also be more carefully considered.

References Andersen, J. (2006). The public sphere and discursive activities: Information literacy as sociopolitical skills. Journal of Documentation, 62(2), 213
228. Andersen, J. (2008). The concept of genre in information studies. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 42, 339
366. Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

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Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bhatia, V. (2004). Worlds of written discourse: A genre-based view. London: Continuum. Buckland, M. (2012). Obsolescence in subject description. Journal of Documentation, 68(2), 154
161. Coyle, C., & Hillmann, D. (2007). Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging rules for the 20th century. D-Lib, 13(1
2). Retrieved from http:// www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html Drucker, J. (2006). Graphical readings and the visual aesthetics of textuality. Text, 16, 267
276. Gilliland, A. (2008). Setting the stage. In M. Baca (Ed.), Introduction to metadata (Version 3). Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Retrieved from http://getty. edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intrometadata/ Hoffman, G. (2009). Meeting users’ needs in cataloging: What is the right thing to do? Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 47(7), 631
641. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151
167. Rose, M. (2012). The ship has sailed and we aren’t on it: How catalogers could support user tasks and why we won’t. Journal of Library Metadata, 12(2
3), 127
139. Segal, D. (2011). The dirty little secrets of search. The New York Times, February 12, 2011. Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. Proceedings of SIGDOC, pp. 110
116. Spinuzzi, C. (2010). Secret sauce and snake oil: Writing monthly reports in a highly contingent environment. Written Communication, 27(4), 363
409. Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Genres and generic labor. In C. Bazerman, C. Dean, J. Early, K. Lunsford, S. Null, P. Rogers, & A. Stansell, (Eds.), International advances in writing research: Cultures, places, measures (pp. 487
505). Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/ books/wrab2011/ Tennis, J. (2012). The strange case of eugenics: A subject’s ontogeny in a long-lived classification scheme and the question of collocative integrity. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(7), 1350
1359. Theimer, S. (2012). A cataloger’s resolution to become more creative: How and why. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 50(8), 894
902. Yates, J. (1989). Control through communication: The rise of system in American management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 4

Genre and Typified Activities in Informing and Personal Information Management Pamela J. McKenzie

Abstract Purpose
In this chapter, I bring a rhetorical genre theory lens to the study of two sets of information activities: information seeking and informing in a clinical setting, and personal information management in the household. Findings
I begin by characterizing each candidate genre and show how it is constituted, created, repurposed, and used. I then show how that genre is embedded within a local genre set. This analysis maps the institutional, interactional, and intertextual connections, showing how generic forms interact with other oral and textual genres within the setting. Finally, I situate the single genre and genre set within the broader genre system to show how individual genres are both socially and intertextually connected with institutions and organizations beyond the local setting. Originality/value
A genre analysis shows how “information” is accomplished out of the social and documentary practices of participants in particular settings and elucidates the shifting and complex nature of contexts in which information actors operate. Combining three levels of analysis shows how the actions of individuals are locally negotiated but also situated within broader structural constraints and discourse communities. A genre approach therefore offers a window on the elusive concept of “context” in information needs, seeking, and use research. Keywords: Rhetorical genre theory; genre set; genre system; personal information management; information practices Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 67
90 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011005

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Introduction

In a classic article, Carolyn Miller outlined a framework for studying genre “not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (p. 151). She argued against both a fixed definition and a closed formalistic analysis of genre based on a priori principle, and instead advocated an open, ethnomethodological classification, based on rhetorical and pragmatic practice and organized around situated actions (1984, p. 155). Andersen (2008, p. 355) notes that researchers in LIS “have focused on how people seek information and what sources they use … Genre study would start with the genre and then move backward and ask questions such as: How did this particular text come to look and be used as it was? What actions, or goals, is the text intended to support? Who is involved in producing and using this text? What larger textual and activity system is the text part of? To study a genre is to study how knowledge is regulated, codified, and altered by people and their communicative activities.” In this chapter, I bring a rhetorical genre theory lens to the study of two sets of information activities: information seeking and informing in a clinical setting, and personal information management in the household. Approaching these settings “backwards” will enable us to understand the ways that “information” is accomplished out of the social and documentary practices of participants in particular settings (Talja & McKenzie, 2007). It will contribute to studies of information practices by elucidating the shifting and complex nature of contexts in which information actors operate (Courtright, 2007).

4.2.

Literature Review

Miller (1984) argued that studying genre as social action would focus analytic attention on the relationship between rhetoric and its context and on genre as a rhetorical means of connecting private intentions and public requirements. Learning a genre thus becomes more than learning a pattern of forms or a method of achieving our own ends: “We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have: we learn that we may eulogize, apologize, recommend one person to another, instruct customers on behalf of a manufacturer, take on an official role, account for progress in achieving goals. We learn to understand better the situations in which we find ourselves and the potential for failure and success in acting together” (Miller, 1984, p. 165). Defining and characterizing individual rhetorical forms as genres is

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therefore far from straightforward and becomes an intellectual task for the analyst. Miller (1984, pp. 155
163) identified three challenges in identifying rhetorical genres. The first is clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and the situation within which it is used. She argued that rhetorical situations recur, and that in order to understand how to act, we must characterize a situation as a recurrent type, with recurrent typifications of participants that underlie the typification of rhetoric. The second is understanding the ways that genres “fuse” substantive, stylistic, and situational elements. She argued that symbolic meaning can only be understood as a fusion of the substance (semantic value) of discourse and of its form, which provides instruction to the reader or listener on how to perceive, interpret, and respond. The third is locating genre on a hierarchical scale of generalizations about language use. Miller argued that in constructing, interpreting, and using discourse, we deal simultaneously with purposes at several different levels of abstraction from broad to specific. What is counted as “genre” necessarily varies over time and across cultures, “according to the typifications available” (Miller, 1984, p. 162) as genres change, evolve, and decay, and are constantly renegotiated and reconstituted through active use. Individual genres do not do their work alone, but function in relation to other texts and utterances. Devitt (1991) showed how regularized genre forms interact within a typified “genre set.” She examined the practice of tax accounting and demonstrated that it shows a high degree of both textuality and intertextuality. Texts interact with other texts, past, present, and future, within the tax accounting discourse community. Devitt’s analysis shows that texts form “a complex network of interaction, a structured set of relationships among texts, so that any text is best understood within the context of other texts. No text is single, as texts refer to one another, draw from one another, create the purpose for one another. These texts and their interactions are so integral to the community’s work that they essentially constitute and govern the tax accounting community, defining and reflecting that community’s epistemology and values” (Devitt, 1991, pp. 336
337). Responding to Devitt’s (1991) analysis, Bazerman (1994) argued that the genre set represents only the accountant’s participation in tax accounting, and that accountants’ participation is intertextually linked to the participation of others, including the client and the tax department. Documents created by the other participants, such as taxation law, rulings of the tax department, and the client’s dossier, are not part of the accountant’s genre set. He argued that it is only by studying the genre system: “the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all parties — that is the full file of letters from and to the client, from and to the government, from and to the accountant” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 99) that we can

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fully understand what roles, relationships, and genres are available to us at any time. “An understanding of generic decorum will let us know whether it is ours to ask or answer, to argue or clarify, to declare or request” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 99). In this chapter, I report on two rhetorical settings. I begin by identifying an important candidate genre from each setting and characterizing it with respect to Miller’s criteria. I then situate the individual genre within its local genre set and its broader genre system. Combining these three levels of analysis allows for an understanding of how genres are constituted, created, repurposed, and used in particular settings and how complexes of generic forms work together, both within a local setting and outside of it. This approach shows how the actions of individuals are locally negotiated but also situated within broader structural constraints and discourse communities, which share common “ways of coordinating words, thoughts, deeds, values, bodies, objects, tools and technologies, and other people (at appropriate times and places) so as to enact and recognize specific socially situated identities and activities” (Gee, 2001, p. 37), and which specify and shape the options available to the individuals. A genre approach therefore offers a window on the elusive concept of “context” in information needs, seeking, and use research. Analyzing the genre, the genre set, and the genre system allows us to “follow the links across multiple social settings to paint a complex portrait of actor-in-context” (Courtright, 2007, p. 292).

4.3.

Studies and Methods

Data for this chapter come from two studies. The first was a study of informing and midwife
client communication in the Canadian province of Ontario. Between 2002 and 2006 I observed in midwifery clinics, recorded and transcribed clinic visits between 40 childbearing women and their midwives, and interviewed the midwives and clients about their visit. I sampled Ontario communities purposively to maximize variation of community size. In each community I approached every midwifery practice. From each of the 15 participating practices I accepted all willing midwife
client pairs. The second is an ongoing study of how people “keep track” in everyday life: how they identify what needs to be done — and when, where, and by whom — in their homes, workplaces, and other settings important to them; and how they remind themselves and others if need be. To date, my research assistants and I have interviewed 17 participants living in two Canadian provinces. We have selected participants to reflect a wide variety of household situations (e.g., living alone, with a partner, with children),

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employment categories (e.g., student, retiree, shift worker, manager of home-based business), and other roles (e.g., parent, partner, volunteer, activist, manager of an illness or disability). As part of the interview process, we observe and photograph physical spaces and the tools participants use for keeping track (Hartel, 2010). Data collection and analysis for both studies conform to Canadian ethical guidelines for research on human subjects (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2010). In order to protect participants’ identities, I use generic identification codes. In both studies I used the following transcription conventions: I: Conversational turns are prefaced by an initial identifying the speaker (Midwife, Client; Interviewer, Participant), and a colon. [] Nonverbal elements such as laughter, physical gestures, changes in tone, or to indicate the removal or identifying details or the editing of the excerpt for this chapter. ? ! Punctuation indicates both grammatical sentence-ends and emphatic or interrogative intonation. From each study I have selected one rhetorical situation and one rich example of a candidate genre commonly used in that situation. In the midwifery setting, I present the Informed Choice Discussion (ICD), which midwives and women understood to be a particular and mandated form of talk (McKenzie, 2009). My example shows how the ICD functioned in relation to decision-making about a pair of interventions commonly performed on newborns immediately after birth: the administration of eye drops as a prophylactic against blindness caused by transmission of chalmydia or gonorrhea from mother to infant during childbirth, and the injection of Vitamin K to prevent hemorrhagic disease of the newborn. In the Keeping Track study, I show whether the calendar functions as a genre. I analyze a university professor’s discussion of how a courseplanning calendar supports the work of planning and teaching a course, and how that work is integrated with other things the professor must do in her workplace and domestic roles. I present findings by setting. First, I provide some background on the setting and the rhetorical functions under study. Next, I characterize the candidate genre in terms of Miller’s (1984) criteria and show how it is constituted, created, repurposed, and used. I will then show how that genre is embedded within a local genre set associated with the rhetorical function. This analysis maps the institutional, interactional, and intertextual connections, showing how generic forms interact with other oral and textual

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genres within the setting. Finally, I situate the single genre and genre set within the broader genre system (McKenzie & Davies, 2012).

4.4.

Findings: Setting 1. Informed Choice in Midwifery Care

4.4.1.

Setting

In Ontario, midwifery is a licensed, regulated, and publicly funded profession providing pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum support for women with low-risk pregnancies. Midwives are an integrated part of the provincial health care system and work collaboratively with other health care professionals. Midwifery therefore operates within a complex network of professional responsibilities and regulations. Midwives must balance a feminist care model that respects low-risk childbirth as a normal, nonmedical process and supports women’s reproductive choices (College of Midwives of Ontario, 2014), with a biomedical care model that expects adherence to clinical best practices in the context of relations with physicians (obstetricians, family doctors, and pediatricians) who set practice guidelines, allow or deny midwives access to hospital privileges, and determine many of the day-to-day workings of midwives’ scope of practice (Bourgeault, 2006). Spoel (2010) argued that, because of the profession’s position at the intersection of biomedical and feminist ideologies of care, midwife
client interaction is characterized by discursive hybridity (Sarangi & Roberts, 1999). Spoel and I (McKenzie & Spoel, 2014; Spoel & McKenzie, 2012; Spoel, McKenzie, James, & Hobberlin, 2013) have demonstrated how discursive hybridity plays out in the midwife
client interaction.

4.4.2.

The Informed Choice Discussion as an Oral Genre

Rhetorical genre analysis has most commonly been applied to textual genres. Increasingly, however, researchers have applied rhetorical strategies to analyzing oral and blended genres in clinical, educational, and business settings. Orlikowski and Yates (1994) identified the meeting and the training seminar as business genres along with the memo and the expense form. In clinical settings, Spafford, Schryer, Mian, and Lingard (2006) and Goldszmidt, Aziz, and Lingard (2012) studied medical students’ case presentations to their physician supervisors, Pettinari (1988) studied the dictation of post-surgical reports, and Schryer, McDougall, Tait, and Lingard (2012) studied interaction in palliative care.

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In the midwifery clinic, the Informed Choice Discussion (ICD) serves the rhetorical and institutionally defined purpose of informing the client about a clinical intervention that she may or may not choose to accept, and reporting, accepting, and recording her decision, not just as a choice but as an informed choice. The basic ICD sequence consists of four major sections: initiation (IN), elaboration (EL), disposal (DS), and closing (CL) (for the full analysis of the interactional characteristics of the ICD, see McKenzie, 2009). In the following example, a client asks her midwife about the standard practice of administering prophylactic eye medication and Vitamin K injections to newborns. The sections are labeled in the margin and are described below.

IN

EL →1 →2

DS

CL/IN/ EL

DS

CL

C: I understand that that vitamin K shot isn’t really necessary [sighs] and that salve on the eyes isn’t really, necessary either. M: um C: Um, how do you feel about that? M: Okay. The um, salve in the eyes is um, we usually talk about this later C: Okay. M: But it’s an antibiotic? It’s Erythromycin? And its purpose is it’s a prophylaxis against um, clamydia and gonorrhea? C: I don’t have either. M: I know. It’s been the law in Canada since the turn of the prior century that health care providers have to give it. C: If there is anything you can do not to do that? Because I don’t have either? I would appreciate that. M: Okay. C: I’ll leave it that. Okay? M: Probably if you have really strong feelings about it we’ll just have you sign a disclaimer saying that you wouldn’t consent to it. C: Yeah because M: Um it’s not done in other countries. It’s just a law in Canada and the United States? C: And it’s outdated. M: Yeah. Um now the Vitamin K, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it is an unnecessary, intervention. C: Okay. Then I’ll trust you on that. M: Okay. C: But M: We’ll talk about it some more C: Sure. M: And probably when [partner] is here? We’ll have a complete discussion about Vitamin K. C: Okay. M: And, the benefits and risks involved. C: Mhmm. M: And what your options are. C: Okay. M: Okay?

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The ICD fulfils Miller’s (1984) conditions for functioning as a genre. First, the ICD is a recurrent type of talk in the midwifery clinic, and it positions the midwife and the client in typified ways. The ICD presumes that a client has information needs that must be met before she can make a properly informed decision, and presumes the midwife to be in a position to inform her. The ICD performs two rhetorical functions: informing and deciding. In its idealized form, the midwife informs the client and the client receives and acknowledges the information; then the client makes a decision and the midwife acknowledges and accepts the decision. In the initiation section, the client raises the topic, with a statement and then a direct question to the midwife. Midwives led the initiation of most ICDs, often raising a topic according to an institutional schedule of topics to be discussed. Here, the midwife’s initial response oriented to institutional timelines, proposing that this was a topic more properly discussed later in the pregnancy. The elaboration section continues until participants jointly resolve either or both informing and deciding as (a) unnecessary or (b) sufficiently completed. In this example, the midwife began explaining the reason for the drops: “it’s a prophylaxis against um, clamydia and gonorrhea?” The client’s disclaimer at marked line 1, “I don’t have either,” could be taken as a report of a decision not to allow her baby undero the procedure. The midwife certainly responded to it in this way, acknowledging the client’s reluctance and explaining the legal requirement. The client then asked directly at marked line 2 how she could avoid the procedure, which the midwife treated as possibly choosing to refuse it. Once informing and deciding have been resolved, parties move to disposal, where they determine what arrangements must be made to enact the decision. Here the midwife showed her tentative acceptance of the client’s choice, explaining that a disclaimer might be required. The midwife explained that the policy is limited to Canada and the United States, emphasizing the lack of consensus internationally. The client responded with a negative evaluation of the intervention “it’s out of date.” The midwife did not take this opportunity to challenge the client’s interpretation; the two therefore positioned themselves to be in agreement in resisting a legal requirement. Once arrangements have been resolved, participants move on to closure, which effects an orderly progression to the next topic. In this case, the midwife’s “Yeah” closed the discussion of eye ointment. The midwife immediately initiated a discussion about the second topic the client raised, Vitamin K injection. The ICD also meets Miller’s (1984) second caution about identifying genre, that symbolic meaning can only be understood as a fusion of the

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form and substance (semantic value) of discourse, which provides instruction to the listener on how to respond. Although the ICD does follow a typified form, multiple variations occur. In this example, it was the client who raised the issue. She brought her own perspective and evidence to bear on the discussion, ensuring that it functioned as a two-way exchange of information. Not all ICDs functioned this way. In other cases the midwife took the lead in raising the issue and shaping the discussion (McKenzie, 2009). Also important in this case is the distinction between the discussion of eye drops and of Vitamin K. Although the client raised these concerns as a single topic, the midwife separated them. Although a midwifery client may control when, how, or even whether to display informed status or report a decision, it is the midwife who has the final authority and responsibility to evaluate both as adequate. Given midwives’ commitment to respecting women’s choices, it is interactionally difficult for a midwife to reject a client’s decision. One of the few acceptable ways to do so is to declare a provisional decision to be insufficiently informed (McKenzie, 2009), which the midwife does in the Vitamin K discussion. The midwife foreclosed the discussion on the Vitamin K injection and proposed a “complete discussion” later in the pregnancy. In doing so, the midwife instructed the client on the typified conditions for a “complete” ICD: it will occur at the right time in the pregnancy to discuss such issues, it will involve the woman’s partner, who has a stake in discussing the baby’s health, it will cover the risks and benefits involved, and once it is complete the woman will be institutionally accepted as “informed” of her options. The midwife responded to the client’s “Okay” as an agreement to delay further discussion of Vitamin K and moved on to discuss another topic. Miller’s (1984, pp. 159
163) third caution about identifying genre is that form, substance, and context should be considered as relative, not absolute, and that they function on many levels on a hierarchy of meaning. The combination of form and substance at one level become substance for form at a higher level. Once the midwife warrants the client as having made an informed decision, a record of the decision is inscribed into the client’s chart, and is subsequently taken as fact (Latour & Woolgar, 1987). The outcome of the ICD therefore moves hierarchically up into other genres in the genre set and does work in constructing the client for subsequent visits (Berg, 1996; Berg & Bowker, 1997; McKenzie, 2006; Pettinari, 1988). Being institutionally warranted as “informed” on a topic therefore opens up some new courses of action and forecloses others. Analyzing the ICD as a genre shows how “informing” in this setting is institutionally and socially embedded. The ICD itself is embedded within broader constellations of genres.

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4.4.3.

The Informed Choice Genre Set

The midwifery informed choice genre set contains several oral and textual genres. The client’s chart was uniformly housed in a file folder and brought into the examination room for each midwife
client visit. The contents of client files varied from client to client and from practice to practice. However, all practices made use of the official Ontario Antenatal Record form. As the hub of the client’s file, the Antenatal Record co-ordinates and records the work of the various participants, structures individual visits, and mandates topics to be discussed at various points in the pregnancy (McKenzie, 2006). Informed choice in midwifery care is also supported less directly by other genres that are subsumed within the midwifery practice genre set. These include such administive records as appointment booking calendars, employment contracts, records of hours worked and clients served, referrals of clients to other care providers, and requisitions for diagnostic tests (McKenzie, 2006).

4.4.4.

The Informed Choice Genre system

The genre system includes the client’s own genre set, which supports her participation in the clinic visit; for example her appointment calendar or list of questions to ask the midwife. With her partner, the client manages a genre set for her household and family, which also indirectly supports the midwifery visit. Other constituents of the genre system are alluded to by the midwife within the ICD itself: M: It’s been the law in Canada since the turn of the prior century that health care providers have to give it. M: Um it’s not done in other countries. It’s just a law in Canada and the United States? A position statement by the Association of Ontario Midwives (2012) outlines the legal and policy framework around the requirement to administer antibiotic eye ointment to all newborns. The Ontario Health Care Consent Act “recognizes parents as the most appropriate substitute decision-maker for their child and entrusts parents to make significant decisions in their child’s best interest” and limits state intervention in parental decisionmaking authority to cases “where it is clear that the parent’s choice places the child at significant risk of serious harm.” The statement also notes that rates of maternal chlamydial and gonorrheal infection are low, and that

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research evidence shows high rates of ineffectiveness of the drugs used as mandatory eye prophylaxis (Association of Ontario Midwives, 2012). Despite this evidence, the Canadian Pediatric Society upholds longstanding position statements that recommend that “as soon as possible after birth, all infants receive prophylaxis with silver nitrate, tetracycline or erythromycin” (Canadian Paediatric Society, 2002; Infectious Diseases and Immunization Committee, Canadian Paediatric Society, 1983). In addition, the Ontario Health Protection and Promotion Act “requires all health care professionals in Ontario attending a birth to ensure that eye prophylaxis is administered,” and specifies that the Health Care Consent Act does not apply in this case. The midwifery position statement criticizes this legislation as contrary to midwives’ professional commitment to providing clients with evidencebased care and to respecting clients’ choices (Association of Ontario Midwives, 2012). Spoel et al. (2013) analyzed how midwives and clients draw on these kinds of standards and protocols in informed choice discussions. Because standards and protocols simultaneously enable and constrain the options available to midwives and clients, their invocation functions as an important space of discursive negotiation across professional and institutional boundaries. This midwife’s brief mention of these other constituents of the informed choice genre system shows how the ICD is embedded within that system and provides methodological clues for tracing that system. By referring to “the law,” the midwife brings to visibility the legal, structural, and discursive relationships within which the profession of midwifery is regulated, and hints at the relationships between the midwife and various regulatory bodies, the role of regulatory bodies as authors and publishers of position statements, and the role of physicians and legislators in governing the work of midwives. Analyzing the Informed Choice Discussion as a genre and placing it in relation to the web of other genres within which it operates shows how the informational activities undertaken by the individual midwife and client are embedded within a broader context of institutional structure, social relations, and discourse communities.

4.5.

Findings: Setting 2. Keeping Track in the Household

4.5.1.

Setting

For many 21st century citizens of Western countries, everyday life requires the co-ordination of people and resources in time and across multiple

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physical spaces and organizational settings such as home and workplace. Keeping track is an important form of personal information management (PIM, Jones & Teevan, 2007), and individuals and families often create and use actionable tools (Whittaker, 2011) like calendars, which contain details of the tasks a user must do, to assist in this work. In this setting I analyze the calendar in the life of one participant, a tenure-track university professor whose workload includes teaching faceto-face and asynchronous online courses, research and publication, and service to the university and scholarly communities. The professor’s household includes a partner and a pet, and home life includes extended family, social connections, and leisure activities. After reviewing the functions of multiple calendars, I focus on the rhetorical situation of planning and delivering a university course. 4.5.2.

Calendars as Genres in Course Planning

All participants in the Keeping Track study employed more than one tool that they understood and described as calendars, including wall calendars, agendas, and calendaring software. This is consistent with the findings of other studies that multiple calendaring systems are common (Eliot, Neustaedter, & Greenberg, 2007; Kalms, 2008; Nippert-Eng, 1996; Payne, 1993). Calendaring tools are commonly commercially produced and they share typified formal characteristics. Calendars structure time in particular ways with their grid of pages standardized by year, month, week, or day, and the size of the lines and squares constrains what the user may write (Zalot, 2001). Although the calendar has uniform formal characteristics and is commonly spoken about and treated as a genre, I argue that this participant repurposes (Askehave & Swales, 2001) the calendar as a genre better to align with the values, goals, material conditions, rhythms of work, and horizons of expectation of the discourse communities to which she belongs. Miller’s (1984, pp. 155
158) first criterion for identifying genre is a requirement for a recurrent rhetorical situation with recurrent typifications of participants. In her interview, this participant described three distinct calendars. One she created and used to support her in planning and delivering her university courses: P: When I prepare for my term I will always print out a blank calendar. So fall term I’ll print out August to December calendar, and then will write and create essentially a draft of the fall term. You know, what topic is being taught each week for each class. What assignments are going to be due when for each class. I do that so I can actually see the whole term, and I don’t necessarily double up.

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I: Then, you use that calendar to deliberately distribute the assignment load? P: To manage my work? Absolutely. That is my guide so I don’t lose my mind entirely over the term. I: The calendar that you print out, does it then get used for any other part of your life? Does suddenly, in October, you have a dentist appointment, P: No. I: That is strictly for, P: Strictly, absolutely it is for the courses. What I will do is write on it, “assignment returned to students on this date.” So I’ll use it for planning my life, well, my teaching life over the term. The second was a small wall calendar posted in her kitchen and used to co-ordinate family and household activities: I: So how do you keep track in the home? How is that different from how you keep track of your work life? P: Every September the city sends a calendar. And we use the calendar as “Okay, let’s talk about what’s going on for us. Who’s out of town?” [I don’t mark in my classes] But it’s just known that I’m in class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If it’s different than that pattern, it gets put on the calendar. But the same way, if [partner]’s out of town for a couple of days, we have to coordinate about who can take the dog. But we have to coordinate all of that stuff. Or like things like having a drink with friends, or a haircut, stuff like that, dentist appointments. It gets on the home calendar. Third was the calendar embedded in her smartphone, which the participant carried with her regularly: P: I’ll have things like, I had a lunch with a colleague on Monday. I don’t have my class in there because it’s just a given. There’s a notation, I have to bring snacks to a faculty meeting. I have meetings. And the thing with the iPhone iCalendar, is that there’s different colours for different things. See, I have a social on Saturday, and it’s a friend’s birthday celebration, and it’s yellow cause I chose that colour for social events. And this bluey-green colour is for work. Despite sharing formal characteristics, these three documents do not reflect a single recurrent situation with a recurrent typification. I contend that this participant repurposes the broad calendar genre to create more specific genres that reflect the values, goals, material conditions, rhythms of work, and horizons of expectation of the discourse communities to which she belongs (Askehave & Swales, 2001).

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The course-planning calendar typifies the participant as professor, and both organizes and documents her teaching work. The household calendar typifies the participant and her partner as sharers of a domestic space and a domestic life, and holds them accountable for individual (e.g., haircut) and joint (e.g., drinks with friends) commitments. The scope of both the courseplanning calendar and the household calendar is limited to a specific subset of either workplace or household obligations but largely ignores the other. The participant’s teaching days are not recorded on her household calendar, because they are “just known.” The household calendar does record when she will be unexpectedly away from home, because such events will have an impact on her partner and their household life. The smartphone calendar follows the participant across her work and home life and typifies her as an individual moving through space and time. With the notable exception of Savolainen (1995), LIS scholarship often dichotomizes workplace and everyday life. However, this participant’s calendars show that these overlap to a great extent. Miller’s (1984, pp. 159
163) third challenge to identifying genre is locating it on a scale of abstraction from broad to specific. I contend that, for this participant, “calendar” is too broad a level of abstraction to function as a genre, and that genre is more appropriately situated with the more specific categories of “course planning calendar,” “household calendar,” and “personal calendar.” In this section I will focus on the course-planning calendar and show how it functions as a genre in the rhetorical situation of planning and delivering a course. Course planning is a recurrent type of situation that typifies the participant not only as professor but also as planner and executor of a plan, and typifies the calendar as a project plan. The planning calendar therefore meets Miller’s first genre criterion. The course-planning calendar also meets Miller’s second criterion, deriving its meaning from a fusion of substantive, stylistic, and situational elements. In this case, the participant creates the calendar herself before every teaching term and could therefore choose any representational format. She chooses to make use of tabular conventions to depict both the straight-line temporal trajectory from beginning to end of term, and the recurring weekly cycle of teaching and grading. The course-planning calendar fuses this typified calendric form with the discourse of the classroom. A typified understanding of what a “course” is provides the relevant content categories and specifies how they are to be understood in relation to one another. The participant noted that the course takes place over a “term,” that it will be delivered to a “class” of students, that the term “class” also applies to the division of course content into chunks delivered on a regular, periodic basis, that each class will focus on one or more “topics.” There are also “assignments” linked to classes and topics, which must be spread

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across the term to distribute the workload in a manageable way for the students who do the assignments and for the professor who must evaluate them and report assignment “grades” back to the students. Before the beginning of the term, the course-planning calendar functions as a developing plan to which the participant aspires. As the term progresses, she holds herself accountable to executing the plan as finalized. The course syllabus, discussed below, functions as the standard to which her plan must be held accountable. After the end of the term, the calendar serves as a record of her accomplishments with respect to her courses and feeds into the next planning cycle as a reminder of what went well and what did not. Finally, the course-planning calendar meets Miller’s (1984) third criterion, as the combinations of form and substance become typified at higher levels of abstraction. The categories course, class, assignment, and term link the rhetorical work of the course-planning calendar to genres at both higher and lower levels of abstraction. The weekly topics, for example, are typified in short concrete phrases on the course-planning calendar, but the nature and scope of each topic, what it includes and excludes, and how this week’s topic relates to last week’s and next week’s, are worked out in the notes and files the participant keeps for each class. Moving up the hierarchy, as each individual assignment is evaluated, the participant records a grade, which she compiles at the end of the term into a course grade. As the midwifery client’s decision is recorded in a chart which then shapes the course of her subsequent care, student grades are recorded on transcripts, which classify the student according to performance levels and open up or constrain access to various kinds of opportunities. 4.5.3.

The Course Planning Genre Set

The genre set associated with course planning was complex. The participant showed and described multiple tools. An excerpt from the course-planning calendar appears at the far left. The bottom right image shows the smartphone calendar, described above, which serves to co-ordinate the participant’s work and home life and includes some course planning-related tasks. The others are described in Figure 4.1. On the top right are what the professor described as course files: P: I keep banker’s boxes of files, one for each course. That helps me divide it by topic, which then falls on a week-to-week basis. And then alongside that I have all my electronic files because I teach online and face-to-face. And it’s a paper folder and a digital folder for each course of a term. So I’m teaching, [one face-to-face and one online section of the same course]

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Figure 4.1: Genre set: course planning.

I: What’s different in each one of those? P: A course [student] list would be different, if there’s one in there. Um, because I use a course management site also. A copy of the syllabus, because they will be slightly different. A copy of assignments and then I used the syllabus as a tracking device. “Have I handed out this assignment? Have I talked about this assignment in class?” Sometimes I cross them out and say, “This assignment is done and graded!” I: So when you prepare a syllabus for each new iteration of the course, do you use the last version and then just update it? P: I use the last update. That usually will have a sticky note attached to it that would say “change this, do this, this didn’t work.” From the files for her online courses, the participant posts content for the students to the course management site. P: I load a week’s material so that it is available at 8am on a Monday morning. Bottom center is the participant’s notebook, which she carried with her on a day-to-day basis. It functioned as a repository for several teachingand research-related resources. The notebook contained various to-do lists,

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the course-planning calendar was tucked into the back, and sticky notes were placed throughout its pages and on its cover as reminders. I: So the to-do lists that end up in your notebook are related purely to research or research and teaching or “what I have to do this week”? P: Research and teaching. I have one [list] in my notebook right now that’s sort of term plans — what do I want to accomplish this term. I have another one that is “what do I have to do this week,” you know, grade these assignments, sketch out or draft this paper. I tend to work with multiple to-do lists of different scale. I have to do sexual harassment training for work so I have it on this to-do list that’s “things to get done in the next little bit.” Not necessarily the term, but the next little bit. And then I’ll have one of “things I absolutely want to get done this week,” cause I tend to make a week-to-week plan. But then, I can’t just look at that or else it will become too overwhelming, so I break it down to “things I’m going to do on Monday,” “things I’m going to do on Tuesday.” And I develop those on almost a day-to-day basis. I: So your goal for the term stays, and then you can branch off it? P: That’s why sticky-notes were developed. […] The big [course planning calendar] for the term is on a piece of paper that’s folded, that fits neatly inside the notebook. The course-planning calendar is thus firmly embedded both physically and intertextually into a genre set that performs complementary functions, each of which relate directly or indirectly to the rhetorical activity of course planning, but which also link course planning into the other aspects of the participant’s working and domestic life.

4.5.4.

The Course Planning Genre System

The work of planning a course is part of a larger genre system that includes genres such as assignments and requests created by students, as well as departmental, Faculty, and University-generated elements. Looking at the genre system shows how the participant’s individual teaching activities were linked to the activities of her students, her academic department, her faculty, and her university as a whole. The genre system makes visible intertextual links between the participant’s personal documents and a number of extralocal participants, whether textual, material, human, or organizational. In addition to assignments, the participant mentioned other studentauthored genres. Given that this participant teaches both face-to-face and online, she interacts with students in various ways. When she teaches online,

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Pamela J. McKenzie P: because our online teaching is asynchronous, there isn’t just a three hour block of time you dedicate alongside preparation and grading. It would be various emails or answering things, […] I notice that some students will post [to the learning management system] early in the week, so you spend time early in the week responding.

The genre system also embeds course planning into academic policy and operations. As mentioned above, course grades are transferred to university-level transcripts. The course name and number elaborated on syllabi are incorporated into department-level teaching assignment schedules and university-level course timetables and academic calendars. The “term” within which the course-planning calendar operates is generated by the university. In the back of her notebook the participant keeps a list of institutionally important dates. P: This is my important dates for work that are generated by my administration. This is internal and it’s sent out to the faculty. In her interview, the participant showed how annotations on her courseplanning calendar were linked with university-level policies. P: What I will do is write on it, “assignment returned to students on this date” so I will know that on this date, this class got this assignment returned to them. I: Why do you make a record of that? P: There’s a policy that they only have so long to dispute a grade for a certain assignment. Then there’s another policy where they can dispute a grade for the course. So I keep a record of that. Finally, the genre system embeds course planning into the system of faculty evaluation, promotion, and tenure. Data such as the number of courses taught, class size, student evaluations of teaching, and descriptions of curriculum development initiatives are inscribed into the participant’s curriculum vitae and annual review dossier. P: We have a dossier review every year. So what I tend to do is keep a digital file folder on my computer. And then as things get submitted, as things get accepted, they get dumped into that file folder. I keep a C.V. also. […] I try to keep my C.V. updated, but on my smartphone I keep a reminder list of “add this to C.V.” because sometimes I forget. Solomon (2008) identified the academic star as a concept that organizes the work of American assistant professors. Achieving star status requires continuous attention to one’s scholarly record, demonstrated through texts such as CVs, and causes a great deal of anxiety for individual faculty members. This participant likewise contextualized her work in relation to the North American promotion and tenure system.

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P: I’m part of this bigger thing created for me. I: Like an academic machine that kind of … P: That has this thing that you are supposed to achieve, and be successful at. It’s created for me. I’ve put myself … I’ve chosen to be part of this structure. But I still feel the pressure, and the anxiety that’s caused from this structure. In talking about and showing the tools she used to plan and deliver her course, this participant gave evidence of the intertextual connections between the calendar with its rhetorical work, and a much broader system of both genres and interests. Considering the ways that PIM genres are created, repurposed, and used and the ways that they are embedded within broader genre sets and systems begins to elucidate the web of context within which this individual participant operates, with its multiple discourse communities and complex and shifting needs, interests, and requirements (Courtright, 2007, p. 291). The context for this participant’s personal information management includes both the organizational setting of the university with its division of labor into teaching, research, and service and its overlay of tenure, and the domestic setting with its roles of spouse, friend, dog-owner, and person responsible for her own health.

4.6.

Discussion

Considering the nature and use of genres and their situatedness within genre sets and systems provides insight on information activities and on the settings and broader contexts within which they take place. In the midwifery clinic, a genre approach shows “informing” to be more than a cognitive process, a form of social action mediated by oral and textual genres and situated within rhetorical contexts and discourse communities. The analysis reveals such features as the kinds of information needs treated as legitimate in this setting, the appropriate time for seeking and giving particular kinds of information, the kinds of evidence that are brought to bear in making an explanation, and the consequences of being characterized as “informed” or “uninformed.” A genre analysis also provides evidence of the hybrid discourse community within which midwifery practice takes place, and highlights the challenges that arise when the core tenets of midwifery care come into conflict with one another: women are the best decision-makers about their own health and pregnancy versus midwives are professionals who adhere to accepted clinical standards. In the household, taking a genre approach to studying the everyday work of personal information management shows that individuals take up and use standard generic forms like the calendar for multiple purposes, and the generic forms may be repurposed to meet the varying requirements of household and workplace responsibilities.

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Situating the individual genres within their broader genre sets and systems shows how the participant’s individual work of planning her course is embedded within broader institutional timelines, policies, and requirements. It also shows how her workplace and household informational activities are neither entirely separate nor entirely integrated. Andersen’s (2008) strategy of analyzing information “backwards” beginning with genre therefore represents one possible response to LIS calls for a shift in attention from abstract understandings of “information” to “the intertwined, institutionally disciplined, documentary and non-documentary practices from which ‘information’ emerges as an effect” (Frohmann, 2004, p. 198). In this way, a genre approach helps to illuminate the contexts in which information activities take place: Much of the INSU [information needs, seeking, and use] research continues to equate context with a describable physical setting and to identify one or more contextual variables that are seen as causally or tangentially linked to actors’ information practices. However, several of the models and theoretical trends … embrace the complexity of context and the actor, in that they posit actors as embedded in complex, multiple, overlapping, and dynamic contexts, elements of which include sociality, culture, institutional rules and resources, technological change, and power relations, and that are in turn shaped by information actors (Courtright, 2007, p. 291). The rhetorical genre scholars’ insistence on studying genres within context parallels relational approaches to studying information seeking in context (Courtright, 2007). Both perspectives recognize that genre, information, and context are not themselves fixed entities, but are enacted, upheld, repurposed, evaluated, and challenged on an ongoing basis through the practices of specific communities (Lloyd, 2005). One significant contribution of a rhetorical genre approach is that it is able to transcend the typical LIS dichotomization of workplace and “everyday life” (Savolainen, 1995) contexts. It does so in two ways. First, careful attention to genre makes evident the ways that individual settings can function simultaneously as workplace and everyday contexts: the midwifery clinic is a workplace for the midwife but for the client it is a place where the “everyday life” (intimate, embodied, familial, caring, unwaged) work of mothering takes place. In traditional LIS terms, the Informed Choice Discussion represents workplace information seeking for the midwife but everyday life information seeking for the client. A genre analysis helps to show how these two perspectives are interwoven. Second, analyzing genre within broader genre sets and systems shows how the individual moving through the 24 hours of her day navigates the requirements of the various settings. The professor’s course planning work must take place in relation

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to her other institutional requirements of research and service, but also in relation to embodied, household, and familial life such as getting a haircut, coordinating schedules with a partner to attend social functions, and caring for the dog. The professor is not just a professor, nor is the midwife just a midwife nor the pregnant woman just a pregnant woman. The contexts they inhabit are complex and their information activities reflect this complexity. A genre approach therefore extends the sophistication of typical LIS analyses by showing how the intimacies of domestic life (e.g., pregnancy and childbirth, the day-to-day life of a household) are embedded within a web of organizational and social relations. Individual decisions and actions are never made independent of this web. A rhetorical genre approach has a great deal to offer LIS scholars interested in understanding the ways that context is constituted through talk and text. It makes visible the ways that individual information actors operate within multiple discourse communities simultaneously and shows how information activities adapt and respond to shifting contextual requirements.

Acknowledgments Both studies were supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Elisabeth Davies and Philippa Spoel, for their co-authorship of earlier articles from these two studies, to the numerous research assistants who assisted with data collection, transcription, and analysis, and to the participants who shared their lives so generously.

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1388. Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66, 847
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Lloyd, A. (2005). No man (or woman) is an island: Information literacy, affordances and communities of practice. Australian Library Journal, 54, 230
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Spoel, P., & McKenzie, P. J. (2012, June). Mapping story-telling genres in midwifery healthcare visits. Paper presented at Genre 2012: Rethinking genre 20 years later. An international conference on genre studies. Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Spoel, P., McKenzie, P. J., James, S., & Hobberlin, J. (2013). Negotiating the hybrid genre of informed choice in Ontario midwifery care. Healthcare Policy, 9, 71
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391.

Chapter 5

The Role of Calendars in Constructing a Community of Historical Workers in the Public Records Office of Great Britain ca. 1850s
1950s Heather MacNeil

Abstract Purpose
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the relationship between and among genres, discourse communities, and their associated ideologies by means of a historical case study of the rise and decline of a particular archival finding aid genre, i.e., the calendar, within the Public Records Office of Great Britain (PRO) between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Findings
The study demonstrates the ways in which the calendar genre, as it evolved in the PRO, reproduced, framed, and perpetuated a progressive, consensual understanding of the history of the British nation, and worked to construct a community of historical workers comprising select members of the PRO’s professional staff and select users. Originality/value
The study deepens and extends understanding of discourse communities and the ideologies they promote and suppress and contributes to the emergent understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts by exposing the ways in which they participate in the formation and shaping of knowledge. Keywords: Archival description; calendars; rhetorical genre theory; discourse communities; Great Britain; Public Records Office

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 91
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Rhetorical genre studies investigate genre as action rather than form (e.g., Devitt, 1996; Miller, 1994), and emphasize the necessarily social nature of genres, that is, their ‘embedded[ness] in groups and hence social structures’ (Devitt, 2004, p. 36) and their socio-historical specificity, that is, their emergence and disappearance at particular historical moments and places. The concept of discourse community is used as a means of specifying and localizing the social nature of genres — their entrenchment in disciplinary, professional, and other kinds of groups — directing attention to the interaction between a given social group and the genres used by that group to carry out its activities, communicate its aims, and promote its values. In the last decade rhetorical genre theorists have paid increasing attention to the ideology of genres and discourse communities: the values and power relationships they embody and perpetuate and the forms of knowledge they enable and constrain. As Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko observe, ‘for all their commonalities, … communities are typically hierarchical and heterogenous. Genres will inscribe not only common perspectives, attitudes, values, methods, and subject positions, but also the divisions and distinctions that exist in and constitute social situations’ (2002, p. 6). Discussions about the ideology of genres revolve around questions such as: ‘how do some genres come to be valorized? In whose interest is such valorization? What kinds of social organization are put in place or kept in place by such valorization? Who is excluded? What representations of the world are entailed?’ (Freedman & Medway, 1994, p. 11). Although it is implicit rather than explicit, a comparable interest in the relationship between genres, discourse communities, and their associated ideologies is discernible in the archival studies literature where the values, epistemologies, and power relationships underpinning archival description practices in general and archival finding aids in particular have become a significant focal point of reflection and research.1 This literature takes as its starting point the socially constructed and mediated nature of archival description. By its lights, finding aids are not simply neutral tools for facilitating intellectual and physical access to archives, but socio-cultural texts. They are historically situated in particular times and places and they inscribe, reproduce, and valorise institutional, disciplinary, and professional ways of knowing. The insights of rhetorical genre studies with regard to the relationship between genre, discourse community, and ideology, therefore, have the potential to deepen and extend this emergent understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts. In simple terms, archival description may be defined as the representation of the holdings of an archival institution, the aim of which is to make

1. For a sampling of the archival literature in this area see MacNeil (2012), esp. pp. 487
488.

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those holdings accessible to users either in whole or in part; the term ‘finding aids’ encompasses the various genres through which this aim is accomplished. Some finding aid genres, such as inventories and guides focus on providing users with the intellectual means of understanding and interpreting archival holdings, while other finding aid genres, such as lists, are designed primarily to provide users with a means of identifying and physically locating those holdings. Viewed through the lens of rhetorical genre studies, archival description constitutes a ‘genre system’, defined by Devitt as ‘a genre set identifiable by those who use it that has clearly linked genres with a common purpose’ (2004, p. 56). The genre system of archival description emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the opening of archival institutions to the public and the consequent social need (what rhetorical genre theorists term ‘exigence’ or ‘motive’) to make the holdings of those institutions known and available for use by that public. Over time, archival institutions developed discursive strategies to address this need and these repeated strategies evolved into recognizable text-types (e.g., inventories, guides, lists) and conventions for their preparation (e.g., policies, procedures, standards). In rhetorical terms, therefore, finding aid genres shape and are shaped by: a recurring situational context, that is, the reciprocal communicative actions of archivists providing information to users about archival holdings through finding aids of various kinds and of users seeking to locate relevant archival documents through these finding aids, a recurring cultural context, that is, the socio-historical role of archivists and archival institutions; and a recurring generic context, that is, the antecedent finding aids that have influenced the form and content of contemporary ones. (MacNeil, 2012, pp. 489
490) The common purpose, or social action, linking finding aid genres within the genre system of archival description would appear to be a relatively straightforward one, that is, making archival holdings accessible to the public. In carrying out that social action, however, archival finding aids also participate — both explicitly and implicitly — in a somewhat more complicated action, that is, ‘the formation and the shaping of knowledge’ (Freedman & Smart, 1997, p. 239). As Freedman and Smart explain: Thinking and knowledge production are … often instances of social action. In … both corporate entities and disciplinary fields of knowledge, genres tacitly codify and channel thinking while allowing for the possibility of resistance to, subversion of, and creativity within these boundaries … genres function consequently as repositories of communal knowledge, devices for generating new knowledge, sites for

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240)

Each finding aid within the genre system of archival description reproduces and shapes knowledge in its own distinctive way, codifying and channelling institutional thinking about what it means to make archival holdings accessible, the nature of the public whose interests the archival institution is intended to serve, and the roles and responsibilities of archival institutions in relation to that public. Each finding aid genre shapes and is shaped by professional perspectives of reality and inducts users into those perspectives; in so doing, it participates in the construction of a discourse community comprising archivists and users of archives. In order to participate in that community, novice archivists and users alike need to learn and then internalize the discourse conventions informing particular finding aid genres. As rhetorical genre scholars have observed, ‘participation in a community’s knowledge-making practices does not just produce knowledge; it produces ways of knowing, ways of seeing, ways of believing, ways of being’ (Starke-Meyerring & Pare´, 2011, p. 14). This chapter explores the relationship between genres, discourse communities, and their associated ideologies by means of a historical case study of one particular archival finding aid genre, that is, the calendar. It traces the rise and eventual decline of the calendar between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries within a specific institutional locale — the Public Records Office of Great Britain (hereafter PRO) — focusing on the ideologies that informed the calendar’s production, the ways in which it worked to construct a community of ‘historical workers’ comprising archivists and (select) users, and the forms of communication and knowledge it encouraged and inhibited.2 The study aims to deepen and extend understanding of the historical evolution of genres, to suggest new ways of thinking about discourse communities and the ideologies they promote and suppress, and to broaden the empirical foundation of rhetorical genre studies. In specific terms, it seeks to contribute to the emergent archival understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts by exposing the distinct ways in which particular finding aids function, in Freedman and Smart’s terms, as ‘repositories of communal knowledge’, ‘sites for enculturation’, and ‘forces to be resisted if and when change becomes necessary’.

2. This chapter draws on the findings of a research project entitled Archival Description as Rhetorical Genre in Traditional and Web-based Environments, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). More detailed findings of that research may be found in MacNeil (2012), MacNeil and Douglas (2014), and Douglas and MacNeil (2014).

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Setting the Scene: Background to the Large-Scale Publication of Calendars in the PRO

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the public records of Great Britain ‘were scattered through no fewer than sixty [separately administered] official repositories’ (Hall, 1908, p. 23) including the Rolls Chapel in Chancery Lane, the Tower of London, Somerset House, Carlton Ride, and the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey (Lawes, 1996, pp. 14
19; Shepherd, 2009, p. 22). In 1800, a Select Committee of the Commons was appointed ‘to inquire into the state of the Public Records of this kingdom … and to report to the House the Nature and Condition thereof; together with what they shall judge fit to be done for the better Arrangement, Preservation and more convenient Use of the same’ (qtd. in Walne, 1960, p. 9). The Committee’s inquiry brought to light the chaotic state and appalling conditions in which the public records, some dating back to the eleventh century, were being kept. It also drew attention to the fact that the finding aids created by the keepers of records in these repositories varied considerably in terms of their accuracy and completeness as did the fees charged by the keepers for their use. The Committee made several recommendations aimed at improving this state of affairs and, between 1800 and 1837, six consecutive Royal Commissions attempted to implement those recommendations. Although the Commissioners made some progress, by 1836 it had becoming increasingly apparent that, ‘the first and most obvious defect in the present system is that records are deposited in different and widely scattered buildings’ and that centralization of the public records in a single repository was the only means of effectively remedying that defect (qtd. in Shepherd, 2009, p. 22). The PRO was legislated into existence with the 1838 Public Records Act, which authorized the creation of a Public Record Office under the supervision of the Master of the Rolls, a senior judge who was responsible for the papers of the Court of Chancery. A deputy keeper of the Records was appointed to manage the day-to-day operations of the Office with the assistance of six assistant keepers and twenty-four clerks (Procter, 2010). Although the Public Records Act established the need for a central repository, the PRO continued to manage records spread across ten repositories until 1851 when construction of a new purpose-built archival repository began; as each portion of the building was completed, groups of records were moved into it (Shepherd, 2009). From the beginning, the PRO’s mandate was to protect and make available for use the public records of the nation. For more than a decade following its establishment, however, it functioned primarily as ‘a legal department and much of its work involved the making of copies of the ancient records for lawyers, record agents and the like’ (Cantwell, 1993,

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p. 41). In 1852, the PRO’s remit was expanded to include departmental records and in 1854 it absorbed the State Paper Office. According to John Cantwell, with these changes, the PRO began to be seen, and to see itself, as ‘a part-scholarly, part-governmental institution’ (1993, p. 41). Between 1800 and 1837 a substantial number of so-called ‘calendars’ had been prepared and published under the authority of the various Record Commissions but there was little consistency in their structure, content, and coverage. At the time of the PRO’s establishment, many of these calendars were still in varying states of completion. For the first few decades following the establishment of the PRO, they, along with new ones, continued to be published, often in piecemeal fashion, as appendices to the deputy keeper’s annual reports (MacNeil & Douglas, 2014). The calendar’s stabilization as a genre in the early 1860s was due in large part to the merger of the PRO and the State Paper Office. Long before the merger, the State Paper Office had begun preparing for publication calendars of the three principal classes of State Papers in its custody — Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial — but the work had ceased at some point. After the merger, the Master of the Rolls was keen to see the work resume. To that end, he requested additional funds from Treasury to prepare calendars for the State Papers beginning with the reign of Henry VIII. The task of editing the calendars was divided between PRO employees and external editors. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, hundreds of calendars — including the state paper series and several major series of medieval records — were prepared and published (MacNeil & Douglas, 2014).

5.2.

The PRO Calendars

A contemporary glossary of archival terminology defines a calendar as ‘a finding aid that is a chronological listing of documents in a collection, which may be comprehensive or selective, and which may include details about the writer, recipient, date, place, summary of content, type of document, and page or leaf count’. (Pearce-Moses, 2005). The calendars published by the PRO between the 1850s and 1950s generally fit within this definition. Each calendar volume covered a particular group of documents within a given time period. It typically included a historical introduction outlining the significant historical events and persons covered within the time period of the volume. This was followed by the calendar ‘proper’, consisting of chronologically ordered abstracts that communicated the ‘pith and substance’ of each document in the collection (Gt. Britain. Public Record Office, 1840, p. 12); and an index(es) of persons, places, and (sometimes) subjects covered in the volume.

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The principle underpinning the preparation of a calendar was that it ‘should convey for ordinary purposes all the information which was in the original document, and thus in general substitute for it for the purposes of historical research’ (Post, 1990, p. 93). According to the Instructions to Editors for the preparation of calendars issued by the PRO in 1862: If the information be not sufficiently precise, if facts and names be omitted or concealed under a vague and general description, the reader will often be misled, he will assume that where the abstracts are silent as to information to be found in the documents, such information does not exist; or he will have to examine every original in details, and thus one great purpose will have been lost for which these Calendars have been compiled. (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1862, p. 24) That ‘one great purpose’ was to obviate the need for researchers to journey to the PRO to consult the original records. The Instructions underline the fact that an important intended audience for the calendars was the ‘inquirer living at a distance’: The greater number of readers who will consult and value these works can have little or no opportunity of visiting the Public Record Office, in which these papers are deposited. The means for consulting the originals must necessarily be limited when readers live at a distance from the metropolis; still more if they are residents of Scotland, Ireland, distant colonies, or foreign states. Even when such an opportunity does exist, the difficulty of mastering the original hands in which these papers are written will deter many readers from consulting them. Above all, their great variety and number must present formidable obstacles to literary inquirers, however able, sanguine, and energetic, when the information contained in them is not made accessible by satisfactory Calendars. (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1862, p. 25) Deputy keepers of the PRO thus considered it ‘a national duty’ to furnish such inquirers with reasonably priced calendars that they could peruse in the comfort of their own home, office, or local library (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1856, p. 23).3 Moreover, since the calendars ‘superseded the necessity of perpetual reference to the original Document’ they not only saved time for

3. The emphasis on the ‘inquirer living at a distance’ may also reflect the fact that for most of the nineteenth century, the home study remained the main workplace for many historians, even if they were attached to a university. As Michael Riordan points out, for that reason, ‘the archive must come to the study and the documents must be published’ (Riordan, 2011, p. 53).

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the researcher, they also ‘help[ed] to extend the life of the original records themselves, many of which were “in a frail and perishing condition” and protected valuable records “from being purloined”’ (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1863, p. xii).

5.3.

The Ideologies of the PRO Calendars

Generically speaking, the calendars produced by the PRO belonged to the family of national source publications that served as the critical underpinning for much historical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Saxer, 2012, p. 47). Early source publications grew out of the philological tradition of historical scholarship and ‘the work of antiquarians who saw their task as being “to collect, to preserve, and to transmit the memory of the past”’ (Riordan, 2011, p. 53); by the middle of the nineteenth century the preparation of national source publications had evolved into a flourishing historical enterprise.4 National source publications typically took the form of editions in which historical sources were reproduced and compiled into scholarly categories, thus making those sources accessible and susceptible to interpretation. As Daniela Saxer explains, ‘by editing written sources in terms of their pertinence to a national entity, scholars provided historiography with a material substrate of ‘national’ documents’ (p. 47). Of course the act of selecting those ‘national’ documents involved processes that were profoundly ideological. According to Saxer, ‘the selection of sources for inclusion in a national publication was the most fundamental step in framing history by editing it. … national publications contributed greatly to nationalized frameworks of historical research by anchoring national notions of history in the most important instruments of research: historical sources’ (p. 54). National source editions were thus linked, inextricably, to the nationalization of history itself. As Jo Tollebeek and Ilaria Porciana describe it: With the emergence of the modern nation-state, a process that occurred in various different ways in Europe, the past increasingly became that of the nation — of its genesis as a nation and its development into a state. This transformation was manifested in many ways: governments encouraged the construction of a national view of

4. For a detailed discussion of the range of national source publication projects undertaken across Europe in the nineteenth century see Saxer (2012).

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history, separate chairs of national history were established at the universities … and national history was soon regarded as the most prestigious form of historiography. (Tollebeek & Porciana, 2012, p. 5) As part of the process ‘of historiographical nation-building’, source editions ‘became important arguments in the ideological justification of national sovereignty’ (Saxer, p. 51). In many European jurisdictions, the interest in documenting and constructing early national origins translated into a strong focus on medieval sources in the preparation of editions (Saxer, p. 51). The production of national source editions was supported by an institutional infrastructure that included learned societies, academies, libraries, and archives. Within that infrastructure, national archives played a particularly crucial role. Not only were they ‘symbols of the nation’s historical identity, expressing the fact that it had a history ‘of its own’, that it ‘owned’ a history’ (Verschaffel, 2012, p. 29), they also provided vast amounts of raw material for documentary history in general and national source editions in particular. A number of national archives, including the PRO, were actively involved in preparing and publishing national source editions. Between 1858 and 1911, for example, the PRO published a major series of source editions under the title Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, also known as the Rolls Series. While the PRO calendars were abstracts rather than transcriptions of original documents they nevertheless shared many of the same purposes as national source editions. Like the source editions, the calendars were intended to function as surrogates of historical sources — mainly medieval and early modern records — thereby facilitating access to and research use of those sources outside the walls of the PRO. Moreover, the work of calendaring records, like that of editing source documents, was a profoundly ideological process that shaped as much as it reflected Britain’s national past. The large-scale publication of calendars (as well as source editions) was driven by the PRO’s ambition to disseminate knowledge about the nation’s origins and history beyond its walls and that ambition linked the PRO calendars to a historical and nation-building enterprise. The significant amount of time and money spent on calendar production was defended by deputy keepers on the grounds that calendars represented ‘the most efficient means of making the national archives accessible to all who are interested in historical inquiries’ and ‘the best justification of the liberality and munificence of the Government in throwing open these papers to the public, and providing proper catalogues of their contents at the national expense’ (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1862, p. 18). The generic form of the calendars embodied that ambition: the calendar abstracts were

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presented as condensed versions of historical events and their chronological ordering mirrored the unfolding of those events. More importantly, the processes of selection and abstraction underpinning the calendars exposed certain aspects of the nation’s past while suppressing others. These recurring features of generic form — selection, abstraction, and suppression — served to promote a view of the past that supported and reinforced the interests and values of the PRO, the broader historical community and, to some extent, the broader public. These processes took place at a number of levels and by a variety of agents. Editors of individual calendars determined the choice of documents for inclusion, the depth of detail given to the individual abstracts, and the facts and events that would be covered in the historical introduction. As they worked their way through collections of unsorted documents in search of relevant material for the calendars, the editors also took on the role of deciding how those documents should be arranged and, in some cases, whether they were even worth preserving. It has been suggested, for example, that John Brewer, the first editor of the Calendar of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ‘used to sort documents into four piles — Henry VIII, Not Henry VIII, Trash, and Rubbish — and at least one sighting of a document marked ‘Trash’ has been recorded’ (Johnson, 1957, p. 179; Post, 1990, p. 91). The special interests of the various deputy keepers also played a role in determining what was and was not worth calendaring. The first deputy keeper Sir Frances Palgrave, for example, assigned one of his editors the task of calendaring patent specifications, which he ‘thought of great value as showing the progress of mechanical science and as a stimulus to wouldbe-inventors’ (Cantwell, 1991, p. 97). Decisions were made not only about what parts of the nation’s past were worth calendaring but, also, what parts of that past should not be calendared and such decisions were made by agents both inside and outside the PRO. The expansion of the PRO’s remit to include departmental records and its subsequent merger with the State Paper Office had been a matter of some concern within both the Foreign Office and the Home Office since it meant that their records would eventually be made available to the public after their transfer to the PRO. Following the commencement of the State Paper calendar series, the Foreign Office wrote a letter to the Master of the Rolls directing ‘that certain classes of [sensitive] documents be withheld from the public’. The Home Office, for its part, ‘sought to suppress publication in the Calendars [of State Papers] of correspondence relating to Irish affairs amongst others’ (Levine, 1986, p. 107). The story of the suppression of the correspondence relating to Irish affairs is recounted in the catalogue description of a series of PRO unpublished and unfinished finding aids ([U.K.] The National Archives, 2014). Included in that series is an incomplete draft calendar of Home Office Papers for the years

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1801
1803.5 Work on a series of published calendars of State Papers Domestic (subsequently Home Office papers), intended to cover the period 1760
1830, began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Work was started on the papers of the 1760s and early 1770s, and simultaneously on those for the years 1801
1803. The calendaring for the period 1760
1775 was eventually completed and published in four volumes as the Calendar of Home Office Papers of the reign of George III (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1878
1899). The calendars for 1801
1803, however, remained in limbo. According to the catalogue description, on March 31, 1876, J.R. Atkins, the editor of the calendar for that period, wrote to Thomas Duffus Hardy, the deputy keeper at the time, explaining that: … the calendars for 1801
1802 would have gone to press soon after completion but for the Home Office’s concern about publication of certain material relating to Ireland in 1801. Earlier in the same month, Atkins had noted at the beginning of his calendar of 1801 records that certain pages relating to Ireland had been sent to the Home Secretary in 1874, and had not yet been returned …. They are absent from the surviving manuscript. On 21 June 1876, Hardy wrote to the Home Office, expressing some concern about the advisability of publishing the 1801
1803 material. A reply on behalf of the Home Secretary, dated 3 October 1876, approved publication of the 1760s and 1770s material, but requested that until the calendars for the period 1760 to 1800 had been published (presumably in full), the Deputy Keeper would ‘suspend the printing of the Calendar … from 1800 to 1830’. In the event, no calendars of Home Office papers later than 1775 have ever been published. ([U.K.] The National Archives, 2014, n.p.) The suppression of the calendars dealing with Irish affairs underlines Philippa Levine’s observation that the British government at that time was willing to support historical work so long as it promoted a progressive, consensual view of history: There was … a sense in which the past was too dangerous simply to be thrown open to the public. The idea of history as a means of political education thus acted as a counsel of suppression. Its importance was seen in terms of its promotion of consensus; an expression of the widely held view that the English past should be seen not in terms of a series of conflicts but, in classic Whig terms, as a natural

5. The draft calendar itself provides insight into the working methods of the editors. An abstract for each document or series of documents has been prepared on separate sheets of paper and then cut and pasted into a single chronological sequence for each year.

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progression of events tending towards the development of the peaceful, civilised and prosperous society which was the Britain in which they lived. (Levine, 1986, p. 108) This ‘counsel of suppression’ persisted into the twentieth century. A 1912 Royal Commission on Public Records, for example, drew up a list of subjects excluded from public access, covering the Home, Foreign, Colonial, and War Offices, the Admiralty and the Treasury. The exclusions included ‘names of secret service agents or payment of secret service money, references to scalping, and other atrocities in war, reference to individual convicts, passages likely to give offence abroad or to prejudice diplomatic negotiations’ (Levine, 1986, pp. 107
108). The embargo on access effectively meant that no calendaring work could be done of records dealing with those subjects. At the same time, publication was positively advocated, not only by the government but by British historians, if it was thought to promote the ‘correct’ version of history. In 1876, the historian A.J. Froude strongly encouraged Hardy to begin calendaring papers from Trinity College Dublin relating to the Irish rebellion of 1641, insisting that: The Irish are now taught to believe that the whole story of the massacre was got up to justify the confiscation and that if there were a massacre at all it was a massacre of Catholics by Protestants […] there is no limit to the mischief which a general conviction of such kind, if allowed to grow up without some authoritative contradiction will produce in Ireland. (qtd in Levine, 1986, p. 108) Both the suppression and publication of calendars were motivated by a desire to promote a consensual view of English history; that desire, in turn, was ‘rooted very strongly in [a] tenacious sense of national pride which informed the historical communities at this time’ (Levine, 108).6 That tenacious sense of pride extended to certain segments of the broader public. According to Levine, the calendars of state papers ‘were

6. The reaction of Irish and Scottish patriots to the launch of the PRO’s other major source publication, however, underlines the limits of this consensual view. As Daniela Saxer observes: ‘When in 1858 publication began of the famous Rolls Series under the official title of Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, Irish and Scottish patriots repeatedly protested against the conception of the edition. In the 1880s they even mounted a public campaign on the grounds that they were not adequately represented. The Scottish protest was quelled by some editions of Scottish chronicles in the series and an indemnity of 1000 pounds for Scottish publications. In both cases, in the second half of the nineteenth century, patriotic societies and historians produced national Scottish and Irish source publications which contested the aspirations of English historians to incorporate their history by editing their sources’ (Saxer, p. 55). See also Knowles (1962).

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eagerly consumed by enthusiastic nationalists’ (p. 108). The 1863 Calendar of Colonial State Papers relating to the East Indies, China, and Japan between 1574 and 1660, for example, received the following favourable review in the Morning Herald and Standard: It is impossible for anyone to understand the history of Elizabeth’s reign who is not familiar with the lives of the famous sailors whose love of adventure and hatred of the Spaniard led to achievements which Englishmen will recall forever with pride […] these men won for England her Queenship of the Seas. (qtd in Levine, 1986, p. 108) Of course, the same nationalistic, bordering on jingoistic, pride also fuelled negative public opinion toward particular calendars and editors and public opinion played a role ‘in determining the character and indeed the authorship of the Calendars’ (Levine, 1986, p. 113). In 1867, for example, there was some press criticism of remarks made by the editor of the fourth volume of the Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, for the reign of Elizabeth I, ‘which were construed as unduly favourable to Philip of Spain and to Rome’ (Cantwell, 1991, pp. 240
241).7 In 1860, the PRO’s appointment of William Turnbull to calendar foreign diplomatic papers beginning with the reigns of Edward VI and Mary was strenuously protested by a number of organizations that had strongly anti-Catholic leanings. They considered the appointment of Turnbull, a well-known antiquarian who had recently converted to Catholicism, to be a breach of faith. Arguing that, by virtue of his Catholicism, Turnbull was ‘unfit to be intrusted with […] valuable Foreign papers’ (qtd in Levine, 1986, p. 113) they demanded that he be replaced by an Anglican editor. The controversy was widely reported on in the press and the unrelentingly vitriolic attacks eventually led Turnbull to resign (Cantwell, 1991, pp. 192
193; Levine, 1986, pp. 113
114). Such incidents make clear that it was not only government officials who believed the past could be dangerous if placed in the wrong hands; such belief was shared by members of the historical community and certain sectors of the public. They also draw attention to the multiple agents and interests concurring in the production of calendars and the impact of those agents and interests on the kinds of knowledge reproduced and valorized through them. The next section will look at a more specific community of ‘historical workers’ that took shape within the PRO around the production of calendars.

7. John Romilly, the Master of the Rolls at the time, responded by issuing a circular to editors, requesting that they ‘confine any Prefatory Remarks they may consider necessary to prefix to their Volumes to an explanation of the Papers therein contained’ (Romilly, 1867, n.p.).

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The Role of Calendars in Constructing a Community of Historical Workers

In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1867, William Stubbs characterized the new breed of British historians emerging in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘a great republic of workers’ (qtd in Riordan, 2011, p. 53). As Margaret Procter makes clear, this ‘great republic’ included archivists as well as historians. In her study of the relationships and networks formed by American and British archivists and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she describes a community of ‘historical workers’ whose sense of shared identity came from their contribution to ‘the promotion of historical enterprise’ (Procter, 2008, p. 143). Within this community, Procter argues, the roles of archivists and historians ‘were interchangeable, and considered equally important to the production and dissemination of historical knowledge. … There was a commonality of purpose, and because this existed within a restricted community, the ability to forge links to promote that commonality of purpose was relatively straightforward’ (Procter, 2006, p. 362). Such commonality of purpose and sense of comradeship between archivists (the keepers of records) and the historians who relied on those records for their research was evident in the PRO’s culture during the first century or so of its existence and calendars symbolized that sense of purpose and comradeship. Successive generations of deputy and assistant keepers saw themselves as members of an emergent historical research community and viewed the calendars as the PRO’s unique contribution to historical scholarship. In 1870, Hardy asserted that the calendars were ‘a species of historical literature peculiar to this country — exclusively of English birth and growth — for no other nation as yet has attempted anything of the kind though both France and Germany are now commencing works of the same description and on the same plan’ (qtd in Cantwell, 1991, p. 246). The calendars played a key role in shaping the professional identity of the PRO archivists as ‘historical workers’ rather than simply ‘government bureaucrats’ (Procter, 2010, p. 20). In a letter to the Master of the Rolls written in 1882, Lord Lingen, the permanent secretary of the Treasury, made specific reference to the so-called ‘literary’8 work of calendaring as a justification for the PRO’s special status as a quasi-scholarly institution: The duties of the Department in part turn upon the mechanical details of the custody and search of documents, and in part are of

8. During this time period the term ‘literary’ was synonymous with ‘historical’, reflecting the fact that history was considered mainly a literary pursuit (Levine, 1986, p. 105, n. 18).

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a more strictly literary character, under the name of ‘calendaring’, which consists in collecting the documents deposited of some particular period, and concisely exhibiting the contents of the most material of them in volumes for publication, so as to guide students to the originals, whenever they wish to consult them, and, in the meantime, to furnish them with information of the most authentic kind in a shape which makes it at once available. It need not be said that such work requires sound historical and antiquarian knowledge, and also familiarity with old handwriting and style, and this often in more than one language. (qtd in Cantwell, 1991, p. 297) Almost 70 years later, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, then deputy keeper of the PRO, was continuing to insist that the background knowledge and technical skills an archivist needed to calendar medieval and early modern records remained relevant and was inseparable from the knowledge and skills an archivist needed to manage and describe modern departmental records. In his annual report for 1951 he asserted: [the] ability to deal with later Records in this Country, where administrative development has been so continuous from medieval to modern times, should be based on a technique gained by close familiarity with classes of all dates — a familiarity which must include not merely the handling but the reading and comprehension with equal readiness of medieval, Tudor and Stuart Records. Such a familiarity has been gained by Assistant Keepers in the past only through long periods of work of an ‘editorial’ kind — it cannot in fact be gained in any other way — and I view with apprehension the possibility of a lowering of past standards. (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1952, p. 4) At the time Jenkinson was writing, the assistant keepers were still primarily medieval specialists with degrees in history or classics and they fought to maintain the tradition of calendar publication on which the PRO’s scholarly reputation, particularly within the academic community, rested (Cantwell, 2000, p. 7, 23). In an essay written in 1957 as part of a tribute to Jenkinson, Charles Johnson, who had served as an assistant keeper from 1920 to 1930, urged the continuation of this academic tradition and suggested that the remuneration for staff employed in what he called ‘the learned branch’ of the PRO ‘ought to compare favourably … with that of a career in a university’ (Johnson, 1957, p. 194). The large-scale publication of calendars played an important role in establishing an academic tradition within the PRO and in cultivating a community of historical workers. But the community the calendars helped to shape and perpetuate was a profoundly hierarchical one and, as such, created a somewhat divided culture within the PRO. As J.B. Post describes

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it, by the end of the nineteenth century, a ‘snobbish cachet’ had attached itself to the work of publishing calendars and source editions; it was considered ‘somehow of a higher order than other types of work’. This meant that, ‘the lofty but, in terms of service to the records, secondary work of publishing documents … was given to the most able, whereas the dirty, thankless, and obscure business of tracing the provenance and context of a myriad scattered miscellanea … was entrusted to the weaker and less professional’ (Post, 1990, pp. 93
94). Staff engaged in the “literary” work of publishing calendars (and source editions) were thus positioned at the top of the PRO pecking order while staff engaged in the more mundane duties of arranging records and preparing “less exalted forms of finding-aid,” such as lists and guides, were placed somewhat lower down (Post, p. 94). The privileging of so-called literary work extended to the PRO users who were divided into two classes: literary searchers and legal searchers; such privileging manifested itself specifically in the debates about whether legal and literary searchers should be charged different fees for being given access to records and finding aids. Sir Henry Cole, who helped to lay the foundation for the 1838 Public Records Act viewed the establishment of the PRO as a means of improving ‘the administration of justice, especially for poorer litigants’ and had recommended equal treatment for legal and literary searchers in the matter of search fees (Cantwell, 1991, p. 5, 40). Palgrave held a very different view. He believed that a distinction ought to be made between literary and legal searchers and that the latter should be charged for the use of records and finding aids in order to discourage applications he deemed to be frivolous and a waste of PRO staff time: It frequently happens that individuals (generally of the lower classes of society) imagine that they are entitled to property or peerages which have descended to them from some remote ancestor. People of this description applying without professional aid, have of course no accurate idea of the evidence which such a claim requires. … Other persons being professional men would use the Records simply for the sake of vexatious litigation, … and if the Records could be used for a small outlay of money, the privilege would be exceedingly abused by such practitioners. (qtd in Cantwell, 1991, pp. 40
41) Palgrave lost the argument and a table of fees treating all classes of searchers equally was issued in 1840. But he did not give up the fight and in 1851 he moved to abolish fees for literary searchers while continuing the practice of charging legal searchers. According to Cantwell, Palgrave ‘considered it almost an act of charity to discourage misguided persons, generally in humble circumstances, from pursuing imaginary claims to property or titles because such endeavours frequently led to insanity or beggary’ (Cantwell,

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1991, p. 139). This time he succeeded. A deciding factor seems to have been a petition sent to the Master of the Rolls by the President of the Society of Antiquaries and signed by Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Hallam, and Thomas Macauley, among others. The petition argued that: … public documents were ‘the only sure foundation of historical truth’ and if historians were deterred from using them by heavy fees, they would be ‘compelled to copy erroneous or questionable statements from earlier authors … thus doubt and mistake are perpetuated and made part of our national history. … The attainment of historical truth — an object in which the whole nation is interested — is therefore prejudiced, and in many cases defeated by the enforcement of fees which produce the nation absolutely nothing’. (qtd in Lawes, 1996, p. 26) This argument carried the day and regulations were drawn up in 1851, which freed literary searchers from fees. The various rationales offered in support of lifting fees for literary searchers (while continuing to charge legal searchers) contain an implicit assertion of ‘a moral hierarchy’ of users within the PRO (Levine, p. 105). Literary searchers, who acted selflessly in the public interest, uncovering important truths about the history of the nation, sat at the top of that hierarchy while legal searchers, who acted solely in their own interest, grubbing about in the records in the hopes of finding unclaimed funds in chancery, were positioned somewhat lower down. Literary searchers were entitled to membership in the PRO community of historical workers; legal searchers, clearly, were not. At the same time, it was clear that to be full members of that community, literary searchers needed to possess background knowledge roughly analogous to the knowledge possessed by the PRO’s assistant keepers. When the Master of the Rolls accorded special recognition to ‘literary enquirers’ through the lifting of fees, he also made it clear that: No applicant ought to present himself who is not sufficiently acquainted with the handwriting, abbreviations and language of ancient documents so as to be able to read and decipher their contents. The literary inquirer will have free access to the documents, but this being done, he will have to conduct the inquiry from these documents in such a manner as his own knowledge and capacity may best enable him to do. (qtd in Timings, 1960, p. 179) When the PRO opened its new search rooms in 1866, fees were also lifted for legal searchers. Nevertheless, the divided culture of users was perpetuated in the different physical spaces allocated to them. The Long Room

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was reserved for legal searchers while the glass-domed larger room, known as the Round Room, was reserved for literary searchers and this division of searchers and reading spaces within the PRO continued well into the twentieth century.

5.5.

The Decline of the PRO Calendars

Although deputy keepers insisted in annual reports throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century that the calendars benefitted every class of user, it is more accurate to say that the calendars served and embodied the interests and values of ‘literary enquirers’ in general and academic historians interested in the medieval and early modern period — many of whom worked for the PRO as external editors — in particular, and that these interests and values were shared by the upper ranks of the PRO, since the bulk of the PRO’s publication resources were spent on the preparation of calendars for these periods. By the 1960s, however, calendar production had slowed considerably and production on the ‘less exalted’ finding aid genres, such as lists and guides of various kinds, were occupying significantly more of the PRO staff’s time. The slowdown in calendar production was symptomatic of a breakdown in consensus about the value of the calendars within the community of historical workers.9 In 1962, a survey soliciting user opinions on PRO publications, including the calendar series, ‘found that, while medievalists and some eighteenth century historians wished to see the calendars continue along the established lines, historians working in other periods believed that more emphasis should be placed on listing and indexing and the preparation of “short, informative guides” rather than on calendaring’ (qtd in MacNeil & Douglas, 2014, p. 314). By the 1950s it was also clear that, proportionally, historians working in the medieval and early modern period represented a minority of the PRO’s users as the weight of research shifted toward more recent periods (Ede, 1968, p. 186). Moreover, the belief that the interests of users were well served by reducing their need to consult original records no longer carried the weight it once had. In a report written in 1951, R.B. Wernham, editor of the Calendars of State Papers, Foreign, suggested that the very fullness of the calendar descriptions, ‘might actually mislead [the historian], by tempting him to trust exclusively to the “Calendar” and neglect the actual Manuscripts; for even the “Calendar” could not be a real substitute for the Manuscripts’ (Gt. Britain. PRO, 1952, p. 24).

9. For a more detailed discussion of the reasons for the calendars’ decline and the finding aids that supplanted them, see MacNeil and Douglas (2014).

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This breakdown in consensus regarding the value of the calendars to historical research was not a new or sudden one; it was beginning to be felt in the first decades of the twentieth century. The PRO calendars were rooted in a philological and antiquarian tradition of documentary history. As the historical community became more professionalized and historical scholarship more specialized, many historians began to distance themselves from that tradition and its excessive focus on the individual source document. In 1908, the British historian Hubert Hall (who also spent much of his career as an assistant keeper in the PRO) gave voice to a different way of thinking about documentary history when he asserted: … it is not enough that we should merely find and use a document; we should also know its manuscript relations. By treating every document as a separate unit we are in danger of making ‘documentary’ history in a spasmodic and desultory manner. When a new document has been ‘discovered’ our histories are made to accord with its evidence. Then another document is found, and our latest views must be modified, and so on, without any assurance of finality. These new discoveries and new views, ever shifting with the progress of research, are not only prejudicial to the reputation of the historian, but also exercise a demoralizing influence on our historical method. (Hall, 1908, p. 8) The calendars’ emphasis on individual documents came to be regarded as ‘the fetishization of the content of records at the expense of the context’ (Riordan, 2012, p. 105). This change in historical perspective was accompanied by the emergence of a distinctly archival perspective, one that drew attention to ‘the fundamental incompatibility between the interests of those who care for the natural history of the documents [i.e., archivists], and those who merely regard the information contained in them [i.e., historians]’ (Johnson, 1913, p. 3). The emergence of that perspective was symptomatic of a shift from ‘consolidation’ to ‘separation’ in the professional identities of archivists and historians (Procter, 2006). In the early decades of the twentieth century, continental currents of thinking about the centrality of the principle of provenance to an understanding of the nature of archival documents and the implications of this understanding for their arrangement and description began to be discussed in the English historical literature. Many of the contributors to that literature spent all or part of their careers working as assistant keepers in the PRO.10 The infiltration of this

10. For a sampling of that literature see Hall (1908), Jenkinson (1922), Johnson (1913, 1919). For discussions of the infiltration of the archival theory of arrangement into the PRO during this time period see Procter (2008), Roper (1992).

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literature into the PRO’s culture gave voice to a different constituency within the PRO’s community of historical workers and gradually transformed the institution’s conception of what it meant to make archival holdings available for use and the role of the PRO and its professional staff in addressing that need. The finding aid genre that embodied this transformed conception was the repository guide.11 Whereas the calendar focused on exposing the content of select records held by the PRO12 and was designed primarily to meet the needs of remote users (the inquirer living at a distance), the guide focused on exposing the context of all the records held by the PRO and was designed primarily to meet the needs of onsite users. The guide identified all the major groupings of records by provenance, elaborated their administrative origins and internal structure, and listed the various means of reference available to assist users in understanding and physically locating records that might be relevant to their research. Like the calendars, the guides were underpinned by a good deal of historical scholarship, but that scholarship was directed to general rather than specialist users of the PRO. The publication of calendars was driven by the PRO’s desire to disseminate knowledge about the origins and history of the British nation beyond its walls and that desire linked both the PRO and its professional staff to a historical, and nation-building enterprise. The publication of guides, on the other hand, was driven by the PRO’s growing desire to communicate information about the nature and extent of its holdings and to assist users in locating, understanding and using those holdings. The PRO’s efforts in this regard linked it to a more distinctly archival enterprise. While the PRO continued to publish calendars, they no longer enjoyed the privileged position they once had and throughout the 1960s the PRO increasingly turned its attention to identifying the kinds of finding aids that, in its view, would better serve ‘scholars of this and the rising generation’ (qtd in MacNeil and Douglas, p. 315).

5.6.

Conclusion

This study has traced the rise and decline of the calendars published by the PRO between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, focusing on the ideologies that informed their production, the

11. The generic evolution of the PRO repository guide is traced in MacNeil and Douglas (2014). 12. And, in some cases, records held by other repositories.

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kinds of knowledge they enabled and constrained, the influence they exerted on the PRO’s culture, and their uptake by the historical community and the public at large. The study has demonstrated the ways in which the calendar genre, as it evolved in the PRO, participated in the formation and shaping of knowledge functioning, in Freedman and Smart’s terms, as a repository of communal knowledge, a site of enculturation, and a force to be resisted when change became necessary. As a repository of communal knowledge, the PRO calendars reproduced, framed, and perpetuated a progressive, consensual understanding of the history of the British nation through processes of selection, abstraction, and suppression. As a site of enculturation, the calendars worked to construct a community of historical workers comprising select members of the PRO’s professional staff and select users whose sense of shared purpose and commonality derived from their participation in the promotion of ‘historical enterprise’. As that community fragmented and new communities of historians and archivists with different ideas about the best means of making archival holdings available for use began to take shape and infiltrate the professional and institutional culture of the PRO, the calendars became a force to be resisted because they no longer embodied the ways of knowing valued by these new communities.

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1899). Calendar of state papers domestic. Calendar of home office papers of the reign of George III (4 vols.). London, Longman: HMSO. Gt. Britain. Public Record Office. (1952). The 113th report of the deputy keeper of the public records. London: HMSO. Hall, H. (1908). Studies in English official historical documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkinson, H. (1922). A manual of archive administration including the problems of war archives and archive making. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnson, C. (1913). The Administration of Archives since 1789. Paper read at the International Congress on Historical Studies in London, 1913. In PRO 8/42/C22228. Johnson, C. (1919). The care of documents and management of archives. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Johnson, C. (1957). The Public Record Office. In C. Davies (Ed.), Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson (pp. 178
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16.

Chapter 6

Organizational Records as Genres: An Analysis of the “Documentary Reality” of Organizations from the Perspectives of Diplomatics, Records Management, and Rhetorical Genre Studies Fiorella Foscarini

Abstract Purpose
This chapter explores the relationship of rhetorical genre studies with archival studies, and identifies commonalities and differences between the two fields. By complementing and expanding the diplomatics approach to the analysis of the documentary reality of organizations, rhetorical genre studies provides the records disciplines with sophisticated conceptual tools that may be used to enhance understanding of how records are made, used, and transmitted in workplace contexts. Findings
All genres are sites of continuous social, cultural, and ideological negotiations, and organizational records make no exception. By recognizing that records are culturally constructed artefacts that shape and are shaped through social interactions, and recordkeeping is an inherently ideological discursive practice, notions such as evidence and accountability take on new, more dynamic meanings. Record keepers as well as the creators and users of the records become agents who continuously engage in the production, reproduction, and transformation of the documentary reality of their organizations.

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 115
132 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011007

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Originality/value
Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, this chapter offers an inclusive, situated, and dynamic view of organizational records that is in line with postmodern accounts of recordkeeping. The new reading of basic archival concepts and methods proposed in this chapter especially contributes to enrich the theoretical framework of records management, which has traditionally been represented as a technical discipline supporting unspecific ideas of organizational effectiveness. Keywords: Records management; diplomatics; archival studies; rhetorical genre studies; organizational records

6.1.

Introduction

The archives and records management area of studies (also known as archival science) has at its core the notion of a record. All principles, methods, and practices concerning the creation, handling, storage, and preservation of any kinds of recorded information that may arise during the conduct of professional or personal lives derive from the way records are defined in relation to the activities they support. Different archival traditions offer distinctive understandings of the nature of a record. What relationships records entertain with other concepts such as evidence and information (Yeo, 2007, 2008) and with their surrounding contexts (Duranti & Preston, 2008; Lee, 2011) are among the most debated issues in the professional literature. With particular regard to those records that are created and used daily in both public and private sectors’ organizations (the subject of this chapter), diplomatics and records management are the disciplines (or sub-disciplines, if one sees them as integral components of archival science) that provide the most comprehensive theoretical and methodological frameworks to understand records as the outcome and means of business activities. By drawing on both disciplines, this chapter reviews basic ideas associated with the notion of an organizational record, and examines their literary warrants and cultural underpinnings. This analysis will reveal the limitations of current representations of the “documentary reality” of formal organizations. Rhetorical genre studies is then introduced as a research field that may help reconceptualize those aspects of “recordness” that appear unsuitable to capture the richness and complexity of professional discourse practices. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that the genre approach can be used to expand the scope of diplomatics and to

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provide records management with new, more sophisticated tools to explore how records are made, used, and transmitted in the workplace. Why rhetorical genre studies? Since the beginning of the 1990s, various archival scholars have engaged with postmodern and poststructuralist ideas, as well as with concepts and methods coming from other disciplines, in an effort to enrich archival science and attune it to the sensibility and philosophical orientation of the 21st century (see, inter alia, Cook, 1994; Shankar, 2004; Upward, 1997; Yakel, 2001). Rhetorical genre studies embeds some of the frameworks adopted by these authors (such as, for instance, structuration theory, activity theory, and ethnographic methods). Additionally, its focus is on the interrelationships existing between texts and contexts, between the formal and substantial features of “genres of organizational communication” (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992) on the one hand, and the situations in which such genres (primarily records) are enacted on the other. Both genre and records research recognize that actions shape our written, oral and other symbolbased communications. Consequently, they are both concerned with the interactions taking place when organizational actors engage with cultural artefacts (e.g., records, systems, technologies) in accomplishing their tasks, and both suggest action-based principles for classification, knowledge organization, and meaning making. Thus, rather than being just another postmodern, socio-constructivist approach to information objects, rhetorical genre studies is especially relevant to archival science, in that it specifically addresses issues that are central to it, such as, how records are created and why.

6.2.

The Nature of Records

According to archival traditions dating back to the 19th century, records may be described as by-products (that is, residues, outcomes) and instruments (that is, tools, means) of the practical activities carried out by individuals and organizations in the usual and ordinary course of their business (Cencetti, 1970; Duranti, 1997a; Jenkinson, 1966; Schellenberg, 2003). In order to be able to be recalled as the “documentary evidence” of some event, records must be created “unintentionally,” in the sense that “the recorder … should be interested only in that it happened. That is, the record should be a product not of his [sic] interest but of the event” (Raffel, 1979, p. 19). The record-writers’ “closeness” in time to the event to be recorded, together with their “indifference” to it, are prerequisites for the record to “speak for itself,” or, in other words, to be “reliable” (Raffel, 1979, p. 29).

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Recordkeeping, as a set of concepts, tools, and procedures that are essential to the functioning of the bureaucratic machinery, was developed to ensure the objective and impartial creation of records, as well as to protect their identity and integrity (that is, their authenticity) across space and time, so that not only the bureaucrats but also any users of the records — present and future, internal and external to the organization — could confidently rely on them. When assessing whether the records under their purview can be trusted as evidence of what happened, bureaucrats focus on the reliability of the record writer (is the writer “competent” to enunciate the content of the record?) and on the record “completeness” (does the record include all the formal elements it is expected to exhibit?). These very same questions underlie the understanding of a reliable record one finds in diplomatics (Duranti, 1998, pp. 71
72) and are implicit in most archival practice. Records managers and archivists support an organization’s past, present, and future accountability primarily by drawing on their specific knowledge of record forms and functions, and of the procedures and actors involved in records creation. This knowledge largely derives from the old “science of the diploma,” or diplomatics. The body of principles, concepts and methods that constitutes diplomatics was born in the 17th century. By examining hundreds of medieval charters, the French Benedictine monk Dom Jean Mabillon established “certain and accurate terms and rules by which authentic instruments can be distinguished from spurious, and certain and genuine ones from uncertain and suspect ones” (Mabillon, 1681, quoted in MacNeil, 2004, p. 202). Over time, diplomatics further developed as an analytical technique to ascertain the “true nature” of various types of documentary sources, produced by different authorities and in different periods (Barbiche, 1996; Guyotjeannin, 1996). By becoming the cornerstone of archival science in the 19th century, this discipline specialized in documentary forms and processes broadened its scope as to include in its purview both historical and contemporary material (Carucci, 1987; Duranti, 1998; Sandri, 1985). It also acquired a prospective dimension besides the retrospective one it initially had, when its main purpose was to assist in the discovery of forgeries. The diplomatics’ method — which involves looking at the extrinsic and intrinsic elements of documentary form (from the language, style, and other physical characteristics of the document, to the intellectual articulation of its content) as a manifestation of the functions fulfilled by the document in the specific juridical-administrative context in which it was created (Duranti, 1998, p. 133) — was extended to the identification of functional aggregations of records for purposes of classification, the establishment of instructions for record creation and use (e.g., document templates and workflows), the determination of the nature of records in electronic environments, and other recordkeeping endeavors (Duranti, 1998, 2005).

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However, even in its most recent instantiations, known as “contemporary archival diplomatics” (Duranti, Eastwood, & MacNeil, 2002) and “digital diplomatics” (Duranti, 2009), the discipline continues to be applied almost exclusively to formal, highly regulated contexts of document production, and to “juridically relevant acts” (Duranti, 1998, p. 62). Similarly, archival science has traditionally concerned itself with government records and other selected material deposited in public archives; while records management focuses, in particular, on the current records from which the accountability of public and private bodies depends. Only recently have the social dimension of recordkeeping, as well as the personal and the community-based spheres of records creation, become legitimate areas of archival research (see, inter alia, Flinn, 2010; McKemmish, Piggott, Reed, & Upward, 2005; Meehan, 2010). Still, the official, well-formed record of activities that are relevant to the major functions of formal organizations is the information object that existing recordkeeping procedures will primarily attend to.

6.3.

The Documentary Reality of Diplomatics and Records Management

In her book on diplomatics, Duranti (1998) writes: “Diplomatics saw the documentary world as a system, and built a system to understand and explain it” (p. 107). Referring to the “exact sciences” (Duranti, 1998, p. 108) as the research paradigm on which diplomatics is based, she suggested that the “typical, ideal documentary form, the most regular and complete” (Duranti, 1998, p. 133), derived by early diplomatists from their examinations of older documents would still be useful for identifying and assessing the properties of the documentation produced today. The regularity of administrative procedures and the inherent rationality of bureaucracy, combined with the “passivity” of the recorder and the “neutrality” of the recordkeeper, would warrant the continuing validity of the diplomatics’ methodology and its predictive and prescriptive power. Various authors have discussed the limitations of the “postpositive” or “scientific” ideology and deterministic thinking associated with the diplomatics’ approach (Brothman, 2011; Foscarini, 2012; MacNeil, 2004). In many ways, the same kind of reasoning applies to the discipline of records management, whose goal is to protect the evidentiary value of records by establishing mechanisms (i.e., processes and controls such as those embedded in classification systems, retention schedules, and audit trails) that help stabilize-for-ever the record’s form and substance.

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“Seeing fact-in-a-document,” Raffel (1979) explains, “requires distinguishing between document and event as a matter of boundaries, limits, the outside (what the record reports) and the inside (the record)” (p. 19). In the record disciplines, the world and the word, the context, and the text are conceived as discrete, finite, and dissectible entities. It is part of a record professional’s responsibilities to abstract the instantiation of events, which the record impartially encapsulates, from the flux of life, to analyze and describe all elements that participate in the action and the documentation of the action concerned, and to identify and fix those properties that point to the true meaning of the record. The “world” is broken down into the broader juridical system that dictates how actions should be carried out, the organizational structures and functions involved, including any administrative procedures and the individual phases of each procedure, and any relevant systems and technologies (Duranti & Preston, 2008). The “word” comprises the actors involved in the making of the record (“persons” in diplomatic terms), the record’s extrinsic and intrinsic elements of form, and any attributes, digital components (in relation to electronic environments), and metadata contextualizing it. The analytical tasks performed by the record professional require that the complexity and messiness of the real world be eliminated, like in a laboratory setting (Foscarini, 2012, p. 397). This decontextualized and prescriptive approach is reflected in the records management literature, which largely consists of models, standards, and specifications.

6.4.

Recordkeeping from a Genre Perspective

In her 1993 article “Records as genre,” Catherine Schryer considers the “genre of recordkeeping” and studies its effects on the members of a professional community — the medical staff of a hospital — for which recordkeeping appears to be a “central discursive practice” (Schryer, 1993, p. 204). Analogously to bureaucrats, hospital workers (i.e., medical doctors, nurses, social workers, etc.) rely on specific ways of representing reality by means of records, and much of the interaction within their community and with the rest of society happens through the language and procedures associated with their recordkeeping practices (see also Schryer, Lingard, & Spafford, 2005). Thus, not only does the accountability system of the hospital, as much as that of any other organization, depend on good recordkeeping, but also socialization and the ways people look at their world are shaped by acts of record-making and -keeping. Citing sociologist Smith (1984), Schryer (1993) writes that “[o]ur lives are “infused with a process of

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inscription” … or the rendering of an event or object in documentary form” (p. 205). The relationship between the world and the word, and the inherent notion of a “documentary reality” are here interpreted quite differently from what emerged from previous accounts of diplomatics and records management. Within the conceptual framework in which rhetorical genre studies is situated, the “objectified forms” displayed by the bureaucratic, legal, and professional apparatuses reveal their socially constructed nature. Organizational records and recordkeeping systems, as well as the kind of reasoning, decision-making, evaluation, and judgement that the records incorporate are seen as “the artful constructions of text-based methodologies and the practices of formal organization” (Smith, 1987, p. 151). The “socially organized practices of reporting and recording” (Smith, 1974, p. 257) are part of the discourse practices of most workplace communities, and presuppose some background knowledge of how things get done and how reality should be documented in that community. As Smart (2006) puts it, “discourse practices [enable the] members of professional organizations [to] collaborate in creating and applying the specialized knowledge they need for accomplishing their work” (p. 11). The genre of recordkeeping strategically hosts many of the attitudes, motives, and values that shape and are shaped by the shared practices of formal organizations, and has numerous “textual, cognitive, and social consequences” (Schryer, 1993, p. 206). By providing rules that enable and constrain the members of professional communities to “act together” (Miller, 1984, p. 159) in socially expected and institutionally sanctioned ways, recordkeeping becomes a key site for collaboration and identity formation (Foscarini, 2014). But what makes the type of bureaucratic discourse embedded in records and recordkeeping practices successful? And for whom it is successful?

6.5.

The Ideology of Records

“Institutional genres,” Pare´ (2002) suggests, “are successful patterns in local discursive forms and functions” (p. 60). Their ongoing use “in certain ways that worked once and might work again” (Russell, 1997, p. 515) and their ability to adapt to (and influence) changes in the environment explain why memoranda, progress reports, meetings, notification letters, and other conventional discursive forms typical of bureaucracies are considered effective, and thus, tend to endure. The resilience of recordkeeping tools and procedures (even when they have become obsolete) is a well-known phenomenon described in the archival literature (Jenkinson, 1966; Schellenberg, 2003). However, this literature does not investigate the recurring rhetorical

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“exigence” or “objectified social motive” (Miller, 1984, p. 158) that a longstanding business practice appears to fulfill. Genres are “structuring devices for realising meaning in specific contexts” (Coe, Lingard, & Teslenko, 2002, p. 2). Mastering a genre does not just involve knowing how to write or speak competently and compellingly. It also means to have expectations with regard to “who is … empowered to initiate or receive certain genres, when or where certain genres [may or] may not be enacted, and what content or form [is or] is not appropriate [in given circumstances]” (Yates & Orlikowski, 2002, p. 17). In order to emphasize the importance of genres as interpretive frameworks that sustain our lives, Miller (1984) proposed that “what we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern or forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have” (p. 165). In formal organizational contexts, those ends are predefined in job descriptions, user’s profiles, manuals of procedures, and record-making and -keeping practices. They are constructed by the groups that hold power in one or more of the various spheres of responsibility the institution is concerned with, and reflect those groups’ goals and value standards. One of the insights provided by rhetorical genre studies is that genres are “inherently ideological” (Schryer, 1993, p. 209). In the case of organizational records, the ideology, or better, ideologies, they embody are shaped by bureaucrats, records managers, and any other professional group whose interests are served by the records. Besides constituting “the very substance of organizations” (Schryer, 1993, p. 205), records are also constituted by the organization’s dominant forces and are used as mechanisms of control. So when studying institutional genres, we should not only ask ourselves how they have been constructed, but also “for whom, for what needs and why they have been formed the way they are” (Pare´, 2002, p. 60).

6.6.

Records between Stability and Change

As “ideological vehicles” (Schryer, 1993, p. 230), genres always represent the values of certain groups in society and not others. And the setting where genres are most ideologically charged and contested is the institutional one. What makes organizations anything but homogeneous or harmonious “communities of practice” is the fact that they include various “activity systems” (Russell, 1997), that is, multiple “tangential and overlapping communities” (Lave, 1988, cited in Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pare´, 1999, p. 25), each having its own objectives and motives. Miller (1994) argued that in order to account for the several, fragmented ideologies existing in any workplace and the consequent struggle between conflicting interests, we

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should talk about “rhetorical communities” as “site[s] of contention [which] … include the ‘other’” (p. 63). Russian philosopher and semiotician Bakhtin (1981) offered genre scholars the image of “centripetal and centrifugal forces” (the former directed towards “formalization, normalization, regularity, convention, stability — and stasis” and the latter involving “resistance, idiosyncrasy, as hoc innovation — and chaos” (Spinuzzi, 2003, pp. 21
23)) that would continuously shake organizations from the inside. Because “institutional genres serve primarily to conserve and standardize, and usually offer the individual writer little room to improvise” (Pare´, 2002, p. 59), one may fall under the impression that the centripetal force is the only one governing record-related activities. In reality, all genres are sites of continuous social, cultural, and ideological negotiations, and the history of such negotiations is embedded in their forms. As demonstrated by, for instance, Spinuzzi’s (2003) study of the changes made by workers to a traffic accident database system, established tools and procedures may be subject to “micro-breakdowns” when they are perceived as being too rigid or, in any case, inadequate to their purpose. Centrifugal impulses manifest themselves in unauthorized work practices and local innovations that reflect the unarticulated needs of the users of official systems, and that might, in the long run, alter the systems’ features permanently. By observing the daily operations and interactions of his research subjects with maps, logs, and databases, Spinuzzi (2003) realized that workers would constantly tend to deviate from the protocols they were supposed to adhere to. This eventually resulted in the ongoing use of new, unforeseen genres, whose existence escaped the official recordkeeping system. Evolution, or “transformativity,” as Schryer (1993, p. 210) calls it, is part of the nature of genres. Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration is often invoked by genre scholars to explain how, in the course of their interactions, human agents may deliberately or inadvertently either reproduce an existing genre without substantially modifying its forms — thus supporting its institutionalization — or challenge it to the point of creating a new genre (which is usually signaled by the fact that people give it a new name). In their diachronic study of the emergence of the memo genre from a preexisting genre, the business letter, Yates and Orlikowski (1992) revealed how the written tool used to exchange business communications had been gradually adapted in order to make it fit in with changing conditions, including the availability of new media, the restructuring of organizational procedures, and material or perceived alterations in the relationships among agents. The more stable a society and the greater the power imbalance characterizing a bureaucratic system, the more persistent and invariable the documentary forms produced in such environments. This argument may be used to explain why genre classification (including the categorizations of

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typologies of documents and procedures provided by diplomatics) appeared less problematic in the past than it is today. In an age of “marked instability such as ours,” Miller (1984) observed, following Burke (1969), “typical patterns are not widely shared” (p. 158) and new or modified genres emerge, and old genres decay, at a very fast rate. Online digital environments, where it is especially hard to identify genre boundaries and where “hybrid genres” appear to be the norm rather than an exception, have only made the meaning of Schryer’s (1993) famous description of genres as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action” (p. 200) more tangible (see Giltrow & Stein, 2009). Devitt (2009) pushed even further the idea of the temporary and relative stability of genres, when she argued that since each “genre-in-use” is always unique, in that the very same circumstances of use are irreproducible, it would be more accurate to say that “[g]enres are destabilized for now and forever” (p. 39).

6.7.

Record Interactions: Abstract vs. Situated Approaches

The dynamic view of artefacts and situations that characterizes rhetorical genre studies comes from its situated, particular, and concrete understanding of human action as a social phenomenon. Every instantiation of a genre is seen as the evolving result of a history of previous interactions and shapes any responses to it by anticipating its audience’s expectations. “Whether fulfilled or subverted, such expectations constitute the fabric of social situations” (Coe et al., 2002, p. 6) and allow those who master the genre to predict, negotiate, and respond strategically to the “moves” of other participants. Bakhtin (1986) coined the term “addressivity” to account for the relational quality of any “concrete utterance,” or “speech genre” (p. 95). The idea that speakers or writers necessarily direct their oral or written texts to someone, and that therefore there always is a sense of an audience, or attitude to the “other,” built into any individual communicative action, is central to the notion of “dialogism,” which is another distinctive feature of rhetorical genres. According to Bakhtin (1986), even the most monologic genres (think, for example, of records such as decrees or injunctions) involve some tension between conflicting ideologies, between the centripetal and centrifugal forces that are inherent in any language as a living organism. Another way of looking at the mutual and strategic structuring of texts that occurs in the natural course of social events is through the metaphor of a tennis match, as suggested by Freadman (1994, 2002). A text in one genre will elicit a response in the form of another text — which she calls, by borrowing from Austin (1962), an “uptake” — and this exchange is

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coordinated by means of “rules of the game” (Freadman, 1994, p. 38) that must be known to the participants. “A genre,” Freadman (2002) maintains, “is governed by a ceremonial, a ritualized sequence in a formalized space ad time, enacted by fit persons to effect a specific outcome” (p. 44). By replacing the term “ceremonial” with “jurisdiction,” we may easily figure how this dialogic and structured understanding of social interactions applies to recordkeeping. The relationships existing among records in a records system, and between each record and the activity generating it, build on the notion of “transactionality” (McKemmish et al., 2005). A transaction is defined by diplomatics as “an act or several interconnected acts in which more than one person is involved and by which the relations of those persons are altered” (Duranti, 1998, p. 65). The legal and regulatory environment in force at any given place and time will dictate how the sequence of steps constituting a transaction, or procedure, must be enacted, and by whom, in order to produce valid effects. The records that accumulate in the course of any transaction will form a sequence as well and will be connected one another through a special link that, in some archival traditions, is known as “archival bond” (Cencetti, 1970; Duranti, 1997b). In line with the postpositive paradigm we discussed earlier, this link or bond would be originary, natural, determined, and incremental. In other words, human volition would not be involved in the establishment of the most important among all types of relationships that records may entertain with the objects and situations surrounding them. Because it comes into existence as a natural, unselfconscious consequence of the activity originating the records, the archival bond is considered capable of revealing the “true” context of records creation and use. For this reason, its identification and protection require records professionals’ full attention. The archival and genre perspectives of what takes place when people interact in the real world in order to accomplish their tasks (inevitably generating some “text” either to support their action or as an outcome of it) share many similarities. The role of the addressee as an essential component of all communicative exchanges is recognized by both diplomatics and genre studies. Even when the intellectual recipient of a record is not specified (as it is the case with, for instance, driver’s licenses or maps), the “addressivity” relates to any present or future reader who might have an interest in the record. As I illustrated in previous articles (Foscarini, 2012, 2013), the recordkeeping notion of a file, or dossier (i.e., “natural accumulation of an interrelated group of records, … which results from the way in which a records creator carries out its activities or functions” (InterPARES 2 Terminology Database, n.d.)) and that of a genre system (i.e., “interrelated genres that interact with each other in specific settings” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 97)) have much in common too.

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However, what is missing in the record disciplines is a situated, localized understanding of all these phenomena. When records managers analyze the context of records creation and use, all they (want to) see is codified rules, patterns of repetitive business processes, structured or semi-structured workflows, document-making procedures, and functional roles. The identification of functions, activities, and transactions, that usually precedes records classification and filing, is based on the abstract, idealized functional representations one may find in regulations, policies, business models, and other similar prescriptive texts. Any deviation from how work “should” be carried out is perceived as a potential hindrance to the creation of adequate records. The fact that, even in the most restrictive environments, individuals can act in ways that are slightly or profoundly idiosyncratic and may therefore make intentional or unintentional changes to established routines is not of interest. In fact, the bureaucratic apparatus, as depicted by diplomatics and records management, is not populated by human agents, having free will and the ability to make judgements. Rather, the author, writer, and addressee (that is, the three “persons” necessary for any document to exist, according to diplomatics (Duranti, 1998, p. 83)) merely reflect and embody the authority and competencies delegated to them by the system in which they operate. They behave like automata, or cogs in a machine. And, in the ideal world designed by contemporary diplomatics, records management is conceived as the oil the bureaucratic machine would need in order to run smoothly.

6.8.

Records as Forms of Life — and a Methodological Note

The genre approach emphasizes the profound and complete participation of writers, speakers, readers, and hearers in the “cultural patterns, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, that give significance to [their] actions” (Miller, 1984, p. 160). This is the meaning of Wittgenstein’s (1953) expression “form of life,” which has been greatly inspirational to rhetorical genre scholars. “Genres and the activity systems they are part of provide the forms of life within which we make our lives,” writes Bazerman (2002, p. 16). By looking at records creation and use and the communities that form around specific discourse practices (e.g., tax accountants, city lawyers, social workers) from this perspective, one realizes that the relationship of human agents with the documentary reality in which they are immersed, and which they contribute to shape through their continuous enactment of shared cultural tools (e.g., records, records systems, work routines), is much deeper and transformative than any representation of the same relationship provided by diplomatics or records management.

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Devitt’s (1991) investigation of the “genre set” that appears to structure the activities of tax accountants — a profession whose reliance on its own records appears particularly pervasive — reveals that “texts are so interwoven with and deeply embedded in the community that texts constitute its products and its resources, its expertise and its evidence, its needs and its values” (p. 354). For most professional communities, genres (both written and oral) are the locus where one finds the profession’s epistemology, its cultural identity. Studying the official records only, or the files compiled according to some abstract interpretation of organizational functions, may not be sufficient to grasp the character of the social interactions going on in the organization. Furthermore, the idea of a collective identity that emerges from genre research does not involve any determinism or homogeneity. Because communities are rhetorical, negotiated entities, where multiple worldviews coexist in permanent tension with one another, the identities that genres contribute to shape through their ongoing use are always in becoming and potentially contested. In order for the observer to uncover the distinctive sources of agency and power at play in any given situation, genres must be analyzed in action. In his study of the discursive practices of the Bank of Canada’s economists, Smart (2006) applied “interpretive ethnography, a qualitative approach that enables a researcher to explore a professional organization’s repertoire of shared symbolic resources, … in order to learn something of how its members’ view and function within their particular, self-constructed corner of the world” (p. 9). Similarly, Miller and Shepherd (2004) advocated an “ethnomethodology of genres” in their examination of blogs and the bloggers’ world. These methodologies based on ethnographic methods aim at producing “multi-vocal, polyphonic accounts” (Smart, 2006, p. 10) of a community’s discourse and meaningmaking, so that neither the observer’s own views nor those of any of the powerful groups existing within the community would become the predominant, centripetal perspective from which the situation under examination is narrated. In most recordkeeping literature, the voice of the “other” does not emerge at all. Even when dealing with specific case studies, there are hardly any attempts on the part of the researcher to take locally made concepts and try to assess them in the light of the relevant community’s “Weltanschauung” and its “vernacular of shared terms” (Smart, 2006, p. 153). The language and ideology of records management, with its fixed and universal sets of principles, rules, standards, and best practices, tends to be the only lens through which the singularity and messiness of each documentary reality is read (see my analysis of language and recordkeeping in Foscarini, 2014).

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Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that by adopting a more inclusive, situated, dynamic, and interdisciplinary view of records as culturally constructed artefacts, and of recordkeeping as a socially embedded, highly ideological discursive practice, archival science (particularly diplomatics and records management) will gain a subtler understanding of the “documentary reality” of formal organizations. When looked at through the lens of rhetorical genre studies, the notion of an organizational record as portrayed by the record disciplines — with its strong link to business accountability and efficiency, and its reliance on well-defined and rational systems (from juridical to business, to records systems) (for an analysis of systems thinking, see Checkland, 1999) — becomes just one of the possible accounts (though a rather stable and powerful one) of the complex, never-ending history of negotiations of meanings that informs each genre instantiation. As Pare´ (2002) put it, “genres are sociorhetorical habits or rituals that “work,” that get something done, that achieve desirable ends” (p. 60). Institutional genres enjoy a particularly well-established status as historical practice, hence their durability and apparent impartiality. The regularity of official genres contributes to the transformation of individuals into impersonal, functional roles. By participating in workplace genres, people learn their “professional location in the power relations of institutional life” (Pare´, 2002, p. 69) and develop a sense of their collective identity. Through their continuous enactment of the same forms and actions, they also reinforce the ideology, or “shared world-view” (Smart, 2006, p. 133), that sustains and is sustained by the genres in use. Yet, genres persist only because, and as long as, human agents want so. Change, resistance, or subversion is always possible, although breaking the rules of very conservative genres might require a long time and deep knowledge of those rules. Rhetorical genre studies enhances archivists and records managers’ awareness of the role they play in the life of the organizations they inhabit. It also equips them with powerful conceptual and methodological tools to investigate how the “others” understand their participation in collective action, what values they project on the records they use, why they trust certain genres and not others. Thus, the genre approach, with its emphasis on ethnographic methods, supports research into the culture of organizations, particularly their “information culture” (Oliver & Foscarini, 2014). Rather than offering a new model of recordkeeping, or prescribing best practices for record-making, it helps explain why the traditional “golden rules for the Administrator” (Jenkinson, 1966, p. 153) do not work in some specific environments.

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The study of the “documentary reality” that shapes and is shaped by the cultural, social and ideological circumstances in which we “act together” requires the concerted effort of multiple disciplines. This chapter showed that diplomatics (with its analytical understanding of documentary forms and functions), records management (whose concepts and methods support organizational continuity by ensuring a systematic control of the records generated in the course of business) and rhetorical genre studies (with its socially and historically situated view of texts and discourse practices as “forms of life”) all contribute to shed light on this complex reality. However, it also highlighted the limitations of the traditional archival perspective. The frame of reference of a discipline like anthropology, which has recently taken a special interest in bureaucracies (Hull, 2012), has provided genre scholars with great conceptual and methodological insights. It is time for records management in particular to explore these different disciplinary approaches and truly embrace the post-modern paradigm, both in theory and in practice.

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Chapter 7

Genres of War: Informing a City Laura Skouvig

Abstract Purpose
This chapter presents a case study of the communication of information in Copenhagen during the siege in 1807. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how information was formed by different genres and how these genres relate to different genre systems. Finally, a purpose of this chapter is to shed light over how information from different genre systems merged into an information network mainly found on the streets and squares of Copenhagen. Findings
This chapter has not aimed at generalized findings. If any findings should be recounted it would be that the chapter has mapped how, for example, a specific genre as the proclamation was shaped by different genre systems and directed its readers to a desired field of actions. Those actions depended on the specific purposes of the proclamations. Originality/value
A traditional focus on the siege has been political and military issues. Lately, research has focused on a cultural approach within the frames of urban history. This chapter contributes to this cultural approach by investigating the informational aspects from a genre perspective. Keywords: Information history; genre systems; the second battle of Copenhagen; information spheres

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 133
154 Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-5377/doi:10.1108/S2055-537720140000011008

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Announcement from the commanding general to the garrison and all inhabitants in Copenhagen. The admiral of the hostile English navy anchored at the roads and the general in command of the hostile English troops in Sealand have today urged me to surrender our fleet to the King of England and to consent them to carry it off and returning it at a general peace in Europe. My answer was: “That our fleet […] is just as safe in the hands of our King as in the hands of the English King, against which monarch we have never planned any hostility; that we will subject us to our destiny should they be cruel enough to attempt to destroy a city that has not given any reason for such an act from their side, […] and that we have decided to refute any attack, and to defend the city and our good cause by all means for which we are ready to sacrifice our lives and our blood.” Fellow citizens! I am convinced that my answer is yours […]. (Peymann, 1807, September 1)

In this solemn address to the civilians as to the military forces in Copenhagen, the commanding general, Ernst Peymann, marked a new phase during the English siege of Copenhagen from August 16 to September 7, 1807. The announcement, posted on the walls in Copenhagen, was not merely a passive registration of the situation. It reflected, of course, the previous days of preparations in the city, but much more importantly it called on action from the armed forces and from the people in Copenhagen. It was a part of the massive communication of information that the authorities disseminated to the population in Copenhagen in the late summer of 1807 where the Napoleonic Wars harassed the European continent. Following this announcement the siege turned into a bombardment of the city of Copenhagen with dead and wounded people and a devastated inner city. In the greater political picture, the bombardment threw Denmark into a catastrophic alliance with Napoleon’s France until the general peace in 1815 between England, Prussia, and Russia on the victorious side and France (with Denmark) on the side of the defeated. My agenda here is not to recount the events that led to the siege and the bombardment or to discuss whether the government in Copenhagen had been taken by surprise or not. What is at stake here is that the authorities had to prepare the citizens and the city itself for a siege. This meant distributing a lot of information and gathering a lot of information. Massive amounts of texts were produced with the purpose of preparing the city, organizing the defense, and for handling gossip and rumors about the events. The way the authorities communicated internally and addressed the citizens was defined by different genres. Using rhetorical genre theory,

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this indicates that the relationship between genre, information, and the social world is dialogical: that information is formed by the specific contexts in which they occur but that genres shape and form information and thus affect its given contexts. Genres, so Bazerman, Little, and Chavkin (2003) say, orient their readers toward specific informational landscapes and the purpose of this chapter is to look into these landscapes and to discuss how information was formed by different genres, born in certain genre systems and how this information entered an information network in Copenhagen. In this chapter, I discuss this information network at the beginning of the 19th century with the second Battle of Copenhagen in 1807 as a primary case. In previous research, I have focused on broadside ballads as a distinct genre in the city (Skouvig, 2012; Skouvig & Andersen, forthcoming). Broadside ballads are interesting from a rhetorical genre perspective because they combine orality and literacy. For the lower and illiterate classes, broadside ballads were, however, a prime means of obtaining information and news. Broadside ballads were a cultural fact in the everyday life of ordinary people (Piø, 1969). However, the ballads did not exist in a vacuum nor were they the only channel for news and information. They were part of a much broader information network and they circulated (and commented on) already known information. In order to come to grips with this network, I argue within the frames of rhetorical genre theory that by unraveling genres and genre systems it is possible to come to terms with how citizens of all classes got informed. Though I have limited my field of research to Copenhagen at the beginning of the 19th century (more specifically from 1800 to 1815) it is a rather bold proposal. Thus, in this chapter the scope is narrowed even more to the events in 1807, from mid-August when English troops landed north of Copenhagen to the actual bombardment in the days from September 2 to 5 and ending with the departure of the English with the Danish navy on October 16. My outline of an information network in Copenhagen is inspired by rhetorical genre theory but is more profoundly situated within the frames of an historical discipline, information history. My dealings with rhetorical genre theory are in that respect of a special kind: paraphrasing Claude Le´vi-Strauss (see, e.g., Darnton, 1984) genre theory is good to think with, and it provides information history with a theoretical underpinning as argued elsewhere (Skouvig & Andersen, forthcoming). Information history and rhetorical genre theory share the same basic understanding of information as a rhetorical construct created by people for a specific purpose formed by a specific context (see, e.g., Bazerman, 2001; Weller, 2009 for parallels). The dialogical connection between genres, context, and humans is also what makes rhetorical genre theory so powerful in the field of information studies. Rhetorical genre theory provides a profound insight into

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the mutual interdependencies and interactions between users, information, and information systems. After these initial lines, the chapter proceeds with a more elaborate discussion of the relationships between information history and rhetorical genre theory. In order to discuss the flow of information in Copenhagen, I will discuss genres, genre sets, and genre systems, and their reliance on activity systems. Through this, my intention is to show how genre theory is a valuable path providing a valuable terminology for presenting an information network in the city.

7.1.

A Few Words on Genre Theory and Information History

In my research, rhetorical genre theory and information history do exactly the same thing. They have triggered new questions as to what is the object of my research: the past and its dealings with information. This is a rather bulky, cumbersome, and large object, further diluted by the Danish language and its use of the term information itself (Skouvig & Andersen, forthcoming). Essentially, information history (as a field within the broader frames of history) acknowledges and stresses an epistemological understanding of information: information does not exist per se but is a human creation for human purposes defined by different cultural, sociological, and economic conditions of different societies and periods in history (Weller, 2009). Weller argues for a holistic understanding of information as an opposition to an atomistic understanding that presumably is prevalent especially within the field of information science (Black, 2006; Nunberg, 1996). Historians take for granted that concepts change over time and that past societies have dealt differently with, for example, what we today perceive of as information. They do so because it basically was a different time and consequently a different context. The information historian is thus particularly interested in analyzing how information was perceived, reflected on, passed on, circulated, communicated, shaped and formed (by different genres) in different periods (Weller, 2008). Information is historically linked to texts (spoken, written or printed) and to different texts from different situations. How do texts and their information relate to people — to those using, writing, and reading texts? How do texts conform to informational needs? How do texts help navigate in a world of (needed) information? How do texts influence people and how do people use texts in order to “… create new realities of meaning, relation and knowledge” (Bazerman, 2004, p. 309)? Rhetorical genre theory provides a theoretical setting for addressing the concrete text and its relation to the genre and activity system in which it is embedded. Bazerman

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introduced the term “informational landscape” with reference to Bakthin’s chronotope (Bazerman et al., 2003) as a way of addressing the relation between texts, their information, and their function. The genre’s chronotope (its time-place) involves objects, actors, and events that facilitate and restrict the genre’s content (Bazerman, 2012). Texts and genres are forms of social action, which implies that people create texts and they read texts within particular social contexts. Different contexts — professions, social organizations etc. — use and produce different sets of genres (Devitt, 1991). Thus genres are levers (Bazerman, 1994) not only, in order to “… create consequential social action …” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 79). Genres also work as levers for a historian keen on localizing uses and understandings of information. It is however important to acknowledge that writing as a form of social action is not solely connected to an individual’s urge for writing or producing text in solitude. Genres are knots between the social and the individual (Russell, 1997). Genres are part of genre sets in various ways connected to various genre systems, which again are part of human activity systems (Bazerman, 2004). Very aptly put, activity systems revolve around all sorts of tool-based human activity including writing. Nevertheless, in all activities genres help people to navigate, understand, perform, and realize these activities (Bazerman, 2004). Where genre sets as defined by Devitt (1991) and discussed by Bazerman (1994, 2004) and later McKenzie and Davies (2012), seem to have a more profound connection to individuals producing texts, genre systems link genres and genre sets to the level of a group of people. According to Bazerman, a genre system comprises several genre sets of individuals working together in an organized way (2004). In my discussion of the information network in Copenhagen, I will thus concentrate on genre systems and activity systems. My point here is to address how different genre systems constantly renegotiated and shaped information when it appeared. It is not my intention to define the information network in Copenhagen as a single activity system. My preliminary considerations rather point to the information network as penetrated by many different activity systems and thus characterized by a mingling of many different genre systems. I do not intend to unravel this jumble of genre systems ending up with one orderly line of (red) thread that then would define or constitute the information network. On the contrary, the mixing of genre systems reveals a possibility for following how information transforms through different genre systems. In my research on information flows and information spheres in Copenhagen from 1800 to 1815, I came across different genres as ballads (most of them printed — I only have one in manuscript form), newspaper articles, reports, official proclamations, and decrees to name but a few. I expect though that the information network in Copenhagen contains many more genres than those reflected in this chapter. My starting point is

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a cardboard box with records from the archives of the police in Copenhagen concerning the bombardment in 1807 (DG-001. L.; see the appendix for details about unprinted materials). The police in Copenhagen served many purposes in connection with the bombardment — this was evident from my readings of the 1807-bombardment records. From these records you get a glimpse of the genre system that arose from police activity in the hectic days before, during and after the bombardment. The majority of records could be defined as genres such as instructions (for publishing proclamations), drafts (for proclamations), letters with requests of investigations and of lists of casualties, homeless and, for example, water supplies. Other police records reveal other genres in the police genre system such as reports of arrests and interrogations. Though I originally had a keen interest in these reports of arrests and interrogations, the drafts of proclamations caught my interest. The reason was that I had earlier found the published ones at the Royal Library in Copenhagen together with broadside ballads, pamphlets, and other ephemera (see the appendix). The relationships between the drafts of proclamations and the requests for getting the drafts printed and distributed in the city and then the published proclamations provided a means for me to lift a corner of the veil of the distribution of information in Copenhagen. I noticed from my skimreadings of a single newspaper (Politivennen) from 1807 that proclamations were (re)printed there. Thus, the genre “proclamation” related to and appeared in different genre and activity systems. Different genre systems were intertwined in the information circuit sharing information but still within their different informational landscapes.

7.2.

The City of Copenhagen, 1800
1815

At the beginning of the 19th century, Copenhagen was the capitol in a much larger state than today. The Danish state was, using a rather new term, multi-cultural, as it consisted of the two kingdoms of Norway and Denmark and the German duchies Schleswig and Holstein. The absolutist government was in the hands of the crown prince (in 1808 king as Frederik the 6th) because the king (Christian the 7th) was unable to govern. As the residential town of the monarchy, Copenhagen was the metropolis of the Danish state, though not a particularly big city (approx. 100,000 inhabitants around 1800, Pedersen, 2014). The city was home to a garrison and more importantly the (rather large) fleet. It was squeezed in between the town ramparts with four gates to the farmland and access from the waterside at the customs house as the only entrances to the city. At night you could enter only through one gate, it was pitch dark in the streets despite

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the oil lamps and the poor pavement with flooded gutters made a late night outside home a risky business. Going for a stroll in daylight would reveal that the city was vibrant: craftsmen working, maids doing the groceries, shopkeepers trying to attract the attention of the maids and their mistresses. Prostitutes offered their services, keeping watch for the police. Street urchins, the unemployed and beggars roamed the streets looking for small jobs or for fun. Crowds gathered at the slightest chance of drama and sensation (Blu¨dnikow, 1986). Children, maids, and others gathered at the water posts or at the town gates where customs officers thoroughly searched the ramshackle wagons of the farmers for contraband. At markets and in merchants’ houses, the farmers sold their products, bought whatever was needed, and exchanged news and gossip. Foreign news arrived twice a week in Copenhagen when the mail from Hamburg arrived with letters and newspapers from the continent. Domestic mail routes connected the city and the inhabitants with the other parts of the country — Jutland and Funen twice a week; the near countryside connected with Copenhagen on a more frequent basis. News also came from the city itself. Fires, crimes, and local gossip filled the daily lives of the inhabitants. The doing’s and whereabouts of the royal family were of huge interest to everyone as were events such as thefts, murders, and suicides amongst the population in the city. Information was noisy — it circulated by mouth — and it was everywhere. Ballad mongers sang their ballads in the streets, despite its being prohibited since 1805. Proclamations from the police, the magistrate, and other authorities, were posted on walls and fences. No apparent logic characterized the actual locations of the posters if an article in Politivennen (a newspaper in Copenhagen) is to be trusted (Anonymous, 1807a). Walls were the paper of the city, red chalk its ink — during the feud against Jews in 1819 the inhabitants woke up to walls covered with anti-Semitic propaganda (Blu¨dnikow, 1986) and it seems quite likely to suppose that citizens used this possibility for communicating anonymously with each other in the streets. The few Danish newspapers primarily reported the international news combined with a sparse access to the domestic political arena. Much information came as proclamations and announcements from the authorities to all inhabitants in Copenhagen. In brief, Copenhagen was not short on news, intrigues, rumors, and gossip, though most of it is out of reach for scholars today since it was passed on orally. In his work on the Venetian government and its use of information and communication strategies, De Vivo (2007) points out that Venice consisted of different information spheres — or arenas — outside the strict control of the governmental offices. In his work, it is not so much a question of determining distinctions between the political elite and the broader population in Venice, since it is hardly surprising to find such a distinction. De Vivo is rather interested in how communication of political information defined

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the borders of Venetian government and in addition how information circulated between the different spheres. Based on this, it is possible to discuss how genres finally transgressed the different political and nonpolitical spheres. Though de Vivo does not consider details of the specific genres in the different spheres, various genres were used in the communication practices of the Venetian government. De Vivo’s research is focused on Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries and cannot as such be modeled on a reality in Copenhagen 200 years later. The question is whether it is possible to divide the population in Copenhagen into different information spheres by their access to information and by their informational preferences? Later memoirs where the authors recollect the early 19th century give an indication that this might be the case (Davidsen, 1910; Werlauff, 1954). Thus, the clubs of the higher bourgeoisie (in a very apt Habermasian interpretation) gathered around newspapers, journals, and magazines discussing political news and literary issues though these were by no means restricted solely to this class of people. Journeymen met at their inns, discussing their working conditions (see, e.g., Blu¨dnikow, 1986) and the lower and illiterate classes listened to the ballad mongers shouting and singing the latest news of a more colorful kind. Everybody had access to the walls and fences where the proclamations were posted. This, admittedly brief, outline should be scrutinized more thoroughly in further investigations of the information network. It is not possible, for example, to restrict political news to the clubs and the higher bourgeoisie since news ran through all the informational spheres but was differently communicated. The differences between the information spheres in the information network can be discussed in terms of activity systems (Russell, 1997) and their related genre systems (Bazerman, 2004). Even though proclamations, for example, belonged to different activity systems, they merged into the information network in the streets, being published either in the newspapers or on the walls. Though I just characterized the information spheres by their reliance and use of different genres, these genres seemed to address the same information. This raises a particularly interesting question of how genre systems enable information to “travel” between different genre systems and how this affects information. The question whether it is the same piece of information that appears in a newspaper article as in a broadside ballad seems rather trivial, but the possible answers reveal quite different views on the concept of information. By this I do not intend to start a discussion on whether the information from a newspaper was more reliable than the information from the broadside ballad (see, e.g., Skouvig, 2012 for a more elaborate discussion on this issue). It is simply a reminder of the fact in rhetorical genre theory that a “… genre exists only in the recognitions and attributions of the users” (Bazerman, 1994, p. 81). The assumption that information remains the same regardless of genre fits into a kind

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of abstract, atomistic understanding of information. It is a view that detaches information from its own provenance (Bazerman, 2012) and it points out that genre has no significance at all — the reader would make the same meaning of information in a newspaper as in a broadside ballad. The opposite assumption emphasizes that information is never abstracted or context-free. It would imply an understanding of information as rhetorically shaped, brought into being for a specific purpose in a given situation in a given activity system (Bazerman, 2001; Postman, 1999). And yet, you find that information, born in a specific activity system, brought into being for a specific purpose shaped by a specific genre and belonging to a specific genre system, appears in and merges into quite different settings (Bazerman, 2009, 2012). This indicates perpetual negotiations and renegotiations of the given informational scope of the genres. Communication and information in Copenhagen were at the beginning of the 19th century no doubt semi-oral. However, much information was passed on in texts shaped by different genres. These genres helped readers from the different information spheres (skilled readers as well as untrained) to navigate the world of news and information. For instance, proclamations from the Royal Chancellery, the police or the magistrate, were distinct genres communicating specific information to the citizens. They announced to the public the events in August and September 1807. They were posted on walls and fences in the city and they were brought in the newspapers. They were talked about, commented on and studied. Though they all communicated different information depending on the concrete purpose in concrete situations (water supplies, staffing the frontlines, etc.) they all oriented their readers toward specific “informational landscapes” (Bazerman et al., 2003). In a similar manner, posters about comedies at the Royal Theatre and other kinds of entertainments were posted on the walls and next to the public proclamations. Acknowledging the importance of the differences between these posters, a reader suggested in Politivennen that the walls of the Chancellery and other public buildings should be restricted to proclamations from the authorities. This suggestion supported the navigation provided by proclamations as genres (Anonymous, 1807a, pp. 7826
7827). The popular broadside ballads indicated yet another shaping of information but together with the newspaper they seemingly used the same pieces of information to inform the citizens about the coming war.

7.3.

From City to Fortress: Information-of-War

It was practically impossible to claim a war on the military fortress and naval facilities in Copenhagen without including the civilian part of the city. From

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the beginning of August, the city of Copenhagen was transformed into a fortress and this combined fortress was under siege. The crown prince himself left the capitol on August 12 in order to join the army in Holstein. Though he at the same time assured the population he had made arrangements for his absence, people in Copenhagen felt uncertain (Henningsen, 2007). The high command over the city was entrusted to the 72-year old general, Ernst Peymann who was instructed to fight and not to surrender (Henningsen, 2007). Though the civil and military authorities faced an immense task of communication, they had the advantage of well-known information distribution channels and genres. The most used genre was the poster that addressed the actual publication of information to the general public of the city. Under headings such as “proclamation” or “announcement” you’ll find sub-genres such as royal decrees and ministerial orders (from the Chancellery), police proclamations on rather different topics, and proclamations from other official bodies. The normal procedure was apparently that General Peymann with royal authorization wrote the drafts for the different posters and subsequently conferred with the police commissioner to publish them and make them available at the usual places in town in numbers as high as 6000 copies (DG-001, L. Letter 1807, August 29, and an undated letter). However, the posters only communicated information to the public. Internally, the activities were characterized by correspondence between the military high command and the police commissioner. In letters, the general often requested the publishing of proclamations and also for gathering of information. From the files, it is possible to see that the police commissioner gathered the information but not necessarily how he requested the information to be gathered from his own system. Often these requests resulted in other genres as lists — and these lists could even be published as part of proclamations when it was necessary to distribute the information publicly, as was the case with a list of wells in the city (Haagen, 1807d, August 26). In the public realm, the preparations of the city covered many different areas. First of all, there was the crucial task of securing an actual defense of the city. Arming the defense lines was not a military effort alone. Being a citizen in Copenhagen at that time, included a duty to join the civic guard and thus to participate directly in warfare. The citizens, the students — everybody — were encouraged to staff the frontlines. Citizens turned into soldiers as the city slowly transformed into a fortress. In posters from August 11, August 14, and August 16, the police commissioner addressed the need for staffing the frontlines. Rhetorically in the first poster, he first called on all men capable of working to volunteer for the defense on behalf of the king (Haagen, 1807a, August 11). The central, ideological argument was the need for a large crew to staff the frontlines and to protect the country. Following this, the proclamation argued pragmatically promising free food, salaries, and a monetary gift. If these arguments were not persuasive

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to the general population to volunteer, the police commissioner referred to the king’s absolute power to provide the necessary staff by force (Haagen, 1807a, August 11). Three days later the police commissioner had to issue a second call noting the lack of a sufficient amount of volunteers. The royal threat was not reiterated explicitly, yet the importance of the message was underlined in two ways: first, the police commissioner referred to the possibility of using other means to procure the needed number, and second, he called explicitly on all householders to notify all persons in his house about the matter (Haagen, 1807b, August 14). By explicating the householders as the recipient of this second call, the police commissioner underlined the need for staffing the frontlines. Householders typically had full rights and citizenship in the town and often had responsibility for journeymen or servants. If they rented out rooms or apartments they were also called on to notify those without full rights. The householders were an important communication channel; while not necessarily the final audience they were used to pass on important information. Two days later there still was a shortage of crew for serving the navy and the police commissioner once again addressed the general public in a call. This last call is distinctly shorter than the two others but more specific by asking for 400 men for the navy (Haagen, 1807c, August 16). In a similar way, calls to the students at the university were used to encourage them to form an independent corps and join the defense (Notice, 1807). Relying on a letter from the crown prince, the university senate urged the students to join the corps by “… turning up at the main building for in the Senate’s room to be entered in the list designed for the purpose. Hereafter further measures will be taken” (Notice, 1807). What further measures meant is not clear from the call to the students. It probably meant that the list was transferred to the high command to enroll the student company in the defense of the city and so by entering the list, the students went to war. The action of enrolling was a highly active one. Another crucial task in the preparations was to secure the citizens and the city itself from the effects of the siege and concrete acts of war. Supplying the inhabitants with meat and flour was important (Christensen, 1907
1908). So were the water supplies. Many activities revolved around ensuring water supplies for the fire brigade, supplies for the military forces, and for protecting buildings against fire. Thus the fire-commission issued an instruction concerning what arrangements the citizens were expected to implement in their houses and what to do in case of fire. The alarm drum, it was stressed, served as the key signal when hostilities opened. Whenever fire came up Europe’s pre-modern urban dwellers were warned by church bells, for example, and in most pre-modern cities the dwellers could tell by the bell in which parish the fire was raging (Garrioch, 2003). At the opening of hostilities, so the instructions from the fire-commission say, there should be people present in every

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house in order to secure water supplies (Haagen, Bech, Kirkerup, & Hvidberg, 1807, August 15). Despite this instruction to the urban dwellers to enroll within the lines of the fire department, there was a distinction between the role of the actual fire department and the population. In a later announcement, the police commissioner presented a reinforcement of the fire brigade and how it was intended to work. The dwellers were asked to support the fire brigade as long as no danger occurred (Haagen, 1807e, August 26). In order to secure water supplies, the police commissioner issued an announcement on August 26 listing the location of wells in the different quarters of the city. More importantly this announcement canceled private wells, restricted them to public use and sought to prevent panic and yet called on saving the water (Haagen, 1807d, August 26). Water was obviously rather important for the fire services and immediate action in case of fire bombs and rockets could effectively prevent spread of fire. Locked up houses or houses where no-one would be present to take immediate actions posited a problem for the authorities, giving Peymann cause to ask for a list of those who had left town (DG-001, L. Letter of August 29). The turned-in dossiers (organized by the 12 quarters in Copenhagen) did not form comparable material with easy access to the basic pieces of information. The police commissioner thus had to take into account many different kinds of lists and ways of listing people. Some even reflected the very activities that made up the list and reported how they visited the inhabitants in the quarter of Christianshavn and asked of the whereabouts of a specific family (DG-001, L. Dossier August 29, 1807 with the report dated August 23). The small sample of material from the police archive shows how letters (printed or written) contributed to change the city of Copenhagen into a fortress. Announcements and calls were explicit in addressing specific activities to be conducted by the inhabitants in Copenhagen. As requests they too were closely tied to concrete actions that had varying consequences for the civil population in Copenhagen. The city was by the end of August a fortress with English military lines surrounding it from north to the south at the countryside and with English battleships controlling (or striving for control of) the seaside. The town gates were closed leaving the people and decision-makers without a means of communication with the rest of the country, including communication lines to the residence of the crown prince in Holstein. The population could merely anticipate what was to come (Henningsen, 2007).

7.4.

Sitting Out a Siege: Vigilant and Alerted

In the last paragraph I have described how the authorities took action and prepared the city. In this paragraph, my focus is turned to an activity

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system that emanated from the news system in the city. The primary genres are broadside ballads but I include too how one specific newspaper, Politivennen, distributed proclamations on behalf of the authorities and at the same time brought information to the dwellers as suggestions. Mostly the suggestions in Politivennen appeared as anonymous but they were authored by its editor, K. H. Seidelin (Davidsen, 1910). The newspaper, Politivennen, had as its purpose to make authorities and people in town aware of specific public problems (Davidsen, 1910). The late August days (17
31) witnessed several engagements at sea and in the countryside within a visual distance from the city. The people hoped for the Danish navy to beat off the English and prevent whatever should come. In this atmosphere of confusion, hopes of glory and rising nervousness, balladeering fished in troubled waters. McLane (2010) argues that balladeering is a general term that defines a “… loosely connected but strongly hierarchized network, encompassing everything from the singing, making, inventing, forging, collecting, transcribing, sifting, and editing to the printing of ballads” (McLane, 2010, p. 247). The ballads are hybrids of oral and print culture and this distinction in media forms has been used to make a distinction between original (oral) ballads and the new (printed) ballads (Mcdowell, 2010). For many reasons, the printed ballads have been conceived of as less valuable compared to the original, oral ballads (Piø, 1985). The printed ballads were mere commodities wallowing in blood and crimes. However, the ballads do allow us a glimpse of what people feared or hoped for and how fear and hope were expressed (see also Savin, 2011). Ballads of this kind are also seen as songs for a specific occasion, but they observed a strict format that defined them as genre (Skouvig, 2012). Amongst these were the title, the use of specific adjectives, and often a short notice after the song itself (Skouvig, 2012). Remarkably, some of the ballads accompanying the events in 1807, do not observe these formats, having much shorter titles such as “Take up your arms” (Sander, 1807a), “The beginning or August 23rd, 1807” (Sander, 1807b) and “The flight at Køge [Danish provincial town at Sealand]” (Anonymous, 1807b). They also expressed an intimate connection with the actual events that they dealt with as the more traditionally formed titles show: “Encouraging Song for the defenders of the nation at the brisk sortie against the foolhardy British and our later honorable sorties in Elsinore referred to in the enclosed historical description” (Birchwald, 1807b). In the enclosed “Report of the Danish Victories over the English outside the gates at Kronborg [Fortress at Elsinore, Elsinore being a provincial town in the Northern part of Sealand] from which he returned with considerable loss” there was a detailed reproduction of the events prior to the bombardment following a chronological scheme. Accordingly, Birchwald also wrote poetically about an engagement at sea followed by a meticulous representation of the engagement

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(Birchwald, 1807a). These prose descriptions were important genres for factual information about the engagements but they also included news on casualties and similar matters (Birchwald, 1807b). L. C. Sander, professor in pedagogy (1807b), broke with the traditional genre formats of the broadside by introducing a footnote. In his poem “The beginning” he refers to a new weapon at the disposal of the English, the so-called Congreve rocket, described poetically as “… Artificialities from hell …” (Sander, 1807b, p. 2), and explained more mundanely in the footnote. But, Sander reassured his readers, General Peymann had proclaimed that no civic nation would bring such a weapon into use (Sander, 1807b). Yet, the Congreve rockets were the talk of the town. Bombs and a bombardment — a rising fear gripped the people in the city. To escape a potential bombardment seemed impossible, being surrounded. Seeking safety within the city walls and ramparts was the only possibility and people fled to the inner city from the quarters close to the city wall and frontlines. In Politivennen this strategy was turned down, formed as a suggestion. The suggestion was that people were not safer in the inner city than close to the city wall. If anything the risk was considerably higher for a bombing of the inner city. Rather people should find their way to Christianshavn, a quarter close to the only gate that remained open at the island of Amager (Anonymous, 1807e). The suggestion stressed that the bombs themselves were not to be feared: only one out of 20 bombs would fall and go off in the houses; people would be scattered all over the city and finally time had proven that especially English bombings were not to be feared. Still worse was the old and well-known enemy of the cities: fire. Moving away from the bombs was not possible and the author urged people to stay calmly where they lived (Anonymous, 1807e, p. 7856). The footnote of Sander’s ballad and the suggestion in Politivennen both contained information about the English bombs and both intended to minimize the public fear. Yet the authorities themselves tried if not to maximize the public fear then at least to gain a strengthened attention toward the potential bombardment. In a proclamation from Peymann dated August 21 (also published in Politivennen) he called upon vigilance and courage as the main means to avoid devastations from bombs. In detail, the proclamation spelled out how people had to wait for the bombs to explode before extinguishing them with water (Peymann, 1807). After three days of bombing, people ignored suggestions from newspapers and instructions from the fire-commission. They had left their houses without sufficient water supplies and without attendance. This caused Peymann to ask the police commissioner to remind the house owners of the simple precautions (DG-001, letter from Peymann to the police commissioner, 1807, September 4). At this time the city was burning and the bombs worked. According to Christensen (1907
1908) exhaustion caught

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the entire city — from the fire brigade to women and public servants. And further Christensen (1907
1908) stated that this exhaustion gave a way for surrendering to the British. Yet, surrender was actually not an option. The crown prince had emphasized in his instructions to General Peymann that he expected him to defend the city with all means and not to give in. According to Christensen, Peymann resisted surrendering, though a deputation from the city magistrate tried to persuade him. Even though the good men of the city did bestow him with a (written) petition, the general remained reluctant since the civic guard did not urge him to surrender (Christensen, 1907
1908). Facing the devastation of the city, however, the general decided to surrender on September 5.

7.5.

Writing up a Defeat and Listing up a Siege

Through petitions, letters of requests, and lists, the authorities regained normality in the city after the bombardment and the surrender. The first task was to inform people about the surrender. How then to do this — how to formulate a surrender without the consent of the crown prince and without any opportunity to communicate with the government safely situated in Holstein? The crown prince had not indicated surrender as an option nor given any instructions as to what was a fair reason to surrender (Henningsen, 2007). Even though he had conferred the military command to the general the instructions were vague. The vague instructions gave way to confusion and indecision and involved a personal risk for losing the royal trust and benevolence. The consequences of surrendering without royal consent could be harsh, involving accusations of neglecting the royal instructions and will. In a situation where he could not expect the approval of the crown prince, he indirectly asked for it from the citizens in Copenhagen with whom he shared the experience of the bombs. After having agreed to the English terms of surrender, Peymann addressed his fellow citizens arguing for the surrender in a petition (Peymann, 1807, September 7). Explicitly and twice he addressed his audience as fellow citizens. Initially, he outlined the current situation and recapitulated his reasons for surrendering: the means of defense was devastated to such a degree that the army was not capable of preventing the British from bombing the city whenever they wanted to, and secondly, but more importantly, the Danish army would not be able to prevent the British from taking the city by storm. Peymann admitted to having to accept the capitulation in order to spare the lives of innocent citizens and save the city from the unpredictable consequences (Peymann, 1807, September 7). The fleet was lost (and would not be returned after the war) and the British

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would occupy the naval base. Yet the surrender was not unconditional: the British agreed to leave within six weeks and to leave all public and private properties in the occupied areas intact. This petition marked a new phase in the war. It was stressed by Peymann’s second invocation of his fellow citizens in a rather paternalistic fashion: “Fellow citizens, as I, permeated with worries, inform you about this the state, let me also remind you that the first duty for you as citizen, now life and property are secured, is peace and order, […]” (Peymann, 1807, September 7). The siege was replaced by an occupation and the citizens could return to (some kind of) everyday life — a life that was to be lived amongst ruins and with English troops in town. The activities in the police administration turned towards maintenance of order through proclamations and through tight control over what stories the newspapers could write. Now, English officers on leave in the city became a new challenge to maintaining order in the streets. Officers were allowed into the city during the day time and Peymann’s urgent invocation to the citizens to remain calm in the petition had to be re-emphasized. Thus Peymann’s second in command, major general Bielefeldt, in a letter asked the police commissioner to notify the population on the general permission to the English officers and to admonish the people to treat the English with courtesy (DG-001, letter, 1807, September 13). In later memoirs encounters between verbally brave and sarcastic Danes and embarrassed English officers were reported (Vang Christensen, 2007). Such encounters were peaceful and harmless expressions but the police and the general command knew and feared more hostile expressions caused by the surrender (Henningsen, 2007). Sentiments such as hate and dislike were expressed in broadside ballads with titles discriminating against the English king and the foreign secretary at that time, George Canning (DG-013, 1807, November 27). The aim of the authorities was to control the sentiments on the streets. This included besides the level of proclamation a control over the newspapers to ensure that their news were correct (this meaning in relation to a definition of the events from the authorities). Thus, when the newspaper Dagen published a story about the surrender in Frederiksværk (where production of weapons for the Danish army took place) with allegedly dubious truth value, the police commissioner was instructed by the high command to inform the editor of the newspaper not to publish the story without being assured of its correctness (DG-001, Bielefeldt, 1807, September 15). A fire at the naval base, Holmen, was apparently a potential risk. The English commander, Samuel Hood, had investigated the incident and reported this to the Danish authorities who were then to instruct the newspapers to bring this message “… to promotion of verity and to prevent false rumors …” (DG-001, Report from Sir Samuel Hood, 1807, September 22).

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Another task was to investigate the degree of devastation: lists of casualties and the dead were requested and reported in various formats to the police department including those whose houses were damaged or destroyed. This list was a working document and in table view with headlines that expressed the needed information: number of families, names, age, from what quarter, occupation, the numbers (as a subclass) of men, women, boys and girls, and finally a section on general remarks (DG-001, undated list). The summer turned into autumn and the many people who had lost all they had were in a desperate situation. Besides the efforts of the authorities to control and handle the situation through lists people needed housing and food. Proclamations on housing facilities were communicated to the people (Schou, 1808). In Politivennen, a debate followed the bombardment concerning the relation between city and fortress, how to ensure the fire brigade the best means and how to help the people in need by launching a lottery devoted to the victims of the bombardment (Anonymoous, 1807e; Anonymous, 1807d). Ballads reflecting the sentiments of the people and their eagerness to demonstrate true patriotism were printed and sold. The profits were assigned to the injured and those in need of housing (Bornemann, 1807). The balladeering business continued expressing the hate, hope, and fear of the population in the chaotic days and years of war that followed the bombardment in 1807. The bureaucracy went back to work. During the bombardment no offenses were recorded in the main protocol of the police (DG-001, Copenhagen Police, main protocol 1807), so was the work of deciding disputes and convicting the offenders suspended (DC-013, 4. protocol). Now, the police returned to their normal duties of arresting drunks, of listing disputes between servants and masters, of registering any excursion from normal life. The fortress once again turned into a city.

7.6.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have just scratched the surface of the information network in Copenhagen. Thus my findings cannot be generalized and only preliminary conclusions can be drawn. What I have sketched out in this chapter is how different genre systems intersected at a specific occasion and how information formed by each of these systems merged and possibly took on new forms in the information network as a compound of genre systems. Communication between the military headquarters and the police was intense and dealt with the need for informing ordinary citizens on what to do in case of a siege and how to — after the surrender — behave during the British occupation. These texts marked the course of events and shaped phases in the period from when British troops landed in mid-August north of Copenhagen to when they left in October with the Danish fleet.

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Additionally, through this correspondence between the military command and the police commissioner, we obtain a rare glimpse of how information was dispersed in the city and that different strategies existed for dispersing it to the right audience. The proclamation as a genre contained all sorts of information but it still directed and oriented its readers to a certain information landscape of required actions. These actions were different depending on the specific purposes of the proclamations: enrolling for military service, securing water supplies, informing citizens on negotiations and capitulations. Some of them requested information gathering that was collected and stored by means of other genres. The city digested the information from the authorities and transformed some of it to other genres such as the newspaper article and the broadside ballads. The information was selected, transformed, and renegotiated in correspondence with the information landscapes of these genres.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank my two reviewers for good and detailed comments. They have been good to think with.

References Anonymous. (1807a). Et ønske om Plakatopslagning paa Gaderne betræffende. Politivennen, 486, 7826
7827. Retrieved from https://bibliotek.kk.dk/temaer/ politivennen Anonymous. (1807b). Flugten ved Kiøge [Ballad]. (War ballads etc. 1801
1814). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Anonymous. (1807c). Politivennen, 489, 7873
7875. Anonymous. (1807d). Politivennen, 489, 7876
7877. Anonymous. (1807e). Politivennen, 488, 7855
7858. Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of genres and the enactment of social intentions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79
101). London: Taylor & Francis. Bazerman, C. (2001). Nuclear information. One rhetorical moment in the construction of the information age. Written Communication, 18, 259
295. Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts, genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it (pp. 309
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Bazerman, C. (2012). The orders of documents, the orders of activity, and the orders of information. Archival Science, 12(4), 377
388. Bazerman, C., Little, J., & Chavkin, T. (2003). The production of information for genred activity spaces: Informational motives and consequences of the environmental impact statement. Written Communication, 20(4), 455
477. Birchwald, H. C. (1807a). De Danske Søemænds Hæders-Krands I Anledning af Bombardementet den 31te August, hvorved vores kjække Søekrigere, der saavel fra vores Batterier, som ved vores Kanonbaade fordrev den overlegne Fjende fra Charlottenlunds Bugten, m.v. som Visen indeholder. Copenhagen: M. Seest [Ballad]. (37,-137-139). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Birchwald, H. C. (1807b). Opmuntringssang til Fædrelandets Forsvarere ved vore Jægeres og de andre Fædrelandets Forsvareres kiekke Udfald, imod de overmodige Britter og vore senere ærefulde Udfald i Helsingøer, som medfølgende, historiske Beskrivelse nærmere omtaler. Copenhagen: M. Seest, 4 p. [Ballad]. (37,-137-139). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Black, A. (2006). Information history. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 40, 441
474. Blu¨dnikow, B. (1986). Folkelig uro i København 1789
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54. Bornemann, M. H. (1807). En dansk Mands Stemme i Aaret 1807. Af M. H. Bornemann, Professor i Lovlydigheden. Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin [Ballad]. (War ballads etc. 1801
1814). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Christensen, V. (1907
1908). København under Belejringen 1807. Historiske Meddelelser om København, 1, 97
150. Darnton, R. (1984). The great cat massacre and other episodes in French cultural history. London: Penguin Books. Davidsen, J. (1910). Fra det gamle Kongens Kjøbenhavn (Ny gennemset Udgave). Copenhagen: Gyldendal. De Vivo, F. (2007). Information and communication in Venice. Rethinking early modern politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the professions: Historical and contemporary studies of writing in professional communities (pp. 336
357). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Garrioch, D. (2003). Sounds of the city: The soundscape of early European Towns. Urban History, 30(1), 5
25. Haagen, H. (1807a, August 11). Proclamation on staffing [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Haagen, H. (1807b, August 14). Proclamation on volunteers [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Haagen, H. (1807c, August 16). Proclamation on the navy [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

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Haagen, H. (1807d, August 26). Proclamation on water supplies [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Haagen, H. (1807e, August 26). Proclamation on assistance to the fire brigade [Poster]. (War ballads etc. 1801
1814). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Haagen, H., Bech, Kirkerup, & Hvidberg, O. H. (1807, August 15). At the outbreak of Hostilities [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Henningsen, P. (2007). Ekspeditionen til København. Historien om et bombardement og en præventiv krig. In P. Henningsen (Ed.), København 1807. Belejring og Bombardement (pp. 6
52). Copenhagen: Jyllandsposten. Mcdowell, P. (2010). Mediating media past and present: Toward a genealogy of “Print Culturer” and “Oral Tradition”. In C. Siskin & W. Warner (Eds.), This is enlightenment (pp. 229
247). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McKenzie, P. J., & Davies, E. (2012). Genre systems and “Keeping Track” in everyday life. Archival Science, 12, 437
460. doi:10.1007/s10502-012-9174-5 McLane, M. (2010). Mediating antiquarians in Britain, 1760
1830: The invention of oral tradition, or, close reading before coleridge. In C. Siskin & W. Warner (Eds.), This is enlightenment (pp. 247
265). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Notice. (1807). War ballads etc. 1801
1814. The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Nunberg, G. (1996). Farewell to the information age. In G. Nunberg (Ed.), The future of the book (pp. 103
139). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pedersen, K. P. (2014). Kontrol over København. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag. Peymann, E. (1807). Aarvaagenhed og Uforsagthed. Politivennen, 487, August 22, 7831
7838. Peymann, E. (1807, August 16). Proclamation on English properties [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Peymann, E. (1807, September 1). Announcement from the commanding general to the garrison and all inhabitants in Copenhagen [Placard]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Peymann, E. (1807, September 7). Proclamation on the capitulation and its conditions [Poster]. (37,-122). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Piø, I. (1969). Produktionen af danske skillingsviser mellem 1770 og 1821 og samtidens syn pa˚ genren. Copenhagen: Institut for folkemindevidenskab. Piø, I. (1985). Nye veje til folkevisen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Postman, N. (1999). Building a bridge to the 18th century: How the past can improve our future. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4), 504
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Sander, L. C. (1807a). Til Vaaben! Den 17de August 1807. Copenhagen: B. Bru¨nnich, 3 p. [Ballad]. (37,-137-139). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Sander, L. C. (1807b). Begyndelsen, eller, den 23 August, 1807. Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin, 4 p. [Ballad]. (37,-137-139). The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications, The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Savin, K. (2011). Fortunas kla¨dnader: Lycka, olycka och risk i det tidig moderna Sverige. Lund, Sweden: Sekel. Schou, J. H. (1808). Chronologisk Register over de Kongelige Forordninger og Aabne Breve, samt andre trykte Anordninger som fra Aar 1670 af ere udkomne, tilligemed eet nøigtigt Udtog af de endnu gieldende, for saa vidt samme i Almindelighed angaae Undersaatterne i Danmark og Norge, forsynet med et alfabetisk Register, 14. Copenhagen: Hofbogtrykker Christensen. Skouvig, L. (2012). Produktivitet og moral: Almanakkens anmærkninger og skillingsviser omkring 1800. Fund og Forskning, 51, 337
367. Skouvig, L., & Andersen, J. (forthcoming). Understanding Information History from a Genre-Theoretical Perspective. Vang Christensen, L. (2007). Bombarderet med rygter. Fortællinger om frygt og forha˚bninger i det belejrede København. In P. Henningsen (Ed.), København 1807. Belejring og Bombardement (pp. 130
158). Copenhagen: Jyllandsposten. Weller, T. (2008). Information history
An introduction. Exploring an emergent field. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. Weller, T. (2009). The victorians and information. A social and cultural history. Saarbru¨cken: VDM Verlag. Werlauff, E. C. (1954). Af min Ungdoms Tid. Danske, især Kjøbenhavnske, Tilstande og Stemninger ved og efter Overgangen til det nittende Aarhundrede. E. C. Werlauffs efterladte Optegnelser ved Hans Degn. København: E. Hagerups Forlag.

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Appendix Material from the Danish State Archives (DG-001. L.), (DC-013 and DG-001) The material originates from the archives of the police department in Copenhagen. The police files in the National Archive are diverse. In this chapter, most of the material is located in one file labeled DG-001, The police in Copenhagen, 1807-1807, extracted matters. “L. Correspondence concerning The Bombardment of Copenhagen 1807.” [My translation]. Further material originates from the Police Court in Copenhagen “DC-013. 4th Protocol, Verdicts 1804-1809.” And finally I have a reference to the main protocol of the police department “DG-001, The police in Copenhagen, 1793-1944, main journal, nos. 34, 35 and 36, 1807.” The references in the text are based on my personal interpretation of the APA reference style, 6th edition, in a dialogue with the possibilities of the archival material. I follow a tradition to distinguish between printed and unprinted material. The references to the un-printed material in the chapter are thus as such sufficient to locate the material at the archives.

Material from the Royal Library in Copenhagen The material comes from The Collection of Pamphlets and Corporate Publications that consists mainly of ephemera such as broadside ballads, pamphlets, and public posters. Few of the titles are to be found by a traditional search in the collections, but the larger amount is compiled under the headings of “War ballads etc. 1801-1814,” “Extracted pamphlets 37,-137; 37,-139,” and “Extracted pamphlets 37,-122.” My reference style for material with provenance in the National Archive and the Royal Library’s collection of ephemera: I include if possible details such as author name, date, and provenance from either the National Archive or the Royal Library.

Chapter 8

Utterance and Function in Genre Studies: A Literary Perspective Sune Auken

Abstract Purpose
Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is now much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances, making up particular genres, equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach. Findings
Current Genre Studies, as encountered in RGS, is an impressive and highly organized body of knowledge. By re-introducing literary and high rhetorical subject matter, which has been under-studied in RGS, into it, the chapter demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than the “homely discourses” usually discussed in RGS. Formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable simply as derivations from function alone. But this is not limited to works of literature. The chapter finds that though more complex genres, literary and high rhetorical, most consistently invite utterance-based interpretations, other genre-based studies can benefit from them as well.

Genre Theory in Information Studies Studies in Information, Volume 11, 155
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Originality/value
The chapter offers a perspective on genre which gives renewed weight to formal and thematic interpretations of genre, by allowing the utterances themselves to re-enter center stage. This enables an improved understanding of complex genres. It also revives close reading as a viable approach to understanding genre and thus to inform the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. Finally, it improves our understanding of genre in both a systematic and a historical perspective. The chapter demonstrates, thus, that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances, as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them. Keywords: Genre Theory; Carolyn Miller; Amy Devitt; Mikhail Bakhtin; John Frow; Alastair Fowler

The point of this chapter is actually quite simple. Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances making up particular genres equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today, and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach. Fundamental to what has been called “the rhetorical turn in genre studies”1 is the move from utterance to function as the basis of genre. The fundamental question is whether genres are best understood as intrinsic to the utterances they contain2 or as some social function of these utterances. Another change is closely connected to this: Whereas up to the early eighties, the analysis of genre had been mainly an endeavor for Literary Studies, “Genre as Social Action” (1984) and the researchers who followed

1. MacNeil (2012, p. 488). 2. It speaks for the conceptual difficulties involved in genre theory that even talking about utterances within a genre is problematic, as the relationship between genre and utterance is a subject of controversy, mainly in Literary Studies (Croce, 2000/1904; Derrida, 1980; Fowler, 1982; Jauß, 1982/1972; Lamping, 2009; Sinding, 2002, 2011). The same problem applies to the use of the term “membership,” below, to describe the relationship between utterance and genre.

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Miller’s trailblazing study — many of these scholarly forces in their own right — redefined the subject. As a consequence, RGS, the movement thus formed, has arguably grown to become the single most important and coherent position in the history of Genre Studies. As of today, the movement encompasses a number of different approaches unified by a common understanding, rhetorical or functional, of the workings of genre. However, the previously dominant literary Genre Studies is represented only marginally. Both terms, “utterance” and “function,” are schematically reduced. “Utterance” encompasses an age-old divide within Literary Studies between what a literary work is about (its content, substance, or theme) and how it expresses itself (its formal or stylistic features).3 “Function” covers a wide field of social, rhetorical, didactic, and linguistic roles of genre — some of which are otherwise wide apart.4 I use “utterance” in place of “text” as the term designating the individual members of any given genre.5 Since many language genres are oral, and many other genres are not linguistic or only partially linguistic, I prefer “utterance,” which is less exclusive, though still patterned on language. In what follows I will, therefore, work primarily

3. Tracking this debate — which is often closely connected to the description of poetry — is far beyond the scope of the present chapter. It defines a classic like Brooks (1971), is included as a defining feature in several definitions of poetry (for instance Baldick, 2001; Preminger & Brogan, 1993; Wilpert, 1989), and is alive and kicking in modern literary genre discussions like Frow (2005). The distinction itself is schematically reduced and can be challenged from a number of different angles (for instance Goodman, 1978). 4. Witness, for instance, the wide array of different approaches described in Bawarshi and Reiff (2010). Despite wide internal differences (some of them along the lines described by Hyon, 1996), some of which may even be seen as a renewed utterance >< function distinction, these approaches are united by a common sense of the defining role played by genre’s social role. 5. In that sense, I am reasonably close to Bakhtin, who sees utterances as not a way in which language becomes comprehensible, but the way: “Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants of the various areas of human activity” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). In correlation with this, Bakhtin notes three aspects which must be taken into account when dealing with any utterance: the thematic content, style, and compositional structure of an utterance. These three components make up the inseparable constellation of the unit of any utterance (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). The same holds true for genre. We cannot approach genre as such; we will always need to approach it through individual instantiations of genre — through utterances. However, the clear order imposed on utterances by Bakhtin’s claim that the boundaries of an utterance are determined by the change of speaking subject (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 71) cannot be applied in relation to the relationship between utterance and genre. First, as genres can be non-linguistic, utterances may always be brought forth by an act of expression or creation, but they are not necessarily uttered by a speaking subject: She or he may just as well be designing clothes, building houses, or dancing. Also, an utterance can switch between genres without the utterer ever changing, and an utterance may employ more than one genre at a time.

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with utterances of language; but most what is said here is probably applicable to other types of genre — though it is beyond the scope of the current chapter to examine the extent of this applicability. The well-known endeavor in Miller’s study is to move the rhetorical study of genre from an utterance-based to a functional point of view. The basic claim of the article is “that a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish.”6 This leads to her famous definition — which she herself calls an “understanding” — of genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,”7 relying heavily on the concept of “exigence” formulated by Bitzer (1968) (though with a keen awareness of Vatz’ (1973) criticism of Bitzer), inasmuch as the repeated social need manifest in the rhetorical situation is what produces the typified responses. One of the central starting points in Miller’s article is “Campbell and Jamieson’s approach to genre,”8 which she terms Aristotelian, because each of the three rhetorical genres described by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (1985a) is “a situation-based fusion of form and substance.”9 The fundamental point of this fusion is that it divides what can be said about a genre into the utterances themselves (form + substance) and the function of the utterances in a given situation. Thus, three factors at work in genre, form
substance
function; become two: Utteranceð = form þ substanceÞ − function At the same time, a distinct hierarchy is established between the two factors: utterance is based on function — and not vice versa. There is a certain well-balanced ambiguity in Miller’s position, a caution in not overstating the case. First, despite the strength with which she presents her theory, she clearly limits her discussion to a rhetorical understanding of genre. A number of her statements may make better sense if taken as statements about general genre theory than about rhetorical genre theory in the strict sense. However, Miller always keeps the possibility of other relevant approaches open. Second, the shift in emphasis goes hand in hand with a shift in subject matter. Instead of the literary and high rhetorical

6. Miller (1984, p. 151). 7. Ibid., p. 159. 8. Ibid., p. 152. Cf. Campbell & Jamieson (1982). 9. Ibid., p. 153.

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works that had hitherto been the focus of Genre Studies, Miller gives center stage to “such homely discourse as the user manual, the progress report, the ransom note, the lecture, and the white paper.”10 Though Miller herself is cautious on the point of defining function as the distinctive element in the understanding of genre, the impact of her article is less ambiguous; and in a number of later studies Miller’s guarded position is replaced by a stronger conviction on the central points. This is illustrated in a remark by Aviva Freedman: Briefly the central argument of RGS is that genres are best understood not so much as text types, to be defined by their textual regularities, but as typified actions in response to recurring social contexts. The textual regularities are not ignored; they are seen as symptoms of or traces of socially constructed responses to equally socially constructed recurrent or typified situation types.11 The defining difference between Freedman’s summary and Miller’s position is that Freedman discusses genre as such without limiting herself to a rhetorical perspective. Understanding genre from the point of view of function (typified actions in response to recurring social contexts) is superior to the understanding of it from the point of view of utterances (textual regularities). Thus, the shift of emphasis, that is cautious in Miller, is confident in Freedman. Freedman is not alone on this point. Indeed, the focus on the function of genre has proven immensely productive. A very modest list of important publications within RGS, and in immediate contact with the movement, could include Bazerman (1988) (and a wide array of other works by Bazerman), Swales (1990, 2004), Devitt (1991, 1993, 2000, 2004), Schryer (1993), Freedman and Medway (1994), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), Hyon (1996), Russel (1997), Winsor (2000), Bawarshi (2000, 2003), Askehave and Swales (2001), Coe, Lingard, and Teslenko (2002), Andersen (2008), Bazerman, Bonini, and Figudeiredo (2009), Bawarshi and Reiff (2010), Haffner (2010), Pare´ (2014) — and to a large extent this volume as well. The dominance of the functional point of view is accompanied by a shift in subject matter that also follows Miller — once again with increased confidence. RGS studies a wide array of different genres, but the high rhetorical genres play subordinate roles, and the literary genres are not only conspicuously absent from the actual investigations, they are to a great degree held to be without particular interest. Indeed, when Devitt (2004) included a

10. Ibid., p. 155. 11. Freedman (1999, p. 764).

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positive discussion of the scholarly and departmental possibilities offered by literary conceptions of genre, she was strongly rebuked by Vandenberg for claiming any sort of special status for literary genres. This is so even though the research questions that he quotes from Devitt, “What are the functions of literary genres? And what communities do literary genres serve?”12 are clearly defined by a rhetorical and functional point of view, and are less central to literary scholarship per se. Instead, Vandenberg denies literary genres any special character compared to other genres, and poses the question as a struggle for status within English departments, with the literary scholars as hegemonic rulers and compositionists as institutionally disadvantaged but with truth on their side. Along the same lines, the presentation of literary Genre Studies in Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) is exceedingly critical and serves little purpose within the otherwise excellent book except to make room for different, function based theories of genre.13 So what Miller initiates as the clearing of a space for a rhetorical approach to genre develops into a hegemonic — albeit very productive — dominance of the field. Meanwhile, literary genre theory has stagnated. Even though genre to this day remains an indispensable concept in literary theory,14 despite the brilliance of classic studies,15 and notwithstanding strong later works by, for instance, Cohen (1986), Conte (1991/1994), Seitel (2003), Farrel (2003), and Steen (2011), literary Genre Studies have not kept up. Unsurprisingly, the central concerns of Literary Studies have moved in other directions — most notably toward narratology. In the same period as literary scholars have lost their grasp on Genre Studies, the field itself has risen to prominence. Not only is Genre Studies perceived as useful in a number of different contexts, it is actually — mirabile dictu — being used. This is first and foremost the case in language and writing pedagogy, where not only RGS but at least two other schools, English for Specific Purposes and a genre pedagogy based on Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics, have each made positive impacts on how the subject is being taught. What has not been properly addressed, however, is the relationship between function-oriented Genre Studies and literature. This relationship is important, not only because literature is important, but also because it

12. Vandenberg (2005, p. 539), Devitt (2004, p. 179). 13. Incidentally, the treatment of literary Genre Studies in Bawarshi (2000) is much more precise and less derogatory. 14. Witness, for example, the complete dependence on the concept in Schmitt (2010). 15. Tynianov (2003), (orig. 1927), Todorov (1990/1978), Genette (1992/1979), Fowler (1982), and Schaeffer (1983).

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demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than Miller’s homely discourses. One of the best attempts at discussing literary genres from an RGS perspective — Devitt’s aforementioned Writing Genres — contains a slight, though very enlightening, contradiction on this exact point. In her introductory presentation of genre theory, Devitt makes her connection to the function-oriented tradition explicit: More current and rhetorical theories of genre tend to follow Miller’s definition of genre as “typified social action associated with a recurrent situation.” Agreeing with this essentially rhetorical nature of genre, this chapter draws out and extends threads introduced by Miller and other scholars to weave a detailed tapestry of genre.16 In emphasizing the “essentially rhetorical nature of genre” (emphasis added), Devitt places herself beyond Miller and perhaps even beyond Freedman. And not by accident: Devitt’s rich and poignant book is clearly based in a rhetorical understanding of genre. However, when approaching literary genres she is considerably subdued. She notes that a “rhetorical genre theory based on functionality requires literary genres too to be describable in terms of their functions for their users.”17 Along the same lines she notes that generic interpretations by Aristotle (1985b) and by Janice Radway (1991/1984) “show how closely tied generic function can be to generic readership, for literary as well as rhetorical genres.”18 Devitt’s language marks the shift. Rather than discussing the essence of genre, she sketches how literary genres must be “describable,” not “defined,” by their functionality, and by what “can be” their generic function. This weaker — or if you will: more cautious — language obviously contradicts the strong theory of function with which Devitt opens her book; more importantly, it enters her argument at the point where it moves beyond the scope of Miller’s rhetorical genres and back into the field of literary Genre Studies. Viewed from one angle, this cautious language implies that Devitt is overstretching her concepts by applying them to literature; but from another angle, it is precisely this that makes the exercise admirable. Rather than just asserting the dominance of function over utterance, like Freedman, Devitt exposes the assumption to the empirical material that is most difficult to fit

16. Devitt (2004, p. 3). 17. Ibid. p. 179. 18. Ibid. p. 179.

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within the theory. In doing so, she makes the value of function-oriented Genre Studies for the understanding of literature evident — even if it requires her to expose a limitation in the assumptions on which her book rests. Thus, despite Vandenberg’s rebuttal, Devitt evidently had the right idea in wanting to open up a line of inquiry between Literary Studies and RGS. Being marginalized in modern Genre Studies, we on the literary side have nothing to lose by engaging in dialogue and collaboration with the dominant functional trend in Genre Studies.19 However, the opposite should also hold true, as the insights into the workings of rhetorical genres gained by the interdisciplinary approach should provide an attractive opportunity for RGS researchers. One opening move of such an interchange could arguably be the recognition that formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable in terms of function alone.20 The rhetorical situation and the social function of one novel is similar to the next, but the novels themselves will be extremely different thematically and formally. A genre theory that sees genres as “typified actions in response to recurring social contexts” falls short if it tries to explain the intrinsic complexities of works of literature — you do not even need the impressive theoretical build-up of Genette’s transtextual trilogy (1992/1979, 1997a/1982, 1997b/ 1987), for example, to demonstrate that. All you need is some hands-on genre interpretation.21 It is worth noting that this concession can be made without ever leaving the framework originally sketched out by Miller. A rhetorical approach to rhetorical genres does not need to presuppose that literary genres must be determined by their function. The only thing challenged is the monistic assumption that all genres must be understood first and foremost from a functional perspective. A literary understanding of genre should not be troubled by giving a functional perspective an equal place in its interpretation of genre; but it must be allowed to do so without having to subordinate the internal organization of thematic and formal elements to it. Literary scholarship is above all the study of literary utterances. Thus, in introducing the second volume of New Literary History’s double issue on genre, Cohen (2003) states the textual basis of genre with full-scale conviction: “contributors to this symposium […] all assume that genre refers to a group of texts. Whether this ‘group’ is called a class, a category, or a

19. Auken (2014) offers one take on how a functional perspective on genre can inspire Literary Studies. 20. See Sunesen (2015). 21. See Auken (2015).

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convention, the ‘group’ consists of member texts” (V).22 This demonstrates how crucial utterance-based approaches are to literary genre research. But this should not lead to a barren rejection of a genre-based sociology of literature, of a broadened understanding of literary context, or of an ongoing integration into Literary Studies of questions concerning communication, discourse, structuration, or rhetorical situation.23 Much is to be gained, in fact, from engagement with these questions — and anyway, only a Sith deals in absolutes. This merely means that, in order for literary Genre Studies to work at all, the entry point cannot be the subordination of utterance to function. Literary Studies’ best bid for re-entry into the core of Genre Studies is probably John Frow’s Genre (2006), which, despite its status as an introduction to the concept of genre, is something of a novelty in genre theory. It is a work that has its starting point in Literary Studies, but which also has a coherent relation to modern genre theory from other branches of scholarship. Without making a display of it, Frow contradicts the assumption that genres are universally best understood as typified actions, and reinstates a tripartite model of form, theme, and rhetoric.24 Frow’s definition of rhetoric is somewhat broader than the social function described by Miller and RGS, as it basically has to do with seeing the utterance in context, but it retains function as one of the rhetorical aspects in genre. Frow sees genre as an interaction between form, theme, and rhetoric, and makes two crucial and closely connected points about this interplay. First, that where one of the three is present, the other two will be present too. Second, that each of the three is able to subsume the other two. As a consequence, no matter whether you approach genre from a rhetorical, a thematic, or a formal point of view, you will have to deal with all three of them. This tripartite structure might also — along the lines already described — be construed as a two sided relationship between what

22. Cohen’s statement is thus a counterexample to Devitt’s claim, made one year later, that “Since literature, composition, and rhetoric, like other fields of knowledge, have all been affected by common philosophical shifts, it is not surprising that their reconceptions of genre share many qualities. All have moved away from formalism and so all have moved away from defining genre as textual forms” (Devitt, 2004, p. 165). 23. This is not virgin territory: Both literary and interdisciplinary scholarships have of course dealt with these matters extensively (they are, for instance, crucial in Marxist criticism and in almost all forms of Literary History); and referencing this point in an even marginally satisfactory manner would mean drawing up a multi-page bibliography. However, within Literary Studies these subjects are rarely, if ever, treated in the context of contemporary Genre Studies. An interesting starting point for such a discussion could be found in the tension between, for instance, Genette’s transtextual theory on one side, and Bazerman (2004), and Felski (2011), on the other. 24. Frow (2006, p. 74
77).

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concerns the utterance itself, perceived as a unity of formal and thematic elements, and what concerns its relationship to its context, including its social function.25 Even though this understanding is only valid within certain limitations,26 it has obvious analytical as well as theoretical applications, and corresponds to a common-sense understanding of the relationship. The fundamental advantage of Frow’s approach is heuristic: It enables a wide array of different takes on genre and constitutes an invitation to a dialogue between them. The only thing in function-oriented Genre Studies that it contradicts is the tenet that function is the deciding factor in genre. However, since the interchange between the different aspects of genre is quite fundamental to Frow’s approach, studies demonstrating how the function of a genre — or an individual utterance, for that matter — has determining influence on its formal and thematic structures are unproblematic. Within this framework, different genres can obviously prove to be more or less dependent upon one or more of the three aspects; and different scholarly approaches will emphasize different aspects — or, for that matter, aspects of these aspects. So in trying to understand the relationship between rhetorical and literary genres, we might tentatively posit it as a difference in the relative weight of the formal and thematic vis-a`-vis the functional aspects of the genre. And at least some of the differences between literary and rhetorical Genre Studies might be explained more as differences in subject than in method. Reduced to the point of platitude: Rhetorical genres invite rhetorical readings and literary genres invite literary readings. As we are not dealing in absolutes, the question of the relationship between literary and rhetorical genres (and between literary and rhetorical Genre Studies) cannot be locked into a simple dichotomy. Neither does it posit the study of literary genres as unique — or as more refined than the study of other genres. It does, however, establish that a formal perspective will often yield more in literary Genre Studies, as genre variance and generic complexity in the individual utterance is usually (usually!) stronger in literary than in rhetorical genres. Yet as will be discussed later, even this

25. Frow makes this two sided relationship evident in a later article when — with an only marginally concealed reference to Miller (1984) — he discusses “the logical order that composes any particular genre: a logic at once of its “internal” structure and of its strategic relation to a recurrent situation” (Frow, 2007, p. 1628). 26. From the point of view of Genre Studies, the main limitation is that a large number of formal as well as thematic elements of the individual utterance will be determined by earlier utterances. So the internal organization of formal and thematic elements may be more or less unique to the individual text; but it is also dependent on the utterance’s relation to its generic context.

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only holds true to a certain extent, as a number of high rhetorical texts exhibit a generic complexity and individual variances to rival literary works. A central consequence of the increased formal complexity of literary works is the difficulty in identifying the genre of a given work of literature. A number of literary scholars have claimed that the attribution of genre to a given work is the work of the professional reader, the critic (Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010, identifies Rosmarin, 1985, and Hirsch, 1967). This theory makes little or no sense in relation to many rhetorical genres: Though exceptions arise, the individual utterances can in the overwhelming majority of cases be categorized without major difficulty.27 But the claim has more merit if the utterance in question is a generically complex, multi-layered work. In this context, such a claim has very little to do with epistemological relativism, strong reading, or the dominance of the interpreter over the work. What is more, the discussion of what or which genres to attribute to any given work presupposes that there is an actual meaning to the different genre labels (unstable as that meaning might be), and that the attribution of a genre to a work can be more or less correct. Thus you can label Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad a mythical tale, a love story, an autodiegetic novel, a parody, a feminist novel, a pastiche, or even a multigeneric story, and all of these labels will have merit and explicative force for the understanding of the book; but you cannot label it a doctoral dissertation, a state-of-the-union-address, a letter to the editor, or a technical manual. The fundamental issue is that the utterance is formed by generic structures at the same time as it employs, forms, and contradicts them. So the interpreter’s choice of genres for analysis will highlight some features of a work while putting others in shadow. This can be conceptualized as a counter-play of categories within the framework of Genre Studies (Sinding, 2011), or, in a broader perspective, as a hermeneutic move to understand by means of a conscious choice of perspective. One way or the other, it is illuminating — but not very surprising. The role of the receiver in genre attribution is, however, not just an aesthetic phenomenon. And though it usually works differently in other areas, the decision can be crucial. To give an example from my own experience as Head of the humanistic PhD School at the University of Copenhagen: One of the fundamental parts of a PhD Scholarship application at my faculty is the “project proposal”: if an application lacks a proposal, we can dismiss it

27. However, not all: One possible example of such difficulties could be the proliferation of scams in e-mail communication. The frustration of university IT staffs show that even highly intelligent and highly trained readers can sometimes be duped by scam e-mails. See also Frow (2006, p. 100), and Auken (2011, p. 123f).

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administratively without bothering senior researchers for a scholarly assessment. As rejection rates at the faculty are above 95%, this is important, as we do not want to overburden the already stretched resources of the researchers with the assessment of too many inept applications. So when, for instance, we receive a document titled “Project Proposal” but containing, aside from this header, only the words “I will do research in subject you want (sic),”28 we have to decide whether the name itself is enough to warrant an attribution of the document to the genre of the project proposal, and so to merit a scholarly assessment. This attribution has to be independent of the intention of the applicant, and it has to be absolute: The proposal is in, or it is out. Tertium non datur. There is no room for “participation without belonging”29 or other literary finery. This kind of decision is made through a combination of internal and functional criteria. We know that, formally speaking, a project proposal must contain a description of a project: a coherent rendering (form!) of a recognizable subject, as well as a research question concerning (theme!) something unknown, or less known, in relation to that subject, which it is relevant and important to study further. These traits are related to the institutional function of the project proposal: to allow us to pick eligible candidates for enrollment in a high level PhD program. As the “proposal” that I have just described contains neither a coherent rendering of a recognizable subject nor a research question, it is deemed so lacking that it disqualifies itself as a project proposal. Thus the application is rejected on administrative grounds without burdening senior faculty. In looking at current genre scholarship from the point of view of Literary Studies, one particular question becomes pertinent: In actual analysis of this or that genre, why do we — rhetoricians and literary scholars alike — spend as much time or more studying these inherent formal and thematic shared traits as we do studying rhetorical situations? Because they matter. You cannot do a prolonged study of any genre without a continued reference to its utterances, and by implication to its formal and thematic properties. So even if these studies are framed within a context of recurrent rhetorical situations, you still need to include the utterances in your studies in order to determine the interplay between rhetorical situation and utterance. A case in point could be Winsor’s illuminating study of a particular genre: the work orders passing from engineers to technicians “at a large

28. The project proposal text given here is not an actual one. It is, however, so similar to texts that we have actually received that the situation described is real, even if the proposal itself is somewhat masked. 29. Derrida (1980, p. 9).

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manufacturer of agricultural equipment.”30 Winsor is working strictly with the organizational function of genre, but she registers clear textual regularities between the different work orders, even reprints two variations of the genre, and notes how difficulties arose when engineers used old work orders as templates and “overlooked changes that needed to be made to adapt an old order for a new purpose.”31 She also notes how one technician clearly prefers to have particular formal features in his work orders. So even in a study clearly aiming at generic function, the character of the utterances within the genre plays an important role, including questions of centrality within the genre of a given utterance, of how individual authors influence the texts in question, and of the role played by the interpreter (the technician) in the decoding of the text — the “Blue Collar Literacy” of the title of the paper. Along the same lines, one subject has been less emphasized in recent genre scholarship: the study of complex utterances. Instead, the focus has been on fairly simple utterances that fit into genres with relative ease. This, of course, is not the case with most literary genres, or with the high rhetorical genres. Unsurprisingly, some of the best work done with genre in Literary Studies concerns the possible attribution of multiple genres to a work (McHale, 2009; Sinding, 2011). But in this context, the fundamental point is a different one. The more complex an utterance becomes, the less likely it is that everything in it is best studied from the point of view of function, and, consequently, the more complex an utterance is, the more we need a formal and thematic analysis to properly understand its function. By consequence, the more a genre consists of complex utterances, the more we need to be able to handle formal and thematic problems in order to understand it — and understand its function. Genres allow for individual style to different degrees. Bakhtin describes a continuum ranging from “the most conducive” to the “least favorable” genres when it comes to individual choices of style. In the most conducive genres, works of “artistic literature,” the style “enters directly into the very task of the utterance.” In the least favorable, “business documents, military commands,” and others, the utterer “can reflect only the most superficial, almost biological aspects of individuality.” In between are a variety of genres, “the vast majority” according to Bakhtin, which leave room for individual expression, but are not constituted by it. How central this assumption is to Bakhtin is emphasized when he mentions the “organic, inseperable link between style and genre” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 64), and remarks that where “there is style, there is genre” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 66). These remarks

30. Winsor (2000, p. 155). 31. Winsor (2000, p. 165).

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point to a definition of genre by formal criteria, but Bakhtin does not elaborate on them. Bakhtin’s rendering is probably a bit too schematic, since, as Winsor’s study demonstrates, even the less conducive genres allow for individual variation — obviously beyond the “biological aspects of individuality.” Also, not only the genre itself, but also the individual rhetorical situations will have a determining influence on individual variations among utterances. However, Bakhtin’s description of a continuum of different relationships between generic norms and individual expressivity is enlightening. The sense of this continuum is particularly important given the state of current genre research. The immense success of Miller’s endeavor means that today we have stronger rhetorical Genre Studies when it comes to her “homely” or “de facto” genres than we do when it comes to the high rhetorical ones. The de facto genres are generally on the lower end of the scale when it comes to individual variation. So from the point of view of RGS as well, a renewed interest in the relationship between generic norm and individual variations would be profitable: it would allow for better treatment of the high rhetorical genres, and thus open up a line of inquiry situated between RGS and classic rhetorical studies of great oratory. The apology or the inaugural, for instance, can be very complex genres, and understanding the rhetorical function of utterances within them will require the analyst to make formal and thematic investigations of the individual utterances. However, the relationship between literary, high rhetorical, and what Miller calls “de facto” genres is obviously as manifold as all other genre relations. On a general level, it may well be true that literary genres are more determined by internal features than are high rhetorical ones, and that high rhetorical genres in turn are more formally determined than de facto genres. But like many other genre hierarchies, this one too is unstable. The genres of everyday life can be formally very strict or very loose. There is considerably more formal wiggle room in an academic lecture than in a patent application; depending on the institution a progress report can be more or less formally bound; and an academic article may be free flowing and essayistic, or it may be strictly bound by formalities — depending on the subject, the field of study, and the individual choices of the author or authors. In each case the function will still be there, and a number of the formal traits can be described as aiming at the rhetorical function of the genre; but the function can be very broad, and even so the formal traits of the genre or of the individual utterance may be very specific. An example: The genre of the PhD project proposal, once again, is one whose functional purpose is clear to both the assessors and the applicants. We at the PhD School are looking to enroll the best possible junior researchers with the best possible research projects. The prospective

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researchers want to convince the PhD School that they are the ones we ought to select. This gives us a shared interest in what are called, in the current research lingo, “excellent” research proposals. There are a few formal demands set by the Faculty, a limit to how many characters can be used, and a requirement that certain elements be included — but aside from those, the main demand for the project proposal is that it present an original research idea in a convincing form. This is done in order to demonstrate both that the research project is worth carrying out (and worth investing time and resources in), and that the applicant is skilled enough to follow through on the project successfully. In this very general sense, the genre of the PhD project proposal can be said to be determined by functional concerns. However, from this point on the project proposal itself takes center stage. It will be judged on its ability to make a viable formal presentation of a convincing thematic subject. Given the fierce competition there has to be an almost perfect fit for a proposal to succeed. A bumbling presentation of a brilliant idea will be severely disadvantaged, not only because the assessor has to see through the clumsiness to get at the idea, but also because the lack of ability to write a convincing short presentation calls into question the author’s ability to write a long treatment of the same subject. Obviously, the reverse is even less conducive to success. An elegant presentation of an underdeveloped, unoriginal, and clumsy idea will earn the author points for eloquence but not much else. So what we are doing as assessors of PhD project proposals is not very far removed from a classical close reading: the only differences being that the subject matter is non-fiction, and that if we have to choose between form and content, we will choose content. So from our point of view, the overall function of the proposal is to find the right combination of a person and a project, which is a unity of form and content, but with priority given to content; whereas from the applicant’s point of view, the purpose is to achieve the unity of form and content, and thus to prove that she or he is the right person for enrollment. As even this reasonably simple example demonstrates, there is a useful, even necessary place for close reading of utterances in Genre Studies, and by consequence there is also a place for the study of stylistics, thematics, transtextuality, metaphor, and other forms of figural language, as indeed for most subjects ever touched upon by literary scholars. However, in order to allow this kind of room for the interpretation of concrete utterances, we need one adjustment to happen: We cannot see function as the sole defining feature of genre. We can, however, easily appreciate the power of functional Genre Studies and of a functional point of view — as long as an approach oriented toward form and theme is not made ancillary to it. We would much rather have a point of view from which what is being said, how its being said, and why it is being said form

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a coherent whole. (As in the tripartite structure suggested — or resuggested — by John Frow.) What are genres? And what can we learn from studying genre? The first question is, at least from one point of view, ontological, the second heuristic. The number of sentences in modern genre theory beginning with the words “genres are …” attest to the difficulty of answering the first question. What I want to add to the ongoing debate is that genres are intrinsically connected to utterances. An understanding of them cannot rest on their social function alone; it must take into account the character of the concrete utterances within the genre. The consequences of this addition cannot be covered here; answering them would take up a full article or more. Instead, I will spend the last part of this chapter sketching three of the possibilities in genre research that can be strengthened, or even opened up, through a shift in perspective that allows the utterances themselves to rejoin center stage in Genre Studies alongside genres’ social function. First, this allows for an improved understanding of complex genres. One of the reasons why the functional genre perspective has worked so well is that it is compatible with the de facto genres brought into focus by RGS, since these genres are the ones that are most heavily determined by an organized social function. But the situation becomes much less clear in more complex genres. Here the utterances are so varied, and have so many individually determined characteristics, that the social function of the genre alone is not enough to explain them. This is abundantly clear in connection with works of art — verbal or otherwise, but allow me to stick to my own field, literature, for now. One of the most significant features of works of literature is their ability to transcend their particular situation — the time and situation in which they were written. This is definitely not a universal trait inherent in any work of literature, the vast majority is quickly forgotten, and few works, if any, are universally revered in all subsequent periods. But the fact remains that hundreds of years after their publication, many works can actually be read in their own right as works of art, and not primarily to gain a historical-cultural, sociological, generic, or other kind of extra-textual knowledge. If we turn to the de facto genres that are the center of attention in most of today’s rhetorical genre investigations, we see that this is not the case. Different forms of news accounts from the early modern period century can surely offer interesting testimony not only of the events they depict, but of society’s way of obtaining, dispersing, handling, and structuring information as well (Pettigrew, 2014). Nevertheless, unlike literary texts such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2003/1719) or Fielding’s Tom Jones (1985/1749), these old news accounts are unlikely to find many readers who

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consider them exciting in their own right.32 Surely we can hold that this transhistoricity is due to the universally human truths of a particular work, for example, a kind of function, but the function is so general that it says little about the work in question. To obtain a nuanced understanding of a complex work, it is necessary to focus on how the formal shaping, the characters, the plot, the composition, the themes, the rhetorical structures, and so on are applied and used in this particular work — and how every work of art, therefore, is an unique instantiation of one or more genres. But literary texts are not the only ones that can be read as individualized texts in a transhistorical perspective. The same holds true — though often in different ways — for, among others, central philosophical and theological texts, for some works of scholarship and science, and for important juridical and political documents. Though a number of these texts are by stylistically brilliant writers, like Plato or Augustine, this is not necessary for the continued interest they arouse. Some are widely read even though their aesthetic merits are debatable; few people would read Kant or Hegel for their literary quality (though they might read Hume), but they are still being read, learned from and admired for the brilliance of their philosophical arguments. There is no single formula for what kind of relationship between function and utterance — or, for that matter, aesthetics and content — that opens up this transhistoricity. However that may be, the understanding of complex genres, literary or high rhetorical, would benefit from using a wider range of approaches than the current functional focus of RGS. The point is not to deny the strength of the functional approach, but to add to it by bringing in the other approaches necessary to unravel the intricacies bound up with complex genres. The second point is closely connected to the first.33 The renewed weight given to the formal and thematic sides of genre can add an element of close reading to the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. RGS has developed an extensive vocabulary for dealing with genre: social action, situated cognition, uptake, genre set, genre system, genre ecology, genre network, recurrent situation, etc. These characteristically chart out the relationships connecting different genres

32. As pointed out by one of my reviewers, and rightfully so, this argument is abbreviated to the point of parody. However, actually unfolding it would require the establishment, or reiteration, of a complete historical hermeneutics, most likely one that recontextualized Gadamer (1990/1960), within the framework of Genre Studies, and a number of sociohistorical investigations of actual reading practices. This would in turn most likely lead to serious reformulations of the argument. For now I will, hesitantly, leave it in place. 33. The short description here is basically an abbreviation of a much longer treatment of this subject in Auken (2015).

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and describe how genres are embedded into their institutional and social contexts. Here an approach that gives equal weight to the formal and thematic side could add greater attention to the individual utterances making up, or using, the genre. This will allow contemporary genre theory to be used in the scholarly interpretation of individual utterances. Rather than interpreting genres in their social or organizational context, this approach uses attention to and knowledge about the social uses of genre as a means to perform generic interpretation: We analyze the workings of genre within complex utterances in light of our knowledge of the social role and understanding of genre. Reading through genre involves working with both the overall genre of the works interpreted and with the genres embedded within these works. The first point has been touched upon briefly in connection with Atwood’s The Penelopiad. By attempting to determine to what extent a work belongs to an established genre, an interpretation will highlight fundamental features of the work: its structure, style, enunciation, etc. If there are several different options, as is often the case, the interpretation will bring out different sides of the work in question, depending on which genre is used as the interpretive starting point. This will allow the interpreter to highlight the complexity of structures and details within the work. An embedded genre need not be anything so clear-cut as a letter quoted in a novel (Bakhtin’s example). Most of the genre structures embedded in a complex utterance do very little to draw attention to themselves. A work of fiction, for instance, can pass through such genres as “conversation,” “discussion,” “date,” “promise,” “argument,” or “interview” without any noticeable shift of discourse or enunciative position. Put more precisely: of course there are shifts, but these shifts are an integrated part of the original genre’s form of discourse, and do not constitute a break with it. Everyone knows that one can, in conversation, cite utterances of another genre without anyone taking conscious notice of the presence of these new genres. The embedding of utterances belonging to another genre is an intrinsic generic trait of conversation. The fundamental point of the embedded genre is that it carries its own generic characteristics into the context of the work, thus adding meaning to it. So by calling awareness to the generic structures that enter a work through its embedded genres, an interpretation can map the patterns of cultural meaning in the work and demonstrate how these patterns inform the work and our understanding of it. Though a close reading through genre moves in a direction opposite to what is usually done in RGS, there is no conflict between the two approaches — just differences of perspective. Combining the two should allow exciting dialectical opportunities to arise between understanding the

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social function of a genre and understanding the actual utterances making up or employing the genre. The third point has to do with the relationship between genres in both a systematic and a historical perspective. As has already been touched upon, genres do not exist in isolation, but form larger patterns — patterns that include other genres. This raises a number of interesting questions: How do genres connect to and use one another? And how do genres develop from one another? As a systematic point, this connects closely to RGS, where the relationship and interchange between genres is key. However, the present approach adds to this by further describing how genres reuse, embed, restructure, and contradict one another. This process is extremely complex, and though genre hierarchies, genre chains (Swales, 2004), and genre uptakes (Freadman, 1994, 2002) are part of the explanation, even they are not always determined by function alone. Genres are often formally connected by distinct generic markers, and the more organized a genre chain or genre hierarchy is, the more it will tend toward formalizing the requirements connected to each utterance. Usually, if you hand in a report on the wrong form(!), nothing is achieved; in an important sense, you have not even handed in the report. In order to fit into a given genre chain, an utterance has to comply with the standards of content and form set by the chain. This may be said to be determined by function, but, as has been shown in the discussion of the PhD project proposal above, not only is the fulfillment of the function dependent on both formal and thematic traits, but the ultimate function of a chain may well be to establish a particular kind of content — like a viable research project. The same goes for a historical perspective on genre. One of many reasons why Genre Studies would do well to reintegrate Alistair Fowler’s brilliant Kinds of Literature is the book’s rendering of the manifold different ways genres rise from other genres and transform(!) over time. Fowler has a consistent focus on how new literary genres develop from existing genres, and his book offers a fine resource for studies aiming to describe how genres arise and develop. I am convinced that all the different kinds of change recorded by Fowler can be found outside the realm of literature, too; much of his analysis and vocabulary could thus easily be used in tracking generic change. Fowler frames these developments as a mainly formal affair, and this would — and should — obviously be modified by the functional approach of current Genre Studies. Nevertheless, his study would be able to supplement this by demonstrating how genres are not just the response to recurrent social situations, but are also determined by the contemporary generic landscape. A new genre will always be patterned on whatever is the range of genres available to the genre user or users in question. And thus both formal and thematic patterns in the utterances of said context of genres will not only influence, but at times even determine (positively or

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negatively), the character of a new genre. Fowler’s array of different genre changes can be framed within current Genre Studies as uptakes; but each is a specific and new kind of uptake, and so Kinds of Literature offers a brilliant enrichment of our understanding of the dynamic between genres. My conclusion will have to be as simple as my introduction: I hope the preceding pages have demonstrated that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them. Insofar as we encounter genres in concrete utterances, this is basically stating the obvious; but given the state of the art in contemporary Genre Studies the point is still worth pressing. Adding to this: One of the major challenges facing Genre Studies today is how to handle the subject’s staggering reach. Genre has a strong central presence in human communication, categorization, and understanding. The problems I reported at the beginning of this chapter — the difficulty of finding a term to cover the various phenomena and individual members that are organized in genres — bear ample witness to this. Accordingly, Genre Studies is inherently transdisciplinary, and its insights are relevant far beyond the reach of current genre scholarship — wide as its reach may be (and wider yet, as it will be with the publication of the current volume). There is, in other words, a tremendous impact waiting to be achieved. Allowing equal weight to utterances in our understanding is not an automatic ticket to success in this endeavor, but it does open up avenues of dialogue to a number of scholarly subjects where utterances, in one form or another, are at the center of attention — and it allows for more diverse approaches to genre, which will be conducive to the study of genres in other fields.

Acknowledgments This chapter is written with the assistance of Camilla Mellin. The author wishes to thank the Research Group for Genre Studies at the University of Copenhagen and in particular Christel Sunesen for her invaluable contribution to this study. Thanks are also due to David Russel, Amy Devitt, Anne Smedegaard, George Hinge, Sarah Auken, and Carsten Fogh Nielsen.

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184.

Final Summary: Genre Theory in Information Studies

While these pages end this book on genre theory in information studies, a potential new avenue for genre-based or genre-informed research in information studies has hopefully opened. We are now in a possession of a collection of chapters written by scholars in information and archival studies and literature. The chapters, and the different trajectories they all have taken, have all dealt with genre theory as a tool to think or discus with, as an analytical construct or as a lens. In doing this, the chapters have taken genre into the domain of information studies and expanded the areas of applicability of genre and re-interpreted or provided new understandings of selected research areas in information studies. This implies two things. One is the fact that while the authors in this volume may not have changed the field of information studies in a way that completely overthrows other concepts and theories in information studies, the authors nevertheless have systemically produced a discourse, posed questions with genre theory, and initiated a dialogue about how to conceive of users of information, information, utterances, documents, records, and information systems based in genre theory. We have with this book a piece of research that pulls information studies in a direction toward qualitative or soft social sciences and the humanities. This direction seems necessary as the objects of information studies (whatever that is users/audiences, information, utterances, documents, or information systems) are social in nature and grounded in culture. Information studies are in a deep need for a language for addressing and understanding these objects as social and cultural phenomena. A continuing search for questions and answers in the woods of the sciences will take not take information studies anywhere but into disappointments. Not recognizing this will take information studies in directions where it will not be able to provide socially relevant answers and questions society justifiably should expect from information studies. Other fields (e.g., media or cultural studies) will take care of providing answers

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and questions about issues of information access and management, searching and data practices exactly because these issues are vital to current forms of modern culture. The journal New Media & Society is a case in point here as this journal now publishes research about issues and phenomena having to do with search engines, searching, archiving, and algorithms. The chapters in this book have taken up the challenge and offered accounts showing in what ways selected objects of information studies can be studied and understood when approaching them from a socially and culturally sensitive point of view: the point of view of genre. The other thing is the placement of genre in a scholarly context. The authors have demonstrated how information studies contribute to deepening, expanding, and consolidating genre theory by bringing in areas of research in information studies to the field of genre not yet studied from a genre point of view. Andersen, Feinberg, McKenzie, and Foscarini suggest with their distinct arguments how new understandings of knowledge organization, information systems change, personal information management, and the notion of records can be arrived at with genre theory as a lens. While the contribution from Auken may not be considered a contribution coming from information studies, Auken’s argument is still highly relevant to information studies as he insists on not subordinating thematic or formal aspects of genre to function. In information studies we can learn from Auken’s argument and we may say that both Skouvig and MacNeil can be considered to be moving in this direction too even though it is not their main agenda in their respective chapters. Moreover, this book has also shown similarities between the interests of information studies and rhetorical genre theory. They are both interested in the actions and practice of people using forms of information, utterances, or documents and the interaction between people and systems (information systems or genre systems). The goal for both fields is to understand how people make sense of their worlds in order to act appropriately with the available communicative means and to make people better equipped to respond and act in a society where knowledge and information materialize in particular forms we call genres, whether that is particular forms of texts or particular forms of structured collections of texts (i.e., information systems). Thus, with this book, genre theory as of today is most likely rather different, if not far away from, what Miller and others proposed about genre in the 1980s and onward. Of course, this circumstance may be considered success for genre theory. But we must also work toward not letting genre theory become a victim of its own success. The question that naturally arises is where does all this take genre theory? What does genre as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller, 1984, p. 159) or genre as “types of rhetorical actions that people perform in their everyday

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interactions with their worlds” (Devitt, 2004, p. 2) mean in the 21st century given all the studies the field of genre (including this book) is now possession of? One conclusion we may make is that 30 years after Miller’s seminal article, genre as social action is now a powerful metaphor of genre research comprising different scholarly disciplines, each employing genre in their own way. Therefore, ahead us there is much more work to be done as we must continue to develop genre theory. The chapters in this book may be pointing to new ways of rethinking rhetorical genre theory because they offer cases from where to elaborate new theoretical insights about, for instance, genre users, actions of genre users, activity systems, intertextual networks, knowledge structures and production and epistemologies represented and operationalized within genres. Finally, other kinds of research will pull information studies in other opposite directions. But fields of activity are, or are supposed to be, fueled with tensions and contradictions because of varied epistemological interests. Without tensions and contradictions activity fields like research go down and there is nothing to question, to argue for, to criticize nor to teach but the “sacred texts and techniques.” This book, and the arguments put forward here, could not have materialized if the authors during the years not have questioned or observed shortcomings in other already established approaches. Jack Andersen Editor

References Devitt, A. J. (2004). Writing genres. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151
167.

Index

Activity systems, 8
10, 13, 21
22, 30, 32, 34
35, 122, 126, 136
138, 140 Activity theory, 7, 9, 13, 15
16, 22, 31
33, 35, 37
38, 117 Archives, 23, 36, 48, 50, 52, 92, 94, 99
101, 116, 119, 138 Archival studies, 92, 115
116 Broadside ballads, 135, 138, 141, 145, 148, 150 Calendar, 71, 76, 78
81, 83
85, 91, 94, 96
97, 99
101, 103, 105, 108, 110
111 Catalog, catalogs, 48, 50
53, 56
57, 59
64 Cataloging, 44, 53
55, 61, 63 Catalogers, 51
52, 54
55, 60 Collection, collections, 16
18, 20
21, 25
26, 44, 46, 48, 51
52, 55, 59
61, 64
65, 71, 87, 96, 100 Copenhagen, 133
142, 144, 147, 149, 165 Cultural heritage, 48, 50
53, 55 Diplomatics, 115
116, 118
119, 121, 124
126, 128
129 Documentary reality, 2, 115
116, 119, 121, 126
129

Finding aid, 50
51, 61, 91
96, 100, 106, 108, 110 Genre change, 43
44, 47
48, 56, 60
61, 64
65, 174 Genre repertoire, 9
10, 27, 30, 38 Genre resources, 43, 45
46 Genre set, 8
10, 27, 30
31, 44, 67, 69
72, 75
76, 81
83, 85
86, 93, 127, 136
137, 171 Genre system, 8, 25, 27, 50, 67, 69
70, 72, 76
77, 83
84, 93
94, 125, 133, 135
138, 140
141, 149, 171 Genre theory, 1
5, 7
10, 13, 16, 18, 21
24, 26
27, 29, 31, 43
44, 51, 67
68, 91, 115, 133
136, 140, 155
156, 158, 160
163, 170, 172 Great Britain, 91, 94
95, 99, 102 Ideology, 26, 92, 119, 121
122, 127
128 Information history, 133, 135
136 Information network, 133, 135
137, 140, 149 Information practice, 67
68, 86 Information studies, 1, 13
14, 16, 22, 24, 29, 31, 33, 35, 43
44, 47, 67, 91, 115, 133, 135, 155

184

Index

Information systems, 14, 16, 21
22, 26, 34, 43, 45
53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 136 Informed choice discussion (ICD), 25, 71
77, 86 Informing, 13, 21, 32, 67
71, 73
75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 94, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149
150 Knowledge organization, 13
38, 51, 117 Literary studies, 8, 156
157, 160, 162
163, 166
167 Metadata, 20, 44, 47
48, 50
56, 58
64, 120 Midwifery care, 72, 76, 85 Organizational records, 115
117, 119, 121
123, 125, 127 Personal information management, 67
68, 78, 85 Public record office (PRO), 91, 94
111 Records, 20, 22
23, 25, 45, 47
48, 50
52, 54
58, 60
64, 76, 81, 91, 94
102, 104
110, 115
129, 138

Records management, 22
23, 115
117, 119
121, 126
129 Rhetorical genre theory, 1
2, 24, 67
68, 91, 134
136, 140, 158, 161 Social action, 1
4, 6, 9, 16
18, 21
26, 28
31, 38, 44, 46, 48, 68, 85, 93, 137, 156, 161, 171 Standards, 13
14, 44, 48, 50, 52
55, 57, 60
61, 65, 77, 85, 93, 105, 120, 122, 127, 173 Tools, 14
15, 18, 25, 29
33, 35
36, 38, 46
47, 49, 60, 63, 65, 70
71, 78, 81, 85, 92, 115, 117
118, 121, 123, 126, 128 Typification, 5, 22, 27
29, 37, 69, 79 Users, 1, 4
5, 17, 19, 23, 29
30, 33
34, 37, 44, 47
48, 51
55, 60, 63
64, 91, 93
94, 106
108, 110
111, 115, 118, 123, 136, 140, 161, 173 Utterance, 124, 155
159, 161, 163
169, 171
173