The rhetoric and ideology of genre : strategies for stability and change 9781572733831, 1572733837, 9781572733848, 1572733845, 2001039952

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The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre Strategies for Stability and Change

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RESEARCH AND TEACHING IN RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION Michael M. Williamson and David L. Jolliffe, series editors

New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing About and In Electronic Environments

John F. Barber and Dene Grigar (eds.) The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change

Richard Coe,Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko (eds.) forthcoming Black Letters: An Ethnography of a Beginning Legal Writing Course

Randolph Cauthen Marbles, Cotton Balls, and Quantum Wells: Style as Invention in the Pursuit of Knowledge

Heather Graves Listening to Learn: Basic Writers and Basic Writing in the Contemporary Academy

Susanmarie Harrington and Linda Ader-Kassner Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century

Brian Huot, Beth Stroble, and Charles Bazerman (eds.) Identities Across Text

George H. Jensen Against the Grain: Essays in Honor of Maxine Hairston

Michael Keene,Mary Trachel, and Ralph Voss (eds.) The Future of Narrative Discourse, Literacy, and Technology

Gian S. Pagnucci and Nick Mauriello (eds.) Tech Culture: Internet Constructions of Literacy and Identity

Gian S. Pagnucci and Nick Mauriello (eds.) Unexpected Voices

John Rouse and Ed Katz Directed Self-Placement: Principles and Practices

Dan Royer and Roger Gilles (eds.) Who Can Afford Critical Consciousness

David Seitz Principles and Practices: New Discourses for Advanced Writers

Margaret M. Strain and James M.Boehnlein (eds.)

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The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre Strategies for Stability and Change edited by Richard Coe Simon Fraser University

Lorelei Lingard University of Toronto

Tatiana Teslenko University of British Columbia

HAMPTON PRESS, INC. CRESSKILL, NEW JERSEY

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Copyright © 2002 by Hampton Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without per­ mission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The rhetoric and ideology of genre : strategies for stability and change/ edited by Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, Tatiana Teslenko p. cm. —(Research and teaching in rhetoric and composition) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 1-57273-383-7 - ISBN 1-57273-384-5 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. English language—Rhetoric—Research. 3. Literary form—Study and teaching. 4. Literary form. I. Coe, Richard M. II. Lingard, Lorelei. III. Teslenko, Tatiana. IV. Series PE1404.R488 2001 808’.042’071—dc21

2001039952

cover design by Buddy Boy Design cover photo: © Tina Manley d o Mira

Hampton Press, Inc. 23 Broadway Cresskill, NJ 07626

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Contents

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Genre as Action, Strategy, and Differance: An Introduction Richard Coe, Lorelei Ungard, and Tatiana Teslenko THE SYMBOLIC ACTION OF GENRE

1 2

Genre and Identity: Citizenship in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Global Capitalism Charles Bazerman

13 39

Uptake Anne Freadman

UPTAKES ON PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSES

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Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and Ideology Anthony Pari

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Genre and Power: A Chronotopic Analysis Catherine F. Schryer

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Genre Systems: Chronos and Kairos in Communicative Interaction JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski

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Fuzzy Genres and Community Identities: The Case of Architecture Students* Sketchbooks Peter Medway ,v 1 ^ Digitized

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Learning Medical Talk: How the Apprenticeship Complicates Current Explicit/Tacit Debates in Genre Instruction Lorelei Lingard and Richard Haber, M.D.

155

Problems of Generalization/Genrelization: The Case of the Doctor-Patient Interview Judy Z Segal

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UPTAKES IN EDUCATION

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Meta-Genre Janet Giltrow

10 Assembling a Generic Subject

207

Gillian Fuller and Alison Lee 11

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The Kind-ness of Genre: An Activity Theory Analysis of High School Teachers' Perception of Genre in Portfolio Assessment Across the Curriculum David R. Russell From Little Things Big Things Grow: Ecogenesis in School Geography Jim Martin

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UPTAKES ON SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE

13 Disembodied Voices: The Problem of Context 275

and Form in Theories of Genre Peter Knapp

14 Genres: From Static, Closed, Extrinsic, Verbal Dyads 297

to Dynamic, Open, Intrinsic, Semiotic Triads Sigmund Ongstad

15 Ideology and Genre: Heteroglossia of Soviet Genre Theories

321

Tatiana Teslenko

16 The Exclusionary Potential of Genre: Margery Kempe’s 341

Transgressive Search for a Deniable Pulpit Nadeane Trowse

17 (En)Compassing Situations: Sex Advice on the Rhetoric of Genre

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Ryan Knighton Author Index

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Subject Index

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About the Authors

Charles Bazerman, Professor and Chair of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara has interests in the rhetoric of science and technology, writing across the curriculum, rhetorical theory, and the history of literacy. His most recent book, The Languages o f Edison’s Light, examines the rhetorical and representational work that made Edison’s incandescent light a social reality. Previous books include Shaping Written Knowledge, Constructing Experience, Textual Dynamics o f the Professions, and The Informed Writer. Richard M. Coe has taught rhetoric and writing, “American’’ studies, drama, humanities, literature, and literary criticism in Canada, China, and the United States. He has worked with teachers developing composition curricula and ped­ agogies for the schools and led workshops for various kinds of writers, includ­ ing union shop stewards. From his first significant academic publication, “Rhetoric 2001” (1974) to his current work on genre, Coe has focused on the rhetoric and ideology of form. Anne Freadman is Reader in French at the University of Queensland. Her research interests are general semiotics, Peirce, feminist and cultural theory, and she has pub­ lished widely on genre in all of these areas, including recently: “Feminist Literary Theory (A Question (or Two) About Genre)”, Paragraph, 19.1 (March 1996); “Reflexions on Genre and Gender The Case of La Princesse de Clfeves,” Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 16, 1997 (305-320); and “Models of Genre for Language Teaching,” South Central Review, 15/1,1998 (19-39). _ Digitized

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Gillian Fuller lectures in semiotics and writing for new media in the School of Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has also worked and published in the areas of museums, science education and multimedia. Her academic expertise crosses critical, feminist and postcolonial theory and linguistics. Her current research is concerned with notions of the miraculous and technology within contemporary colonialist practice. Following a long association with Simon Fraser University’s English Department and its Centre for Research in Academic Writing, Janet Giltrow is now a mem­ ber of the English Department at the University of British Columbia. She has published on literary and nonliterary stylistics, literary and nonliterary genres, and ideologies of language, among other topics, in journals in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. She has published Academic Writing (3rd ed., 2001) and an antholo­ gy of articles from the scholarly disciplines, Academic Reading (2nd ed., 2001). R ichard J . H aber, M.D., is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Vice Chief of the Medical Service at San Francisco General Hospital where he directs the medical student training pro­ grams in internal medicine. He has received numerous teaching awards includ­ ing the Distinguished Teaching Award of the UCSF Academic Senate, the Kaiser Award for Excellence in Teaching, Outstanding Teacher Awards from nine graduating classes of the medical school and the unique honor of having a teaching award named after him and of being its first recipient. Peter Knapp is Principal Research Officer: English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He was written many books on teaching and assessing writing and has written and directed several videos on teaching writ­ ing. His current research interests are: the role of the body in learning, Spinozistic theories of signification and meaning, and the “genre as process” model of assessing student writing. Ryan Knighton is a faculty member at Capilano College in North Vancouver, where he currently teaches academic composition, literature and other writings. He is also editor of The Capilano Review, a literary and visual arts journal of the contemporary and sometimes avant-garde. Anvil Press has published his first book of poetry, Swing in the Hollow. Knighton holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from Simon Fraser University. Alison Lee’s work with writing encompasses school and academic literacies, writing as research for postgraduate researchers, and critical and ethnographic understandings of writing as cultural production. She is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her publi­ cations include Gender, Literacy, Curriculum: Rewriting School Geography, Postgraduate Studies/Postgraduate Pedagogy (co-edited with Bill Green) and numerous articles and chapters. With Green and Marie Brennan she is currently writing The Rise o f the Professional Doctorate: Changing Doctoral Education in Australia.

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Lorelei Lingard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto and a researcher in the University of Toronto Faculty o f Medicine Centre for Research in Education at the University Health Network. Her research program investigates the nature of inter-professional communication in healthcare settings, particularly in terms of how healthcare genres are acquired and the ways in which such acquisition socializes novices into their professional roles. J.R . Martin is Professor in Linguistics (Personal Chair) at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality and critical discourse analy­ sis, focusing on English and Tagalog—with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics and social semiotics. Publications include English Text: System and Structure (Benjamins, 1992), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (with M.A.K. Halliday, Faliner, 1993), and Working with Functional Grammar (with C. Matthiessen and C. Painter, Arnold, 1997). Professor Martin was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999. Peter Medway teaches at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he is a Professor in the Schools of L inguistics and A pplied Language Studies and of Architecture. He has published widely in the fields of language in education, writing, design in education, arts education and linguistic and semiotic process­ es in architecture. Most recently, he was co-author of Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts (Dias, Freedman, Medway and Pari, 1999). Professor Sigmund Ongstad teaches Norwegian at Oslo University College. His doctoral thesis focuses on “Genre Positioning(s) and Task Ideologies.” He has (co-)edited books on differentiation, writing, educational research, and genre. He is a member of the publishing board for the National Association for the Teaching of Norwegian and leader for AILA’s scientific commission for Mother Tongue Education. Current research interests/projects include Didaktics and/as (Triadic-Semiotic) Communication, Wholeness in Teacher Education?, Genres and Discourses in the (Post-)modem, and (international) Studies o f Classroom Positioning(s). Wanda J. Orlikowski is the Eaton-Peabody Chair of Communication Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the Sloan School of Management. Her research interests focus on the dynamic interaction between organizations and information technology, including organizing structures, cultures, and work practices. In addition, she collaborates with JoAnne Yates in examining the organizational use and changc of communication genres within clcctronic media over time. Anthony Pare is Chair of the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University. He is co-author (with Dias, Freedman and Medway) of Digitized by

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Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts (Erlbaum, 1999) and Transitions: Writing in Academic and Workplace Settings (Hampton Press, 2000). David R. Russell is Professor of English at Iowa State University, where he teaches in the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. His book, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History examines the history of American writing instruction outside of composition courses. He has published widely on writing across the curriculum and genre theory. He co-edited a special issue of Mind, Culture, and Activity on writing research using activity theory and genre. C a th e rin e F. S ch ry er is an Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Professional Writing Program in the English Department at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She has a general interest in issues related to advanced literacies in the professions and a specific interest in genre theory and medical writing. She is currently conducting a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported study in the role of case presentations in medicine, optometry, social work and dentistry. Judy Z. Segal is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of British Columbia, where she specializes in rhetorical studies of health and medicine. Her essays appear in such journals as College Composition and Communication, Journal o f Medical Humanities, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Social Science and Medicine. She is currently co-editing, with Alan Richardson, a collection of essays, titled Scientific Ethos: Authorship, Authority, and Trust in the Sciences. She is Chair of the Science Studies Department as UBC. Tatiana Teslenko is a Lecturer in the English Department, University of British Columbia. She has extensive teaching experience in Eastern Europe and North America. Her major publications are in the areas of genre theory, translation the­ ory, and science fiction. Her current research interests are in cultural semiotics, postcolonial theory, and genre studies. She is now conducting research on issues of cultural imperialism in the North-American classroom culture. Nadeane Trowse is presently a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the English Department at the University of British Columbia. She continues to pur­ sue questions of the new rhetorical genre theory in the context of older litera­ tures. She continues to live at Finn Slough, an endangered ecologically sensitive area and to work in the writing centre of the University College of the Fraser Valley, while teaching Advocacy and Proposal writing there as well. JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, studies communication and information systems as they shape and are shaped by technologies, ideologies, and genres of communication over time, using both historical and rhetorical/social science methods. She col­ laborates with Wanda Orlikowski on studies of communication genres used in electronic media in contemporary organizations. Digitized by

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Genre as Action, Strategy, and Differance: An Introduction:

Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko With this book, we hope not only to advance radical reconceptions of genre and discourse, but also to enhance understandings of reading, writing, speak­ ing, and listening as socially situated and motivated activities. The various chapters offer theorists, researchers, and teachers critical methods and con­ ceptual frameworks for understanding the pragmatic and social aspects of dis­ course embodied by generic structures and processes. Most contributions to this book are based in pragmatic studies of particular discourses, among them the discourses of the internet, of student writing and “teacher talk” about that writing, of architecture, social work, medicine, engineering, literature, and sex-advice columns. Whatever its particulars, however, each chapter also challenges and advances our understanding of discursive genres, how they act, both socially and on individuals. As the practical disciplines devoted to discourse (among them, English composition, second language learning, and literacy studies) move beyond both formalism and individual psychology to understand writing, reading, and other discursive processes as social, the new genre theories have emerged as one of the stronger and most promising developments for com­ prehending the sociality of discourse while allowing discursive freedom and Original from Digitized

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Editors' Introduction

agency to individuals. Genre theories are also significant in a range of other disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites where discourse is studied, including anthropology, applied and sociolinguistics, speech communications, literary criticism, and cognitive science (and hence in cybernetic applications). Like other reconceptions of discourse that emerged in the late twenti­ eth century (see Ongstad, this volume), the new genre theories direct our attention to the sociality of discourse. However much an utterance or piece of writing may feel like purely individual expression, discourse is also social, situated and m otivated, constructed, constrained and sanctioned. Conventional forms of discourse recur because they respond functionally to recurring rhetorical exigencies set in cultural and material contexts. Where traditional literary conceptions of genre focused on textual form as such, the new genre theories focus on stable discursive forms as socially standard strategies for responding to recurring situations. The various chapters also relate rhetorical conceptions of genre to discourse theories, Soviet genre theo­ ry, activity theory, speech-act theory, the New Rhetoric, social constructivism, poststructuralism, and other attempts to theorize what discourse does. Genres comprise “configurations of semantic resources that mem­ bers of the culture associate with a situation type (Halliday, 1978, p. I ll) ; they are “structuring devices for realising meaning in specific contexts” (Green in Reid, n.d., p. 86); they can “determine the roles taken up by the participants, and hence the kinds of texts they are required to construct” (Christie, 1985, p. 16). Although “genres are subject to free creative reformu­ lation . . . , to use a genre freely and creatively is not the same as to create a genre from the beginning” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 80). Like other aspects of dis­ course community, genres are neither value-free nor neutral and often imply hierarchical social relationships. The new genre theories enable researchers and teachers to focus on authentic discourse, rhetorically and socially situated, and on differance They save us from false dichotomies, for example, between thought and lan­ guage, reality and representation, as well as from false overgeneralizations about “good writing” and “effective communication.” They enable us to improve our understanding both of the action of genres themselves and of the politics underlying apparently innocuous conventional discourse. The new rhetoric of genre is proving particularly useful for research and teaching relat­ ed to academic writing, workplace writing, writing in the disciplines and pro­ fessions, ESL, ethnography, linguistic pragmatics, and cybernetic expert sys­ tems among other areas. 1Derrida, concerned with dichotomies, puns difference/deferral. We here extend the pun to difference/deference, which highlights a more social aspect o f hierarchy. Like Plato and D errida, we include formal speech as a kind o f w riting (because it is planned and can be revised before presentation). ^ Digitized

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Although they assuredly have earlier roots, the new genre theories arose during the 1980s from practical attempts of educators and researchers to understand writing as social. Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional linguis­ tics (1978) became the intellectual basis of the “Sydney school” of genre theo­ rists, formed in opposition to an emphasis on “creative” (a.k.a., “expression­ ist”) process approach in Australian elementary schools. In North America, the intellectual starting point was provided by the New Rhetoric, as articulated by Carolyn Miller (1984) and, before her, Campbell and Jamieson (1978), as well as by Mikhail Bakhtin when his work finally became readily available in English (1983, 1984). Practically, it was rooted in concerns with “writing in the disciplines” and workplace writing. A strong practical motive in each case was a desire to provide access to power and status for disadvantaged students. Early studies in the rhetoric of genre (how genres persuade) and the new rhetoric of genre (how genres shape both individuals and communities) were motivated by concerns about social discrimination and exclusion. Under meritocracy, lack of proficiency in particular genres is often used to justify excluding certain people from positions of influence, power, and status—and also to convince them to blame themselves (i.e., their lack of literate profi­ ciency) for that exclusion. Helping people learn the “genres of power” was seen as a way to help people overcome such discrimination and gain access and influence. Early discussions of what we now call the new rhetoric of genre began in Australia and North America with explicit pragmatic purpos­ es: to help underprepared students succeed in school, to improve the teaching of composition, ESL, and workplace writing, to enable critical analysis of public discourse. Perhaps predictably, this led to discussions of ideology, for genres strategically embody attitudes, values, and ways of doing. Do students, as they acquire genres of the dominant culture, tend to internalize that culture’s attitudes, values, and ways of doing? Do they typically master those genres, or are they mastered by them? What attitudes, values, and ways of doing are implicit in a “five-paragraph essay” (or the French equivalent, the disserta­ tion, or the Chinese “eight-legged” essay)? What attitudes, values, and ways of doing are implicit in a psychology research report, in a job application let­ ter, in a social worker’s case report, or, for that matter, in a classical Greek tragedy? How easy is it to acquire proficiency in such genres without accept­ ing the attitudes, values, and ways of doing each embodies? Such questions— as well as questions about the extent to which acquiring the dominant genres actually leads to power, and status (e.g., Luke, 1996)—were prominent in dis­ cussions of genre during the mid-1990s. Donald Murray asserted that a working writer’s primary question about a draft is, “Does it work?” Genre theorists and researchers ask also, “What does it do?” and “For whom does it work?” Genres survive because they work for someone (however egregiously or oppressively for othersV Digitized by

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They may “work” to help individuals participate effectively in their commu­ nities, to help communities achieve consensual goals. Or they may be “dysfunctionally functional,” working to advantage a dominant faction. Perhaps they “work” to enhance an insurance corporation’s profits while working against the interests of its customers (see Schryer, this volume); perhaps they “work” to keep women “in their place” (see Trowse, this volume) or to impose the dominant culture on aboriginal people (see Pare, this volume). Asking what genres do led genre theorists and researchers, especially in the last few years of the past century, to issues of identity and subjectivity. Particular genres require writers and speakers not only to “dance" particular attitudes and values, but also to adopt particular rhetorical stances, to write or speak from particular subject positions. To what extent and for how long, especially in a relatively coercive situation like a schoolroom or workplace, can people write from a particular subject position without identifying them­ selves with that position and all it entails? To what extent can people learn the formal and strategic differences that constitute genres without accepting the social deferences they embody and thus the social hierarchies in which those genres participate? As genre theory is applied to research sites across professional, acad­ emic, and other settings, its foundational premises are being problematized and challenged.2 Research on the formal and situated similarities that consti­ tute genres has been advanced and new emphases established by the need to account for flexibility, adaptiveness, innovation, and the evolution of genres. New or revitalized concepts, such as “uptake” (Freadman, this volume), “genre system” (Bazerman, Russell, this volume), and “meta-genre” (Giltrow, this volume) and new theoretical alliances, for example, with activity theory, are refocusing researchers’ attention in fruitful new directions. Genre theory is, moreover, developing the political consciousness called for by Freedman and Medway (1994). Applications of the new genre theory have recently focused on the situated social functions of typical discourse structures. This collection expands and enhances that development by adding a distinctive focus on the rhetorical nature, social functions, and ideological consequences of genre. 2In practice, early genre theorists, especially when looking from the perspective o f individual speakers or writers (in particular, o f “nontraditional” students and novices), tended to accept the genre as given, as a situation/context to which individuals gener­ ally must adapt if they want to be accepted as “insiders” (i.e., become members o f the discourse community) and to gain access to power, status, etc. More recently, genre theorists have emphasized the range of free play and flexibility within genres, ceremo­ nials (jurisdictions), and genre systems. In this regard, it has become commonplace to cite Bakhtin, for instance, on what it means to master a genre. In one sense, this shift parallels the shift from structuralism to poststructualism. that is, it is less determinis­ tic, more diachronic, and allows more potential freedom within the system. Digitized by

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Contemporary analysis of genres as social strategies for responding to types of situations provides a shared point of origin from which contributors reveal the potential of genres to discipline, erase, and elide some voices while serv­ ing the dominant political interests within communities of discourse. Although there has long been a range of approaches, earlier studies tended to focus on form and situation; more recent work seems to put more emphasis on rhetorical strategy (i.e., the functional/motivated relation between form and situation). Earlier research studies provided richly descriptiv e accounts o f situated discursive form in w hich treatm ent of function/use/effect tended toward anthropological description, in part because many studies were oriented by the practical task of helping apprentice writers gain access to existing communities of discourse. As Luke cautions (in Freedman and Medway, 1994), however, such accounts tend to deflect critical analysis of the situated, strategic, social, political, and hence ideological rela­ tions reinforced by standard forms of discourse. A second effect of the descriptive tendency is a deemphasis of social tensions that fracture discourse communities, tensions that are reinscribed by the attitudes, values, methods, and subject positions that generic structures construct for their users. Like fault lines, however, these tensions are the basis for a community’s organic, evolving dynamism; they also have material implications for the distribution of power and status within particular commu­ nities. As our title suggests, many chapters in this volume, although based on careful description, also focus on issues of ideology and identity. Intriguingly, both systemic-functional linguistics and the New Rhetoric were powerfully influenced by Bronislaw Malinowski’s concept of language as symbolic action. Kenneth Burke, who epitomizes the New Rhetoric, said that his life’s work can be understood as a spinning out of the implications of Malinowski’s phrase. Analyses of what discourse does is the hallmark of New Rhetorical inquiry. Indeed, all varieties of the new genre theories seem to require a conception of language as action. The various authors whose work appears in this volume find such conceptions in the New Rhetoric, speech-act theory, systemic-functional linguistics, Russian activity theory, Soviet genre theory, and social process theories of composition as well as in various social constructivist and poststructuralist thinkers. What seems clearly necessary is a shift of emphasis from language as representa­ tion (i.e., what words say) to discourse as action (i.e., what words do). The significance of what an utterance or text says should be understood in relation to what it does. Genres may be passed to new users conveniently as formal structures; diachronically, however, those structures embody social attitudes, motives, and actions with political and cultural implications. Living amidst the competition and individualist ideology of capital­ ism, one can easily forget that human society is fundamentally based on coop­ eration, on our acting together. Perhaps the most basic and rhetorical function _ Digitized

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of discourse is to induce and facilitate that cooperation. For all our differ­ ences, our ability to act together is founded on shared perspectives, attitudes, values, and ways of doing, on individual identification with community. The members of particular human communities and cultures are able to act togeth­ er because they are able to shape discourse in socially expected and institu­ tionally sanctioned ways. Whether fulfilled or subverted, such expectations constitute the fabric of social situations, embody the “rules of the game" (Freadman in Reid, n.d., rpt. with some modifications in Freedman and Medway, 1994; Wilden, 1987). Ordinarily this allows individuals who under­ stand the genre to predict, anticipate, respond to, and negotiate the “moves" of other participants. Genres embody situational expectations and ranges of potential strategic responses. Thus a full description of a genre requires atten­ tion to how the form is rhetorical, to how it embodies the type of recurring sit­ uation that evokes it, and how it provides a strategic response to that situation. This central notion of discourse as strategic response to situation is indebted not only to Burke, but also to Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the “dialogism” and “addressivity” of the utterance. Speech-act theory is brought into play by Freadman, whose game metaphor further emphases the social nature of generic discourse. Generic discourse, she asserts, requires a mini­ mum of two genres and two “players” who anticipate and “uptake” one another’s moves. Each move, moreover, embodies various desires, attempts to induce a set of desired uptakes. Although genre users may understand gen­ res only tacitly, without conscious awareness of how the conventional forms they employ work strategically, genres arise and evolve interactively with the exigencies of the situations and contexts in which they are used. Genres in this sense are important constituents of discourse community. For all their commonalities, moreover, 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. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism helps genre theorists and researchers map the tension between the dynamic push and pull of centripetal and centrifugal forces in discourse (see Schryer, this volume). Attention to the variety and conflict that bubbles beneath the surface of shared conventions can provide important insights into how discourse evolves and how genres are ideological. Thus Coe and Freedman (1998) characterize a crucial function of genre research as asking “critical, metarhetorical questions” such as: • What sorts of communication does the genre encourage, what sorts does it constrain against? • Who can—and who cannot— use this genre? Does it empower some people while silencing others? • Are its effects dysfunctional beyond their immediate context? _ TDigitized by V ^ O O g i C

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• What values and beliefs are instantiated within this set of prac­ tices? • What are the political and ethical implications of the rhetorical sit­ uation constructed, persona embodied [cf., subject positioning], audience invoked and context of situation assumed by a particular genre? From a “cultural studies” perspective, one can turn this analysis on its head, take the genre not as an object of study, but rather as a signifier about the community that uses it. One may then ask what the genre signifies about the discourse community that uses it? And a number of chapters in this volume do so (e.g., Freadman, Trowse, Knighton). This book begins with contributions from Charles Bazerman and Anne Freadman. Bazerman applies an activity-oriented genre analysis to examine how emerging political activity on the World Wide Web draws on and revises traditional forms of literate political participation and changes the opportunities for citizenship. The emergence of politics on the internet, Bazerman asserts, transforms prior forms of literate political participation, intensifying some ways of political being at the same time as creating new possibilities. He argues that the character of the activity space shapes the rhetorical actions and the forms of personal development that are likely to take place here. He asserts that genre shapes not only people’s discourse, but also their identities, that the character of local activity space has extremely important impact not only on what happens, what we think and learn, and what social consequences emerge, but also on who we become. For Freadman, genre theory enables critical description of cultural practices. Thus the habits of cultural studies and literary history lead her to think of genre as a diachronic phenomenon, a practice in history. Using a par­ ticularly intriguing Australian case of capital punishment, Freadman develops her theory of uptake, making the case that important issues of genre arise at the point of interaction between texts. Two texts, she asserts, may be a pair, constituting a single genre, or they may arise in a ceremonial sequence of dif­ ferent genres. In the latter case the crossing of generic boundaries, or their closing may involve significant politics. According to Freadman, genre is governed by a ceremonial sequence in a formalized space and time, enacted by fit persons to effect a specified outcome. Freadman suggests that perhaps the most important thing about our knowledge of genres is our knowledge of the differences between genres, as there is significant politics involved in both the crossing of generic boundaries, and in their closing. Freadman shares Peirce’s view that all semiosis is effected by translation in its intralingual, as well as interlingual sense, because without translation as the mediation of a boundary, it is not possible to account for the uptake of speech events in action. Digitized by

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The next group of chapters engage professional discourses in order to engage critical aspects of genre theory. The particular cases—social work, business, engineering, architecture, and medicine—are not only intrinsically intriguing, they also take up crucial issues of genre, including the relation­ ships among genre, ideology, and identity. Anthony Pare’s narratives of Inuit social workers’ conflicts with standard social work genres explicitly embody such conflicts of ideology and identity. Interweaving ideas from Giddens, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Lempke, Catherine Schryer discusses insurance com­ pany correspondence in order to investigate what it means for us to “genre” and be “genred”; she extends Bourdieu’s notion of strategy, asserting that genres are “constellations of strategies.” Building on Bazerman’s concept of genre systems, JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski discuss an engineering team’s use of a new electronic communication medium, arguing that chronos and kairos shape and are shaped by interaction within groups and communi­ ties. Peter Medway reports that the architecture students’ sketchbooks he studied marshalled various generic resources to serve various purposes and fulfill various exigencies. Utterances and texts, he asserts, often do not oper­ ate in a structuralist space of particular, mutually exclusive genres; often they are situated in reference to multiple genres from which they adopt resources. Drawing on Lingard’s case study of how medical students learn to present patient cases during their clinical training, Lorelei Lingard and Richard Haber revisit the issue of tacit/explicit learning, suggesting that tacit learning of pro­ fessional genres may be ideologically motivated (and pedagogically unsound) despite occurring in “authentic” contexts. Using the example of the physi­ cian-patient interview, Judy Segal highlights the dangers of what she calls “genrealization”—a generalizing move that is, she says, “a rationale for the rehearsal of the typical in discourse.” She argues that the very interest in simi­ larity that makes genre study possible also makes difference harder to see; she cautions genre theorists not to participate in the elision of difference that is contained even in such locutions as “the doctor-patient interview.” The third group of chapters focuses on schooling. Janet Giltrow introduces the concept of metagenre, by which she means the variety of metamessages that tell us how to use genres appropriately. Gillian Fuller and Alison Lee use their analysis of the interaction between a particular student and instructor to highlight issues of identity, demonstrating some of the com­ plexities by which a generic subject is constructed. Focusing on the impera­ tives and operations of assessment, they direct our attention toward questions of the effects of writing upon writers, effects that should be understood in terms of pedagogic power/desire and the notion of “becoming.” David Russell looks at a group of secondary school teachers from different disci­ plines who, as part of the work of assessing student portfolios, must decide which student texts meet both local and state-wide criteria for a “good” text; he docs so in order to demonstrate both the practical applicability of genre Digitized by

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and activity theory and the usefulness of understanding a text in relation to the various genre systems in which it participates. Using a Hallidayan model of genre to analyze the impact of “green” politics on Australian school geog­ raphy, James Martin explores the “renovation,” “hybridization,” and “multi­ modality” of the geography report, directing attention to the rhetorical capaci­ ty of discourse to substitute for (rather than influence) action, to the possibili­ ty that real change in a sociopolitical order may be deflected by infusing tra­ ditional genres with (mere) attitude. The closing section of this book begins with three theoretical studies and ends with two intriguingly concrete applications. Offering a critique of the reductively hierarchical structures built into both rhetorical and systemicfunctional models of genre, Peter Knapp engages recent theoretical discus­ sions of desire and the body in order to assert that a pedagogy of literacy should be informed by a Spinozan understanding of the corporeal nature of language, its sociability, the way it is used to interact. Arguing that semiotics rather than verbal language should be the point of departure and using the tri­ adic “auto-bio-graphy” as an example, Sigmund Ongstad draws on a range of discourse theories in order to assert a movement toward understanding genres as embodying potential for uttering and as dynamic reciprocities of form, content, and use. Tatiana Teslenko discusses three crucial transitional periods in the development of Soviet theories of genre—the post-revolutionary debates of the Formalists and the Bakhtin circle, the “politically correct” paradoxes of the post-Stalinist stagnation period, and the multilevel genre models that accompanied Gorbachev’s reconstruction—showing how genre theorists themselves may, often without conscious intention or even aware­ ness, create theories responsive to shifts in their political and ideological con­ texts. Using the case of Margery Kempe, who faced the death penalty for unauthorized preaching, Nadeane Trowse explores the social action of an authoritative genre that excludes particular users, thus making it difficult for them to speak of matters normally addressed in that genre. She discusses the complex negotiations by which Kempe attempted to achieve her rhetorical ends despite being explicitly excluded from using the genre that seemed best suited to them. Starting from Burke’s assertion that we should think of liter­ ary and critical works as action both magical and substantive, and as adopting strategies for encompassing situation, Ryan Knighton uses an analysis of newspaper sex-advice columns to assert the grammatical, community-mak­ ing, and regenerative functions of generic encompassment.

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REFERENCES Bakhtin, M.M. (1983). The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist, Ed., Ca. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). The problem of speech genres. In Speech genres and other essays (pp. 60-102). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell, K.K., & Jamieson, K.H. (Eds.). (1978). Form and genre: Shaping rhetorical action. Falls C hurch, VA: Speech C om m unication Association. Coe, R., & Freedman, A. (1998). Generative rhetoric. In M. Kennedy (Ed.), Theorizing composition (pp. 136-147). Westport, CT: Greenwood, C hristie, F. (1985). Language education. Victoria, A ustralia: Deakin University Press. Freedman, A., & Medway, P. (Eds.). (1994). Genre and the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Luke, A. (1996). Genres of power? Literacy education and the production of capital. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in society. London: Longman. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal o f Speech, 70, 151-167. Reid, I. (Ed.), (n.d.). The place o f genre in learning: Current debates. N.p.: Deakin University (Centre for Studies in Literary Education). Wilden, A. (1987). The rules are no game. London: Routledge.

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1 Genre and Identity: Citizenship in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Global Capitalism Charles Bazerman University of California-Santa Barbara

One o f the more popular academ ic slogans o f this h alf century is Wittgenstein’s characterization of language-in-use as a form of life.1 Genre theory takes this slogan seriously. In perceiving an utterance as being of a cer­ tain kind or genre, we become caught up in a form of life, joining speakers and hearers, writers and readers, in particular relations of a familiar and intel­ ligible sort. As participants orient towards this communicative social space they take on the mood, attitude, and actional possibilities of that place—they go that place to do the kinds of things you do there, think the kinds of thoughts you think there, feel the kind of way you feel there, satisfy what you can satisfy there, be the kind of person you can become there (Bazerman, 1997,1998). It is like going to a dining room, or a dance hall, or a seminar, or church. You know what you are getting yourself into and what range of rela­ tions and objects will likely be realized there. You adopt a frame of mind, set your hopes, plan accordingly, and begin acting with that orientation. JSee, for example, Wittgenstein (1953): “Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking o f language is part o f an activity, or a form of life” (p. 11; emphasis in original). ^ ,xT Digitized by V ^ O O g i C

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You also know that if you hang around a certain place long enough you will become the kind of person who hangs around that kind of place— you know your way around the place, how to act there, what to say there, who fits or misfits, and who is a newcomer. The places you habituate will develop those parts of you that are most related to and oriented towards the activities of that space. As our grandmothers warned, if you hang around the race track long enough, you become one of those race track characters. When you go to army training, you can be all you want to be, but only if what you want to be is those kinds of things you can become in the army. If what you want to be is a piano soloist, you would be better off going to a music conser­ vatory. It is the same with hanging around genres of writing. If you want to be a more knowledgeable cook or you want to have more elaborate fantasies about food, then you repeatedly read cookbooks. If you want to be a mathe­ matician, you spend more than a few minutes with the math textbooks and you gradually work your way into the professional literature. If you want to exercise and develop some political passions and consciousness, you keep up with the magazines of political fact and opinion. But going to the place is only the first step, for once you are there you need access and encouragement to engage with particular people in par­ ticular roles, use particular resources, and take part in particular experiences and activities. When you start writing in those genres you begin thinking in actively productive ways that result in the utterances that belong in that form of life and you take on all the feelings, hopes, uncertainties, and anxieties about becoming a visible presence in that world and participating in the avail­ able activities. You develop and become committed to the identity you are carving out within that domain. Further, the particular ranges of feelings, impulses, and stances that you adopt in orienting to that world develop in interaction with the people and activities within that world. In these ways genre shapes intentions, motives, expectations, attention, perception, affect, and interpretive frame. It brings to bear in the local moment more generally available ideas, knowledge, institutions, and structures that we recognize as germane to the activity of the genre.

Becoming an Income Taxpayer So, once a year in filling out our income tax forms we become taxpayers, with all our concomitant (though individually varying) beliefs about the responsibilities of citizenship and honesty and economic interest. We bring our emotions and anxieties about our current financial situation, our financial life of the past year, our willingness to pay money to the government, and our being called to account for our self-interested reporting of our finances. In filling out the form, we are walked through an ontological universe in which Digitized by

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we come to represent in locally constrained and legally systematic terms the transactions of the past year and are made accountable for reporting them. For those several hours in filling out the forms we act as citizen taxpayers with all that implies, as we collaborate with our accountant and the Internal Revenue Service to produce the communal document that defines our tax obligation and our identity as taxpayers.2 We are, however, more than temporarily implicated in the linked sys­ tems of taxation and the economy. We fill out tax forms every year, and every week we receive our paycheck with amounts accounted and deducted that will be aggregated on the annual forms. Perhaps daily we save our receipts, make purchase decisions, or organize our income with an eye toward tax con­ sequences. We live our economic life, then, in a continuing taxpayer relation­ ship to the government—a fact that provides no end of irritation to some peo­ ple. This taxpayer identity also heightens our own awareness of our economic life in a way different than our monthly statements from our bank or broker or credit card company, for the tax system causes us to aggregate and summarize our income in ways that place us within demographic class categories, as reported in the census and the daily press.

Identity Development Within Genred Activity Systems Thus genres and the activity systems they are part of provide the forms of life within which we make our lives (Bazerman, 1995). This is as true of our sys­ tems of work, creativity, community, leisure, and intimacy as it is of our sys­ tems of tax obligation—each mediated through language forms along with whatever other embodied and material aspects there are to the interactions. Even the biological fundamentals of sex and eating are now surrounded by and enacted through complexes not only of words but of written texts of knowledge, advice, facilitation, commerce. These organized complexes of communications shape our ongoing relationships and identities, and within these complexes we change and develop through our sequences of mediated participation. Another better studied example of the ways in which we develop and form identities through participation in systems of genres within ordered activity systems is in higher education. The writing in the disciplines litera­ ture has provided extensive evidence that educational development occurs and professional identities emerge within systems of genres and activities (Russell, 1997a, 1997b). Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman’s (1991) study describes a graduate student struggling in a series of seminar papers over sev­ eral terms to locate his voice within the professional intertextual forms, with­ 2See Bazerman (2000a) for a related discussion o f the ontology and operations o f tax forms. ^ Digitized

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in which he gradually develops a professional identity. For him this identity never stabilizes but stays in tension through the period of the study, and long after. Sim ilarly, we see the developm ent o f professional identity in Blakeslee’s (1997) account of a graduate student in physics mentored by a professor through collaboration in writing scientific papers. The issue is made more poignant by the interdisciplinary ambitions of the physicists who seek to have applications of their work to neurobiology and pharmacology. We see it in Prior’s (1999) accounts of graduate students developing their theses and professional identities within evolving fields, constantly remade by their actions and the actions of classmates, professors, and others they engage with. The students reinterpret, hybridize, and improvise upon and within the forms of expression and contribution expected of them, as they move through seminar papers and into dissertations. We see in the undergraduate architec­ ture students’ notebooks reported on by Medway (this volume), a self-cre­ ation and identification of aesthetic commitments and imagination. Attention to the role of specific written genres of inquiry in the development of stu­ dents’ thought, commitments, and identity, has been a major theme in compo­ sition pedagogy at least since Theodore Baird’s introduction of assignment sequences at Amherst in the 1930s (Vamum, 19%). And when students grad­ uate and get to the workplace, workplace mentors use controlled assignment of work-related genres as ways of developing the new worker’s professional competence, confidence, and identity (Dias et al., 1999). In another kind of example, my own recent study (Bazerman, 1999) examines how Thomas Edison developed his own career as a public inventor and industrialist by sequentially producing—along with his electrical and other inventions—texts and other statements for various genres and activity systems. To gain support and acceptance for his emergent technologies he, with the help of agents and employees, had to file patent applications in the historically emerged forms of the patenting system, had to defend these patents through the genres of the courts, had to build alliances with financiers, had to become a good interviewee to gain the support of the press, and had to build a professional name by writing for the industrial and techni­ cal press. Through his success in all these genres Edison built his complex identity as the man who could make technological change and industrial growth happen, thereby becoming the great American folk hero for almost a century. These accomplishments and celebrity were for the most part accom­ plished within the ordinary genres of his time—he just coordinated them all extraordinarily well. It was the inventions that were extraordinarily notewor­ thy and that is the part of his work which is most remembered.

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The Transformation of the Public Rhetorical Field All these examples demonstrate the interplay between the existing social worlds writers recognize and orient toward, and the individualized presences and contributions each writer makes through participation in the shared dis­ cursive space of the genres. Identities and forms of life get built within the evolving social spaces identified by recognizable communicative acts. In each of these examples, each person through genred communication learns more of his or her personal possibilities, develops communicative skills, and learns more of the world he or she is communicating with. Each learns to par­ ticipate successfully and make individual contributions within the relevant discursive spaces. In a few of the cases we may say that the activity systems were significantly altered by their participation. Edison’s ability to collabo­ rate in the construction of celebrity brought technology more to the heroic center of cultural representation, thereby creating new ideals for youths, new models for industrial growth, and new motifs for consumerism (Wachhorst, 1984). Edison on occasion even saw new possibilities for existing commu­ nicative forms, thereby changing the typified understanding and activities mediated by that form. He saw in the individual inventor’s notebook a means for coordinating the work of the several workers in his industrial laboratory at Menlo Park. As a young newsboy he understood the nexus of telegraphy, newspapers, and railroad by telegraphing the headlines of the evening paper to be posted at the train stations, so he could sell papers during the twominute train stops. He understood how the forms of representation surround­ ing gas lighting could be mobilized to make intelligible an entirely new tech­ nology of central power. But the next example suggests an even greater transformative poten­ tial. As people develop understanding of the communicative world, their liter­ ate practices may change to fit their deepened vision of what writing accom­ plishes and how. These changed practices may then influence others to per­ ceive and act in the communicative world in new ways. Adam Smith began his career as a university lecturer of rhetoric at a time when new ideas of psy­ chology and egalitarianism were bringing traditional forms of authority, hier­ archy, and social trust into question. Continuing in the available genres of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish-British intellectual life, he worked through issues of knowledge, social order, communication, and his own role as a philosophic innovator (Bazerman, 1993). He thereby reconfigured his percep­ tion of the communicative landscape and saw new potentials for social rela­ tions and action through transformation of the available communicative forms. Building on his understanding of persuasion and interpersonal mutu­ ality achieved through communicative acts, in the later part of his career he Digitized by

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focused on issues of social order by considering political economy along with personal and social self-regulation. In particular, he came to a novel under­ standing of the genre of political economy, which gave great persuasive force to his final contribution of An Inquiry into the Wealth o f Nations. In advanc­ ing his scheme for improving political economy, he eventually got others to see this scheme embedded a mechanism for fundamental communication in the public sphere to produce social order. Even more, the terms of the scheme proposed became so accepted as a kind of natural science that the book came to be seen as one of the founding documents of the new science of economics.3 This after-the-fact reframing of the genre of the book leads to an entirely different reading of the text—the reading modern economists give it, as making certain propositions about eco­ nomic theory. In this modem reading, descriptive passages become reformu­ lated in mathematical terms as newly discovered laws of the marketplace, although Smith never once uses an equation. Although Smith recognizes that much if not most of life occurs out­ side the marketplace, and that people act idiosyncratically and irrationally, yet he convinces people to think of themselves and act as homo economicus, and therefore we can communicate through the common currency of the market­ place. The marketplace creates the basis of an egalitarian, though reduced, democratic social order that admits diversity of desire and interest (though all that desire is channeled into economic desire for its satisfaction). There are limits and problems to his economic game (many of which Smith himself rec­ ognized), but his text has been so forceful that it becomes hard for economics to question those assumptions and the economic reasoning that flows from them (despite regular critiques from Karl Marx through Deirdre McCloskey [1986]). Even more, it has become hard for government officials, politicians, journalists, and ordinary people in their everyday lives to resist marketplace economics as the most compelling mechanism for establishing value. The success of the marketplace is now widely seen as what makes all other aspects of life possible, and therefore subsidiary to the marketplace. Interestingly, from the point of view of genre, the heart of Smith’s proposal is that we locate all of our impulse as public people into the market­ place, where exchange is through the typifications of economic value. Adopting the associationist psychology of his contemporary and friend David ^Smith’s own views of the psychosocial construction o f science appears in his history of astronomy, which argues that the appearance o f truth is only a persuasive appeal to the psychological need for perceiving order within the chaos o f experience. He ends with an adm iration o f Newton, who gives so com pelling an account o f heavenly motions that we feel we are in the presence o f an inalterable natural truth, even though he believes there is no such thing. Sm ith’s comment on Newton provides an interest­ ing gloss on his own ambitions and accomplishments in his later work, and on the atti­ tude with which he is now treated (Smith, 1980). Digitized by

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Hume, Smith saw an incommensurable variety of human desire and percep­ tion, arising from the individuality of sensation, experience, and associations. By channeling all our desires and impulse into the economic terms of the marketplace, however, he argued, we can meet and negotiate a social order through our setting of prices for those things that would satisfy desire, no matter how idiosyncratic. Further, we become committed to operating in the market to gain means to pursue those desires. Thus we can meet over money, no matter what we want the money for. Moreover, once in this marketplace, we can typify each other’s motives and actions as those of rational self-interested actors—the notorious homo ecortomicus. This greatly simplifies the problem of sympathetic understanding of the other and, reflexively, our own understanding of how others might see us and the decorum for acting in this realm. The trading genres of the marketplace and its primary symbol draw us into a narrowed phenomenological world, with limited motive, affect, ideolo­ gy, role, expressive intent, expressive means, and so on (see Smith, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1986). The market does provide a compelling form of life, making it hard to maintain motives outside the market, for all outside the market is in a private realm not reinforced by the great social mechanism of the economy. National boundaries and sen tim en ts, communal loyalties, international strife, familial and tribal loyalty, religion, art, philosophy, landscape, natural resources, other species—all eventually become dependent upon and weaker than the econo­ my and are under pressure to conform to its dictates. Or at least that appears to be the case at the end of the second millennium. In some instances we can clearly applaud the results—for example, war, although at one time thought to be beneficial to some industries and national economic interests, now is seen as clearly destructive of economic resources and disruptive of an orderly environment for doing business. On the other hand, it becomes increasingly difficult to assert policy initiatives that have uncertain or even demonstrably negative economic impacts. Thus welfare is measured more by the effects on the economy than by the value of public compassion. Only when compassion serves economic development is it likely to affect policy.

Typifications and the Construction of the Life World Usual characterizations of the marketplace suggest that all information neces­ sary for rational decision making becomes expressed in the markets, so that homo economicus truly does not need to know anything but economics. The phenomenological philosopher Alfred Schutz (1967), trained in Vienna Circle economics, however, noted that for two business people to negotiate a deal they need to be able to judge each other’s intent, character, reliability, and interests, which are not evident simply in the numbers of the marketplace. He Digitized by

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concluded that what we needed to understand was how people understood, constructed, and operated within the lifeworlds that they shared with the peo­ ple around them (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). This led Schutz to consider the typifications by which we structure the lifeworld. He argued that the ideal types that Max Weber deployed as analytical sociological tools were invoked practically in daily life. We all attribute structure and orderliness to the lifeworld, through our deployment of typifications that we more or less share with those around us. Like Smith, Schutz recognized the need for orderliness for humans to operate. Like Smith, he saw this orderliness as a psychological phenomenon, but he also saw that orderliness as socially shared. Schutz’s individually projected but socially shared typifications forming the orderli­ ness of daily life stand behind numerous forms of contemporary sociology, including social constructionism (Berger & Luckmann, 1967), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984), conversational analysis (Sacks, 1995), and structurationism (Bourdieu, 1991, 1993; Giddens, 1984). As we understand the behaviors of others through typifications, we also develop the terms by which to observe and direct our own behavior and participation, for we believe we are acting in that same typical world as oth­ ers. Pragmatists such as John Dewey (1947) and George Herbert Mead (1934) argued that the need to gain some sense of how others will perceive us and our actions, so that we can regulate and direct our actions, motivates our sense of ourselves. We build that sense of self and identity from our percep­ tion of how others are perceiving us. These insights became the core of sym­ bolic interactionist sociology; through the theories of reference groups and roles, they also became central to Merton’s structural-functional sociology (Merton, 1968). At a more micro level these insights have much to do with Goffman’s forms of self-presentation, which are attuned both to the ways in which the projected self would be perceived within circumstances, and to the ways in which behavior projects or negotiates the footing or frames by which that behavior is to be interpreted (Goffman, 1981).

The Forming of Citizens Because citizen participation has long been associated with rhetoric, citizen­ ship is a particularly interesting case of identity formation to examine in rela­ tion to discursive practice. If, however, identity formation is, as I have argued here, tied to the particular and changing forms of discourse, we may want to question whether the long-standing association of citizenship participation with classical rhetoric is adequate to current discursive conditions. The diver­ gence of political discourse from classical rhetorical ideals has led to a com­ mon belief that public discourse and the quality of citizenship are declining, presenting a threat to democracy and the strength of the polity. The increasing Digitized by

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prominence in this century of radio, then television, and now the internet has given added edge to this sense of deterioration of political discourse and citi­ zen deliberation. Another commonly discussed factor in the perceived decline in the quality of citizen participation is the increasing role of money in the political process, exacerbated by the cost of television advertising, which has become a central medium of political communication. As the artificial persons of cor­ porations have increasingly exercised economic power in politics, market­ place interests have become a dominating discourse of government and politi­ cal commitments. This partnership of the marketplace and politics is in keep­ ing with Smith’s proposal for using economic communication as the key pub­ lic vehicle for negotiating a public social order that then protects individual­ ized and individual realms of privacy. Within such an econocentric concept of citizenship, it is hardly surprising that our role as taxpayers should take such a central role in our identity as citizens. Economically based political participation, when combined with media-dominated forums of political communication, may work against wise and democratic decision making that takes into account the values, interests, and best life for all. Current processes of political participation and discourse may serve the interests of only a few and may ignore the complexity and rich­ ness of life. From the perspective of genre theory, current political arrange­ ments may limit the possibility of citizenship as a humanly satisfying domain of identity and growth. The remainder of this essay sketches out some, but only some, of the history of the genres of citizenship and political participation, their relation to various activity systems and media, and the kinds of participation and citizen­ ship afforded by each. This essay does not pretend to offer a comprehensive analysis of the generic sites for citizen participation, but only to suggest how we might start to look at these issues from the point of view of genre theory. After looking at some of the more obvious landmarks in the shaping of the political discourse, the essay looks at the genres of political activity that are emerging on the web. I do this particularly because a new medium offers opportunities for creating new channels and configurations of communica­ tion, because the genres of political life on the internet are now in current flux, and because a number of people have placed much hope on the internet as providing a new channel for democratic participation (see, for example, Bonchek, 1996). My examples will largely come from the United States. I will consid­ er only limited data, unsystematically gathered, from only one limited van­ tage point. The picture, no doubt would look different to others in different political, geographic, and jurisdictional positions. Moreover, the picture would look radically different in other countries, where the internet is devel­ oping very different presences in political life—whether the Netherlands, or Digitized by

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Brazil, or China, or the Balkans. I only aspire to develop a way of looking at and reflecting on the changing forms of communication within political life, to set the stage for more methodical examination of developments and issues.

Forms off Citizenship within Classical Rhetoric Rhetoric, as we tend to think of it, was bom in politics and citizen participa­ tion—in the agora of the Greek polis,4 and then the senate and courts o f Rome. As such, rhetoric is deeply associated with the forms of justice, repub­ licanism, democracy, and representation bom there, and which then served as models, ideals, and fantasies of the states rebelling against monarchism, abso­ lutism, and colonialism since the eighteenth century. The architectural and statuary fantasies of the American and French republics remind us that there was more at stake here than forms of governance—there were ideals of citi­ zenship and ways at life imagined and brought into being. The communica­ tive model of politics and citizenship grew out of the situation and practices in the agora—an eloquent defense of one’s interests and honor before other citizens who sit in judgment and in the face of accusers; a persuasive appeal to carry a deliberation of leaders forward to a new level of wisdom; a ritual communion rehearsing and heightening community values to bind citizens in a common orientation toward some impending threat or challenge. These were the genres of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric as performed in person within identifiable locales of public high stakes platform oratory, around which the institutions of the state developed and were structured. Insofar as our ways of talking about political discourse are based on the terms and models of classical rhetoric, we keep assuming that our forms, forums, and ideals of citizenship remain continuous with those of the classic world, and that the noblest civic identity we can achieve is to be cast in Cicero’s robes, to be enshrined on the steps of the local neoclassic state court­ house. There is a long tradition of criticizing American political discourse for failing to meet that standard in one way or another and for our failure to pro­ duce great orators to lead us through peril and disharmony to greater

4Although the agora was the marketplace as well as the meeting place o f citizens, I need to point out, given the argument I am making, that rhetoric had nothing to do with the language o f commerce also transacted in the agora. The language o f market­ ing and trading has only in the last century become a major cultural concern, has only recently become the subject of education in business schools, and has never had the status of the civic discourse o f rhetoric. If rhetoric had from the beginning attended to the full range of discourses o f the agora and o f society at the time, it would have been a very different endeavor (Bazerman, 2000b).

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wisdom.5 But this model of citizenship has been under question, in part because of the democratic impulses that were in tension with the notions of elite leadership enacted through powerful, eloquent oratory. As Richard Cmiel points out in Democratic Eloquence, eloquence has long been a trou­ blesome category in American rhetoric. Perhaps even more baffling for the forging of modem rhetoric and citizenship has been the changing character of government and the changing media of public discourse (Bazerman, 2000b). As government grew it became less a matter of direct leadership and more a matter of management and administration of extensive operations. The use of writing increased as part of this more extended administration, with changes in technology going hand in hand with wider uses of written communica­ tion—the printing press, the rotary press, cheap paper, the filing cabinet, the typewriter, the computer, and the electronic network. Thus the founding, incendiary utterance of American history, the Declaration o f Independence— although often recited—takes the form of a written document to be seen by representatives of the British government, to inspire people throughout the colonies to rebellion, to provide a legal justification for action, and to create a written record of intent and justification for all who come after to judge. Tom Paine was a pamphleteer, and the drafting of the Constitution and aiguments in its favor were the most prominent rhetorical works of the early years of the republic. Scribbling lawyers became the ideal of citizen, though statues still cast them in Roman robes, albeit often with a quill in hand. As the nineteenth century brought urbanization, commercial growth, telegraphy, and the rotary press, newspapers and journals became an important site for political and public discourse. Speeches were still delivered in legislatures and courts and city squares, but these now were increasingly part of a complex mix of files and records and journalism and commentary.

Literacy and the Transformation of the Life of Citizenship Literacy and literate genres, even in the ancient world, began transforming and extending forms of political life (Goody, 1986). Written codes of law added a solemnity and consequentiality to legislative considerations, as they were not just arguing a single instance but producing a consistent and enduring set of regulations for daily life. Written law and court records turned judicial dis­ course toward textual interpretation, comparison of current matters to prior texts, and the production of an inspectable court record to justify decisions. 5A notable exception is found in the recent analyses o f Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who has provided us tools with which to consider the quality and character o f political debate as carried out in the print and television m edia (Jam ieson, 1988, 1996; Campbell & Jamieson, 1990).

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The regularity of law meant citizenship became defined increasingly in terms of commitment to and obedience towards abstract rules— law abid­ ingness, responsibilities, rights, and privileges—instead of personal commit­ ment to individual personally familiar leaders. Decision making and pow er moved from public forums to clerics, bureaucrats, and scribes who controlled the written records of an increasingly oiganized, regularized, extended, and distant state, which knew its citizens through organized record keeping. The forums of public participation became associated with the record of their pre­ vious judgments, laws, and rulings. Records created an intertextual context for each new instance of judgment and decision making. Printing provided a public medium to criticize the state and to advo­ cate alternative programs. Polemics and manifestos could be distributed in various degrees of secrecy, especially as printing technology became less expensive and widely available (Eisenstein, 1983). Governments concerned themselves with identifying subversive material and controlling its circula­ tion, resulting in regulation of printing, including copyright (Rose, 1993). Availability of alternative views and the organization of heterodox opinion through circulation of texts served the needs of the new literate commercial classes, which were aggregating economic power outside the state. Print cul­ ture fed the associated desires for commercial and political information through pamphlets, journals, and newspapers, as the reforms and revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries unfolded. Newspapers, written ballots, literate practices of expanding com­ merce, and calls for informed citizenry were associated with the expansion of schooling beyond the training of clerics, bureaucrats, and to a lesser extent the aristocracy. Newspapers were particularly associated with the expanding educated urban commercial classes in Britain and the U.S. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the rise of political parties. Newspapers became forums for people to imagine themselves into wider political arenas and more distant events than they might daily have contact with. Newspapers also provided opportunities for people to identify themselves as partisans and members of communities (Habermas, 1989). In the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century the formation of an independent press also became associated with investigative journalism, public accountability, and the development of professional journalistic standards (Schudson, 1995). The press developed a somewhat independent perspective, to some extent outside government, party, or particular economic interest (although always within limits and to be viewed with some skepticism) from which to view govern­ ment and political processes. By reading the newspapers (or multiple newspa­ pers and journals of opinions), citizens could become observers and evalua­ tors of public officials and political actors, entering into a continuing, although often vicarious, relationship with government and politics.

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Political Culture and Citizen Activity News then supported a political culture of critique, celebrity, spectator rooting, and competition. Citizens could also enter into marginal amateur production of political opinion through letters to the editor, but the production of news, critique, and opinion fell increasingly into the hands of professional journal­ ists. Professional journalism, nonetheless, provided the information that sup­ ported local civic activity, activist group participation, and individual and group communication with legislators. Community and activist group newslet­ ters and other communications came to rely on the news, as did citizen partici­ pations in campaigning and elections. Thus newspapers became a major forum that mediated political participation of ordinary citizens. The intertextual record of the news (as remembered by individuals and as a research file in libraries and newspaper archives) became the context for further news items. The political culture informed by the news also was played out in social gatherings where people exchanged opinions as a kind of identity play (Billig, 1988) as well as exchange of thought. This political culture was given further, if somewhat restrictive and ritualizing shape, through surveys by which public opinion was expressed and aggregated. In the form of polls, public opinion itself became news and influenced the actions of politicians, who kept closer and closer tabs on the moods of the voters. Radio and televi­ sion talk shows gave individuals an expanded opportunity to turn private exchange into public assertion and group affiliation. In this evolving climate of public opinion, political parties developed their own internal cultures and media of communication and participation, in part enacted through traditional patronage and ward politics, but in part enact­ ed through other forms of more conceptualized partisan commitment, involv­ ing speeches, humor, demonizing characterizations of opposition, newsletters, serious program papers, and forms of public hoopla and celebration. These activities in turn were represented on the general news media, over which partisan groups attempted to exert control through media events, spin-doctoring, sound bites, and other means of shaping political messages. Michael Schudson in the Good Citizen (1998) identifies three forms of citizenship and political culture in the history of the United States, characterized by the form of ballot. In the early years of the nation voting was carried out in local meet­ ings by public displays of support for the local elite. In the mid-nineteenth century the color of the ballot you deposited in the ballot box publicly identi­ fied you as a supporter of a party, through which benefits were distributed. Only in the late nineteenth century was the secret ballot introduced, allowing the voter to make choices selectively and privately, putting the burden on the citizen to be informed and thoughtful, making judgments apart from immedi­ ate reward for displays of solidarity.

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In the United States voluntary political associations have had a rich history, particularly since nineteenth-century industrialization and urbaniza­ tion. Economic groups such as unions and chambers of commerce have regu­ larly engaged in lobbying, raising policy issues, and otherwise advancing their interests. Progressive groups have for over a century sought public sup­ port and supportive legislation for their reforms, and since the 1950s activist groups on the right and left have pressed policy objectives concerning nuclear testing and disarmament, opposition to the Vietnam war and other military actions, environmentalism, women’s and minority rights, abortion rights and right to life, gun rights and gun control, consumer protection, campaign* reform, and many other causes. These groups have had their own internal sys­ tems and genres of communication along with forms of public advocacy, forms of creating and distributing information, and forms of communication with the government. Activism within such oiganizations has provided a major site for the development of individuals as citizens. The characterizations I have just provided are broad and sweeping, missing details, ignoring countertrends and missing other equally striking phenomena. Nonetheless, these sweeping characterizations are enough to suggest how complex and varied U.S. political culture is, mediated through many genres of face-to-face, print, radio, and television communication. New forms of electronic communication enter into this already rich field, with the potential of changing the total ecology of political communication—displac­ ing some earlier modes, supplementing and transforming others, and putting all the existing components in new relation.

POLITICS OIM THE WORLD WIDE WEB

The Web became a clearly recognized political presence as early as the 1994 election, with candidates creating web sites to set out their positions and elicit support. In the 1996 elections parties and candidates had extensive and elabo­ rate web sites (Seib, 1995). There were also many private, independent, com­ mentary, journalistic, and humor sites. Since then the web has played an increasing role in politics and journalism, as was dramatically demonstrated by the web’s rapid, sensational circulation of rumor and accusation during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment proceedings of 1998-99. Quite visibly, the web has provided fertile soil for many politically related sites that provide forums and contexts for specific forms of participa­ tion. Major news and political commentary oiganizations have established their own sites representing material presented in other media—many news­ papers (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the

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Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and the Washington Post, just to name a few of the more prominent), political maga­ zines (such as the Congressional Quarterly, the American Prospect, the Washington Weekly, Tikkun), public and private television and radio news shows (NPR All Things Considered, PBS Evening Newshour, MSNBC, and CNN). Some are exclusively devoted to political news, such as CNN’s ALLPOLITICS. Further, new electronic-only journals have appeared (such as Slate and HotWired), and newspaper sites are becoming increasingly indepen­ dent of their print counterpart. Many of these sites are linked with each other and with other rep­ utable sources of political and governmental information, giving some shape to a recognizable universe of legitimated professional public political infor­ mation and commentary. This makes “What Washington is talking about” more public and accessible and virtually concrete—no longer requiring citi­ zens to be at the right cocktail parties, to listen to many interview shows, and to keep up subscriptions to multiple journals. One can in a fairly short time, by hopping around the net, have some access to the political buzz. However, although all these sites provide news and commentary for various publics to contemplate, and this news and commentary may provide the basis for later actions, these electronic journals afford no immediate active form of partici­ pation except letter writing in response—typically, an email response form is attached to each web site. The more technologically adept can elevate themselves from con­ sumer to producer of political chat by setting up an amateur political home page, and there are many such pursuing political commentary and humor. Pages are built in fan support of political heroes and attack of political ene­ mies, as well as of parties and programs. Individuals assert their identity, share their vision, and aggregate resources for like-minded people. Humor is usually pointed, against political enemies. The activities on such pages are clearly derivative of on one side, the public media culture of partisan political celebrity and on the other, of local community political aigument. It is not surprising that the talk show hosts, themselves mediating between national news and local discussion, become web celebrities at the center of fascination and discussion—heroes of political talk on the net. On June 17, 1997, a search on Excite revealed 998,146 matches on the name Rush Limbaugh, 898,241 on the name Ollie North, 172,574 on the name Pat Buchanan, and 12,339 on Geraldine Ferraro. Although this clearly indicates the political direction of this phenomenon, it suggest that even a Democratic newcomer gets some attention. This amateur commentary is outspoken and aggressive, expressing both strongly positive and strongly negative comments, as sym­ bolized by the Punch Rush Limbaugh Home Page, where each click bloodies L im baugh’s image further ( http://w w w .indirect.com /w w w /beetle87/ rush/index.html). _ Digitized

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Like the talk shows, the amateur web political pages give non-politicians and nonjoumalists access to a media stage on which to perform political and journalistic activities, elevating their local talk into a public performance and an identity that extends out beyond their geographically immediate group—and it allows one to affiliate with geographically separated people o f common interests. By participating in talk shows and creating web sites, one can imagine oneself as politically engaged without too much monitoring of the concrete consequences, if there are any, of that participation. The locale of such talk is clearly outside more official political talk, outside the beltway so to speak, but it is clearly contextually and intertextually related to the public circulation of news and commentary. One of the consequences of the multiplicity of amateur political sites, many of which are hot-linked to each other and to the more official sites (some amateur pages consist only of index pages of annotated links), is that produc­ ers and consumers can readily and rapidly immerse themselves in critical, independent, and partisan information and commentary. We might call this an intensification and greater availability of the long-standing culture of political talk. The intensification, however, seems to bring about a qualitative change, as people can produce more extended turns for a more extended audience. The amateur political talk sometimes aggregates within more orga­ nized sites of controversialism, often around minor political parties, cult fol­ lowings, and activist groups—sometimes mediated through the identity of a celebrity talk figure. For examples, the Rush Limbaugh Featured Site (http://www2.southwind.net/~vic/rush/rush.html) contains links to the Berkeley College Republicans, Newt Gingrich sites, the Republican National Convention ‘96 site, the Massachusetts Republican Party, and other conserva­ tive groups Organized political argument and activism also aggregates around a variety of movements, interests, and organizations, with more or less pro­ grammatic coherence, such as libertarianism, objectivism, reproductive rights, right-to-life, gay, lesbian and transgender rights, ethnic rights, and many vari­ eties of environmentalism. The activities afforded by these sites are complex and multiple and I will not begin to examine them here, but will note that the sites are often affiliated with noncyber political organizations. The pages of political organizations in turn typically present information, platforms, candi­ date biographies and positions, speeches, news, resources, and links to candi­ date pages and affiliated organizations. The web provides a forum in which voluntary associations create a presence, a meeting place for like-minded peo­ ple who wish to affiliate, an archive of resources for the affiliated, a mecha­ nism for sharing organizational information, and space for asserting positions and interests. Among the political groups are several representing the Direct Democracy movement, which sees the internet as the vehicle by which direct citizen deliberation can replace representative government. _ Digitized

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Many national, state, and local government sites present the accom­ plishm ents of the agency and the incumbent administration, along with agency-relevant information, query access, forms, and form filing opportuni­ ties. Individual office holders have their pages affording a variety of activities and providing a variety of governmental, political, and constituent service information. Legislative caucuses and other political groups of office holders also have their sites. Finally, independent public service organizations pro­ vide nonpartisan information on office holders, candidates, and elections, such as project Vote Smart. Thus the political landscape on the Web is becoming increasingly complex, and is starting to take on its own novel character, transforming older forms of political activity. Political culture is finding many more public forums and is being more easily spread. By establishing a page and links one can create a political identity by becoming immersed in an array of opinions, associated with networks of like-minded people, and subsumed in a public political culture. A physically isolated person, even without affiliation with political groups or some institution that harbors political activity (such as a university campus), can form a public political presence and establish an identity within a political group.

Political Party Web Sites The traditional means of political participation has been through the official party organizations. In the United States all major and virtually all minor par­ ties have official web sites, plus there are additional web sites for official cau­ cuses and subgroups as well as for unofficial factions, observers, and activists. On December 2, 1999, for example, the Yahoo index of U.S. politi­ cal sites listed 225 sites affiliated with the Republican Party, 167 sites affiliat­ ed with the Democratic Party, 63 with the Libertarian Party, 50 with the Reform Party, 22 with the Green Party, eight for the Constitution Party, seven for the Socialist Party USA, five for the Communist Party USA, five for the Natural Law Party, and fewer for each of a variety of parties including the Puritan Party and the Pansexual Peace party. The official web sites of the Democratic and Republican Parties are in many ways similar. Both are deeply embedded in the culture of journalism. The Democratic National Committee site (http://www.democrats.org/), when I first analyzed it in June 1997, created an impression of breaking news, with a publicity photo of President Clinton signing legislation at the top right and on the top left a bold title, “Democratic Party Online,” with the day’s date just below, suggesting the daily updating of news. Just below was a ticker tape banner announcing the latest news bulletins, followed by a hot-button table of contents with the first item being “DNC News.” Digitized by

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The news, as might be expected, was partisan. “The Daily N ews from DNC,” on June 10, 1997, for exam ple, included the headlines: “Unemployment Drops Again While Wages Continue to Rise,” “Republicans Force President to Veto Disaster Relief—It’s 1995-1996 all over again,” “Barbour Sold Business Deals in China to Foreign Contributor,” “Gingrich Admits Fundraising Hearings Targeted at President, Vice-president; Wacko GOP Investigator Reportedly Stalks Witnesses.” Each of these headlines is followed by a few-sentence elaboration emulating the lead paragraph of a news story, followed by a citation to a professional news organization (and where possible hot-linked to the full story at the news agency’s home site) or by reference (and hot-link) to a DNC news release that elaborates the story and provides references to the independent press. There is also an archive o f previous stories going back to the initiation of this newspage feature on March 26,1997. The reference to the independent press (and as often as possible to right-leaning news sources) is important to maintain credibility for the report­ ed news, even if it has a partisan edge and implications, because the larger part of the rhetorical struggle seems to be over trustworthiness and credibili­ ty—which party and which individuals can be relied on to deliver and who is misleading the American public. The approximately dozen stories on any day are divided into tales of Clinton’s and Congressional Democrats’ accomplish­ ments and Republican leaders’ embarrassments. In the middle is usually placed a quotation of the day, again highlighting a Democratic accomplish­ ment or a Republican betrayal. The news as reported here is really a traffick­ ing in celebrity, credit, and thus potential support. A “What’s Hot” page also consists of representations of high-road activities and accomplishments of the Democratic office holders, and low-road attacks on the deviousness of the opposition party. To draw the visitors more fully into a realm of partisan rep­ resentation of the news, the web site offers direct email subscription to the latest news postings. As of December 1999, the front page of the site had been reformatted to follow the new look adopted by major news web sites such as cnn.com. These sites no longer imitate the front page of newspapers, but rather in a sim­ pler format list the lead headlines with short summaries, hot-linked to the full story. Accordingly, the DNC site homepage lists headlines and story leads. It also has a link to a similarly organized Newsroom page. The look of the newly evolved web newspaper has replaced the look of the print newspaper. By the middle of 1997 the Republican National Committee had set up a similar site (http://www.RNC.org/). As of June 1998, it had many similar features to the DNC site including news and a news subscription service, party information and platform, announcement of party training and events, and membership sign-up. The Republican site was also pervaded by accounts of the misdeeds of the leaders of the other party, not only on the news page but _ Digitized

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on an “Interactive Clinton Calendar” that put scandals on a time line, a set of links devoted to “The Selling of America’s House,” and a “Clinton/Gore/DNC Chinagate Chart.” In December 1999, the front-page of the Republican National Committee Web site was reformatted to have the look of a cyber­ magazine, with graphics that parodied 1950s television to frame headlines of Clinton-Gore misdeeds and a black-and-white image of Clinton and Gore looking like television hucksters, which hot-linked to a “GOPtv video clip of the week.” The Newsroom again leads the list of contents hotlinks on the left side, and on the right side are links to featured items, such as “The World According to Gore” and an archive of past news articles entitled “In Case You Missed It.” At the bottom of the page is another flashy graphic built around a comic image of Gore calling attention to the feature, “Democrats Exposed— What Democrats Don’t Want You to Know.” The linked page provides journalistic-style factual corrections of Democratic ads. This partisan retelling of the news, traced back to independent jour­ nalistic sources, relies on news media already heavily engaged in reporting political warfare, partisan events, and leaks created for the media, and pre­ spun news releases. The parties struggle over appearances of credibility and trustworthiness in this world of partisan representation. The DNC and RNC pages, embedded within this partisan struggle for control of news impres­ sions, place their readers in the role of consumers of political opinion. Beyond inviting viewers to engage in the culture of partisan news, both the RNC and DNC sites have from the beginning offered other resources and activities, which have been growing in focus and extent. Both have from their beginning provided means for joining the parties, volunteering for cam­ paigns, finding out about internship positions, subscribing to an email news service, and giving money. However, there has been increasing amount of practical information for activists, such as announcements of seminars and meetings, call for volunteers, and organizational plans. This information is placed on lower levels of the site hierarchy so it will not be so visible to the casual viewer, but clearly the web sites are doing more than filling cyberspace with partisan journalistic accounts to exercise spectator passions. The sites are supporting, as well, noncyber activities by providing organizational infor­ mation and means for connecting people to events, activities, and campaigns. Also there has been increasing use of the pages for fund-raising. In the origi­ nal versions of the DNC site, for example, the only request for money was the membership fee for joining the party. Now, however, on both Democratic and Republican web sites and immediate links there are numerous opportunities and importunities to give money to the parties and to individual candidates.

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POLITICS AND SOCIALITY IN THE CYBERAGE Nonetheless, at this moment, the major party web sites predominantly draw upon our culture of news, now spun and prespun into a partisan frame of celebrity heroism and villainy. The emotions of political culture are muted from their most virulent forms of political entertainment and are given a small degree of institutional seriousness, but the joy of partisanship is hardly hidden. These emotions are evoked through representations of the celebrity actors, but site visitors are also encouraged to actively participate in this moral drama by signing up on one side and making nose-thumbing gestures at the other. Underneath this morality drama there are entry ways into more substantive information and participation, but all these are framed within the spun news celebrity game that presumably motivates the deeper knowledgableness and activity. Of course there is no reason to think that the currently rapidly evolv­ ing political web genres will stabilize in their current form. The increasing support for major party activists points towards the development of a cadre of citizens engaged in party politics beyond spectatorism fed by professional media productions. Also promising are the alternate organizations and loose networks that form around particular issues such as environmentalism, abor­ tion issues, or global trade policy. Particularly interesting is the use of the internet to organize support for or resistance to major international treaty meetings on such issues as trade policy, environmentalism, and world pover­ ty. These forms of engaged citizen participation, both on the internet and in the streets (yet organized over the internet), make policy meetings that might otherwise be little noticed into high profile public events, opening up to inter­ national public scrutiny the policy issues being decided. Of course, politics may be viewed as a specialized area of profes­ sional development—so that some people become professional politicians (or professional radical activists) just as some people become doctors and others become journalists and others become musicians, engaged within activity systems enacted through a mix of spoken, written, and electronic communica­ tive genres. In such limited professional domains, the range, mix, organiza­ tion, and interaction of the genres affect how well the system works and with what kinds of results. The mix of genres and their location within the activity system also shape the possibilities for recruitment and development of future professionals. Thus the available genres for political participation have conse­ quences for the workings of government, how attractive politics is as a career, and how competent our politicians become and in what ways. However, poli­ tics is much more than that. First the consequences of politics and government bear on all spheres of what we now consider private life—that is, all those other areas of Digitized by

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personal expression, development, relations, and activity that we consider matters of personal choice. So if one wants to have a clean and pleasant envi­ ronment within which to live, or to have one’s children educated, or to be able to commute to work on well-paved roads, or to read an open and diverse press, one is dependent on having favorable governmental policies. To further such interests one needs to be able to bring those interests into the public sphere through politics. Insofar as the polity is reduced to issues of economics and the marketplace, and insofar as the most important actors on the political stage are coincident with those that have the most economic power, nonmar­ ket values will have a hard time getting voice within the political discussion, for that discussion will be in genres not amenable to the expression of noneconomic values and interests. This problem is exacerbated if the most powerful economic actors are the artificial persons of corporations, which have by definition no private lives and exist only for their economic advan­ tage. Even Bill Gates or John Paul Getty have private values that have the potential of influencing their actions in the public sphere, but Microsoft and Getty Oil do not. As the power of the marketplace and corporations increase nationally and globally, noneconomic interests and the interests of weaker economic actors have decreased access and power within political forums.6 Second, and even more relevant to the issue of personal development and citizenship, is the way our current configuration of private and public produces barriers to our sense of common concern with our neighbors at every level of political organization from the village through the globe. If the market mediates all public values and provides the means for pursuing other activities, and if the function of the government is to maintain the market, then all else is in the private sphere. This, as Smith and contemporary liber­ tarians have noticed, has great beneficial potential in carving out large dom ains of private freedoms and self-elected forms of developm ent. However, insofar as these remain in the private sphere and find no expression in those activity systems shared with all the people we live among, rather than just selected subcommunities, then our values and interests and forms of personal development have little to do with the common life. With little shared public life, we feel little attachment to those we live among and have little opportunity to pursue the pleasures of community responsibility. So if we wish for public amenities for the appreciation of nature or for a less vio­ lent public culture or for protection of human rights, we not only will find them hard to pursue in the public sphere unless we can frame them as eco­ 6As I put the finishing touches on this manuscript, a heterogeneous collection o f peo­ ple are demonstrating in Seattle against the dccision-making procedures o f the World Trade Organization. Although the values and interests of the demonstrators are varied and even contradictory, they are all united in perceiving the World Trade Organization as defining the chief relation among nations to be only one o f trades and markets-overriding all other interests that might be expressed through national governments. Digitized by

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nomic issues, we also cannot forge a public link with our neighbors to make these values part of our common life. We become, as Tocqueville warned, locked into the prisons of our privacy. It may be that this fading or narrowing of the commonweal and citi­ zenship to the narrow bounds of homo economicus may be our best bet for a peaceful and free world. Indeed, economically based rational actor theory has gained popularity in departments of political science. And it may well be that attempts to bring other values into politics constantly threatens the freedom, expression, and identity of others. The intrusion of the church, as an alterna­ tive site of person-forming noneconomic values, into the public sphere has been continuingly tension-provoking and rights-threatening—and thus the Constitution of the United States wisely puts a divide between church and state, despite the continuing desire of some citizens to define the national, state, and local community by private religious values. The questions of what a citizen is and ought to be is something that is worked out through the creativity of individual and multiple actors explor­ ing the communicative possibilities of their time, seeking the most satisfacto­ ry forms of life available to them. Rhetoricians, rather than advocating for ideals of citizenship rooted in idealized historical models, may be more effec­ tive in keeping open the possibilities of citizenship by noting the current opportunities for civic participation, the consequences of those forms of par­ ticipations, and the protean shape of the several and evolving public spheres.7 In this way we can support the development of people as citizens and politi­ cians participating through the current genres and becoming adept at the cur­ rent forms of political life. In this way we can also understand, interpret, and advise citizens on the meanings and force of various political utterances along with helping individuals and groups frame their own utterances to greatest effect within the genres and activity systems relevant to their concerns. Finally, in this way we may be able to make local suggestions about expand­ ing communicative possibilities. Noting the changes facilitated by the internet and the social creativity released by the new medium facilitates rhetoric’s responsiveness to changing politics, but the forces of change affecting citizenship are deeper and more baffling than would be suggested by attending just to technological transfor­ mations. To advance the causes of citizenship we need to keep a cool eye on the changing forms of life by which the polity continuingly speaks and inscribes itself into existence and by which individuals talk and write them­ selves into citizens.

7Michael Schudson (1998), for example, argues that our citizenship now consists o f a discontinuous set o f informed participations, engaged only when we see one o f our private interests at stake. Digitized by

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REFERENCES Bazerman, C. (1994). Money talks: The rhetorical project of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In W. Henderson et al. (Eds.), Economics and lan­ guage (pp. 173-199). New York: Routledge. Bazerman, C. (1995). Systems of genre and the enactment of social inten­ tions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre in the new rhetoric. London: Taylor & Francis. Bazerman, C. (1997). The life of genre, the life in the classroom. In W. Bishop & H. Ostrom (Eds.), Genre and the teaching o f writing. Portsmouth NH: Boynton Cook. Bazerman, C (1998). Discursively structured activities. Mind Culture and Activity, 4(4), 296-308. Bazerman, C. (1999). The languages o f Edison's light. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bazerman, C. (2000a). Singular utterances: Realizing local activities through typified forms in typified circum stances. In A. Trosberg (Ed.), A nalysing the discourses o f pro fessio n a l genres (pp. 25-40). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bazerman, C. (2000b). A rhetoric for literate society: The tension between expanding practices and restricted theories. Inventing a discipline, rhetoric and composition in action. In M. Goggin (Ed.), Inventing a dis­ cipline (pp. 5-28). Urbana, IL: NCTE. Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction o f reality. London: Allen Lane. Berkenkotter, C., Huckin, T. N., & Ackerman, J. (1991). Social context and socially constructed texts: The initiation of a graduate student into a writing community. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynam­ ics o f the professions: Historical and contemporary studies o f writing in professional communities (pp. 191-215). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Billig, M. (1988). Ideological dilemmas: A social psychology o f everyday thinking. London: Sage. Blakeslee, A. M. (1997). Activity, context, interaction, and authority: Learning to write scientific papers in situ. Journal o f Business and Technical Communication, II, 125-169. Bonchek, M. (1996). From broadcast to netcast: The internet and the flow o f political information. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language & symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field o f cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schutz, A. (1967). The problem o f social reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1973). The structures o f the life-world. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Seib, G. (1995, August 4). Cyberpoliticking: Presidential races are being changed by latest technology. Wall Street Journal, p. A l. Smith, A. (1976). An inquiry into the nature and causes o f the wealth o f nations (R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner, Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. (1978). Lectures on jurisprudence (R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, & F. G. Stein, Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. (1980). Essays on philosophical subjects. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. (1983). Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres (J. C. Bryce, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, A. (1986). The theory o f moral sentiments ( D. D. Raphael & A. L. Macfie, Eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vamum, R. (1996). Fencing with words: A history o f writing instruction at Amherst College during the era o f Theodore Baird, 1938-1966. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Wachhorst, W. (1984). Thomas Alva Edison: An American myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. New York: Macmillan.

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2 Uptake

Anne Freadman University of Queensland-Australia

This chapter takes as its problem the relation between speech-act theory and genre. I am interested in three things: (a) the way certain propositions in genre theory draw on speech-act theory; (b) why the theory of speech acts rarely draws on genre theory (with the major and important exception of the work of Bakhtin—e.g., 1986); and (c) the history of the two theories, why they are so separate, and what I can do by bringing them together. Most of this work has not been done yet; what I intend to do here is to study a particu­ lar case in order to sketch the beginning of an answer to point (c). That is, what I will present is a reflection on descriptive practice. It turns on, but it also elaborates, the Austinian notion of “uptake.” “Uptake" is what happens when you accept an invitation to a conference, or agree to rewrite a paper for publication (and erase the traces of its previous occasionally for that pur­ pose), or disagree with, or explore, a proposition in theory. One thing I’m doing in this chapter and in the work with which it is associated is taking up a challenge that derives in part from my own early work on genre. That early work has had its uptakes, but the problem of uptake, by and large, has not been one of them. ................ Digitized by

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In my early work on genre, I relied in a rather loose and unargued way on allusions to both Austin (1962) and Wittgenstein (1968). I looked to Wittgenstein for the notion of the “language game,” in the hope that the anal­ ogy of the game would help me to think about the strategic and the tactical dimensions of symbolic interchange. I wanted to argue that a genre does not inhere in its more or less standardized morphology, but in the dynamics of what Carolyn Miller calls “social action”; that is, what it gets people to do with one another, and what they do with it (Miller, 1984). I have argued that “genre” is more usefully applied to the interaction of, minimally, a pair of texts than to the properties of a single text, and I have used the term “uptake” to name the bidirectional relation that holds between this pair; that is, between a text and what Peirce would call its “interpretant” (Peirce, 1932-58): the text is contrived to secure a certain class of uptakes, and the interpretant, or the uptake text, confirms its generic status by con­ forming itself to this contrivance. It does so, by—say—“taking it as” an invi­ tation or a request. By the same token, however, the uptake text has the power not to so confirm this generic status, which it may modify minimally, or even utterly, by taking its object as some other kind. Hence, for example, I wrote recently to my father to ask him if he would object to my mentioning his name in an essay that alludes to his professional involvement in a public event of some notoriety. For 30 years he has resisted all our attempts to talk about it, from, I suppose, his natural reticence and also—again I suppose— his marked preference for not recalling painful episodes; this is why I felt I should ask his permission. His response to me was entirely unexpected: he rang me to say “Yes, of course I’ll do that for you.” Do what, I wondered. Write you my version of the story, was the reply (R. Freadman, 1999). It didn’t take long for me to understand that he had interpreted what I had asked him in terms of previous occasions of family bullying; so I shall say right away that uptakes—and not merely elderly men—have memories— long, ramified, intertextual, and intergeneric memories—much longer memories, I think, than Austinian speech act theory normally attributes to them. It is for this reason that I want to reexamine the theory of uptake as it is developed by Austin. I shall be saying both that the issue of uptake is the crucial one for us, if we want to argue for the significance of genre in cultural practice, and that the notion of uptake that is derived from speech-act theory is inadequate to the needs of a theory of genre that gives its due to this issue of memory. We have two choices: one is to construe genres as speech-acts and the other is to construe speech-acts as genres. Only by doing the latter can we avoid the reductive move of supposing that all symbolic action takes place in synchrony, with joint purposes and in shared contexts. We know, if we are writing teachers or foreign language teachers or cultural or literary critics, that more often than not we do not share contexts and that culture is the history of this fact and our means of dealing with it. My argument rests on _ Digitized

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an assumption that I shall not be able to develop today: that is, that when, in the first half of the twentieth century, scholars as diverse as Bakhtin in Russia, Wittgenstein in England, the American pragmatists, and then, most notably, Austin himself, working between the Oxford tradition and American pragmatism, rediscovered that we do things with words, their discovery was made in conditions I want to call the “amnesia" of genre, or, more generally, o f rhetoric as socially effective speech. This amnesia is easily documented and was fully in place by the middle of the nineteenth century, although the to p ic of “genre" had been confined to poetics well before that. Contemporaneously, the twentieth century saw the rise of theories of “human communication” and theories of language fitted to them. All such theories have a form that will be familiar to you, from the diagram of the circuit of speech in Saussure (Saussure, 1972), to Michael Reddy’s wonderful denunci­ ation of the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy, 1970), and it is in the logic of such theories systematically to elide genre. So if I were to develop this assumption into a detailed history, it would explore the following hypothesis: that speechact theory both retrieves the issue of genre, and construes it in terms of the model of communication—that is, construes it without history and without rhetoric, as a causal theory of behavior.1 But it has given us the problem of uptake, and may the Lord make us truly thankful. Genre is the capacity of human discourse that makes it different, say, from the language of the bees; this is what makes “culture” a different matter from programmed instinct. It depends on a number of things that, thus far, I have called “memory” and the adaptation of remembered contents to changed contexts. So let me remind you of the little story I told you about my father and his memory—his memory of previous interactions with me on that topic, and his memory of that topic, which itself is the object of obsessive collective memory. I shall be using some of the texts that constitute this memory as my illustrations of the problem of “uptake.” The event I’m referring to was the last judicial execution to take place in Australia, and my father, who is a lawyer, was associated with the intense efforts to have the sentence commuted. The story is known as “the Ryan story” from the name of the condemned man; so fraught was it in so many ways that it continues to be told regularly, in the press, on film, and in the theater as well as in the personal memoirs of people involved. I have used this collection of material—let me call it a corpus—as a case study in the description of an evolving generic array (A. Freadman, 1999). Now judicial execution was by hanging in Australia: the uptake that generates this corpus has as its object the uptake of what became in that act a corpse. The story telling is the uptake of the execution, just as the execution itself was the uptake of stories accepted as true in the verdict of the court. “Uptake” applies to all of these things. 'I am aware that this is not true for Austin in the same way as it is, say, for Searle. _ Digitized

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How does a “sentence” become an “execution?” This, of course, is the paradigm question of speech act theory: how does saying make it so? The answer is that it depends on a number of semio-discursive events, arranged in a sequence. Now we have theories to explain how language is produced by the body, but our theory of uptake must also be able to account for this. How does language pass into the body, to kill it? We know nothing if we start with the death warrant, with the speech-act that effects the end. This is only the last of a series; the warrant itself is the uptake of what has preceded it. I have suggested that this sequence depends upon memory. For without that memo­ ry, the sequence of acts would be unintelligible as a sequence, it could not establish its credentials in law, and it could not enact its consequences. The memorizing, moreover, is formally enacted. Each discursive act in the process marks its place in the sequence by recording the previous stage in a narrative report or description, and only then does it perform an act: it turns back, then turns forward. To the judge’s enquiry, the jury will say: we find the accused guilty as charged. The judge repeats the finding as a verdict of the court, then pronounces sentence, adding instructions to police and prison officials as to the proper handling of the condemned person until execution. The next step varies with jurisdictions, but in general it is true to say that the sentence is referred to some official body for review, and that the final ratification of the sentence is made by executive government. The facts of the case, the find­ ings, and the grounds of sentence are reported, with the requirement that the sentence be confirmed or, alternatively, commuted. Whether it be a “life sen­ tence” or a “death sentence," this decision is then sent on to the executing authority, which in Australia is the sheriff’s office, and is acted on according to more or less ritualized actions under the authority of the prison governor. A sequence such as this can be taken as an instance of Peircean semiosis. A sign in Peirce’s theory is not (usually) a unit of a notation, but a significant event: it both represents its object and makes it available for fur­ ther interpretation. All signs thus refer both forwards and backwards to other signs, so you can see how this will provide a generalization over the stages of the sequence I have described. All signs arise in a chain of signs; there is nei­ ther first sign nor last, and semiosis is infinite in principle, although it is sometimes halted or interrupted in practice. Thus Peirce gives us further grounds for contesting Austin’s methodological rule that the utterance must be located in its “total speech situation." That totality is not just elusive; it is theoretically inconsistent with the infinity of the signifying chain (Butler, 1997).2 In principle, though every event in the chain is a sign, all signs differ from one another in some respects: semiosis may occur within the same set of 2Butler investigates this issue in Derridean terms. For her, the cmcial issue is citationality, and the consequent capacity for resignification o f any act in other contexts. The Peircean and the Derridean arguments are complementary with one another. Digitized by

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conventions, on the model of what Jakobson called mfralingual translation (this is something like glossing, defining, paraphrasing and exegesis); or, on the model of interlingual translation, any subsequent sign translates the previ­ ous sign into a different language, a different conceptual framework, a differ­ ent set of assumptions, or, let us say, a different genre (Jakobson, 1966). All semiosis, for Peirce, is effected by translation, in one or other of these senses. I am going to insist on this issue of translation, because without it, I believe, we cannot account for the uptake of speech events in actions. These are my first two moves: the first is to reconstrue the issue of uptake in terms of Peircean semiosis; the second is to insist that semiosis requires translation. The mediation between past and future states that I have described is the basic mechanism of the sign. Between any two states is “difference,” at any point of the scale between the transcendental condition of difference posited by Derrida, to the gross forms of difference that distinguish generic practices. I know that there is a problem with the supposition of generic boundaries because they are constantly being renegotiated, but this does not authorize us to overlook their operations. Indeed, “translation,” of whatever kind, is the mediation of a boundary, not its obliteration. I will say that the same applies to uptake, because I want to say that “uptake” is the local event o f crossing a boundary. For example, for a death sentence to become a death, the words of the judge must be translated into an extraordinary intimacy between two bodies, the actions of the executioner and the suffering of the victim (Dawe, 1992, p. 69). (Now I am not for one moment suggesting that speech in general is not bodily, but it worries me that a generalization such as this is in danger of erasing the specificity of semiotic practices where the body is the primary medium of signification. And physical punishment is indubitably a semiotic practice; you might like to remind yourselves of the early pages of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to get a sense of this [Foucault, 1977]. Furthermore, as I have mentioned, it is part of the effect of the infliction of death to obliterate the subjectivity, and hence the capacity of language, of the victim, whose body in its very speechlessness continues to signify most potently.) I am insisting that we should not overlook the threshold that must be crossed between language and the body, either in the generalization of our theories of the body in language, or in the stories we tell. We are inclined to do both. The official narrative of the death penalty leads seamlessly from the verdict to the execution as if there were no boundary; it does so in order to provide the rationale for the execution, to insist that it is judicial; for divorced from the verdict, it is just another homicide. But this seamless narrative is a product of ideology, and I want to show where the seam is, and what the mechanism of the joining involves in political practice. This seam—the generic boundary—lies between the trial and the execution. Yet the execution Digitized by

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is an uptake of the verdict, and it is how we get from one to the other that is the issue. The two are mediated by the sentence, which is the upshot o f the trial, and which is the act that inaugurates the execution. During the act of sentencing, the verdict is repeated, and the sentence is repeated in the death warrant, as well as in all the preparatory genres that lead to i t The function of this formal repetition is two-fold: it marks the boundary, and it carries— “translates”—material from one side of it to the other. I suppose this is what signs always do, but for this very reason, it does not—yet—provide an account of the particular issues involved in passing across a generic boundary. We need to interrogate the special nature of the generic boundary in order to see what’s at stake in the issue of translation. Responsibility for the outcome of the trial lies within the powers of the court; responsibility for the outcome of the sentence lies outside it, and the laws governing “felicity conditions” differ markedly from one to the other. This appears to conform with a use of speech-act theory I made in “Anyone for Tennis?” (A. Freadman, 1994) where I argued that a genre is governed by a ceremonial, a ritualized sequence in a formalized space and time, enacted by fit persons to effect a specified outcome. If I follow Lyotard, I might call this a “jurisdiction” rather than a ceremonial (Lyotard, 1983). Speech-acts presuppose a jurisdiction, which authorizes them and provides their felicity conditions, and jurisdictions presuppose constitutions, which regulate their boundaries and their relations, the limits on their powers, and so on. We know that it is the institutional parameters of our classroom practice that has this authorizing power for the work of our students; it regulates, it controls, and it is also the condition of the freedoms they invent. Robert M. Cover’s analysis of the constitutional organization that underpins the death penalty and its capacity to translate into action lends this view particular per­ tinence for my example (Cover, 1986). I shall therefore adopt the following heuristic convention: when uptake crosses the boundary between ceremonies, and a fortiori between jurisdictions, it mediates between genres. Translation would be intergeneric in this case, and intrageneric if it stays within those boundaries. For example, it makes some sense to say that the sentence is an uptake of the verdict, and that they are part of the same genre, the trial. Only intrageneric uptake of this kind is addressed by speech-act theory. It is at boundaries drawn by ceremonial and jurisdictional regulations that translation is least automatic and most open to mistake or even to abuse; at such points, it has to be practiced with greatest care, to the extent that Lyotard claims that we have to invent a new idiom for every case. It is at points such as these, where real power over outcomes is at stake, that Lyotard locates what he calls the differend. A differend results in the blocking of semiosis. I shall give an illustration of this phenomenon, because I think we understand a great deal more about translatability when we understand how it can be blocked. This, then, is my third move: I base it on a slogan from Digitized by

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“Anyone for Tennis?”—Perhaps the most important thing about our knowl­ edge of genres is our knowledge of the difference between genres. There is a significant politics involved both in the crossing of generic boundaries, and in their closing. The Ryan case was especially notorious because of a conflict between executive government and the judiciary: the constitutional arrange­ ments that were deemed to make it formally OK to execute a condemned felon broke down at the point of the handover of power between the two. What happened at this point was a very public struggle between the judge and the state premier for authority over due process. I should explain two things about the statute that governed these pro­ ceedings: firstly, that under the statute, the only available sentence for murder was death; but secondly, such sentences were always referred to the executive for review, and there had been 35 commutations, with no executions, over the previous sixteen years. This means that in capital cases, the court formally handed power over its sentences to the state. The judge (Starke) was known to be a firm opponent of the death penalty, and had achieved some local fame in Melbourne prior to his appointment to the bench because he had success­ fully pleaded for reprieve in a previous murder case. The state premier (Bolte) was incensed. He was a reactionary politician, well known for his populism, and for his contempt of lawyers and academics, and determined to display his authority against, and over, 1960s liberalism. It is on record that he appointed Starke to the bench in order to prevent him from defending any more criminals (Prior, 1990), and it was against this background that Ryan was tried and sentenced. The Ryan case was his opportunity to assert execu­ tive authority over judicial authority. There was, however, a great deal of opposition to the Ryan hanging, partly because of the manifestly unjust com­ parison with the previous case, and there were several appeals and other events designed to block it. Bolte was determined that none of these should succeed, and indeed attempted in various ways to short-circuit the legal process. This counts in the history of this event as an abuse of process. When all avenues had been exhausted except the petition for clemency, an ex-crimi­ nal, in a misguided but time-honored attempt to support Ryan, came forward with “new evidence,” and Starke ordered a stay of execution on the eve of the appointed day. He was called into the cabinet. Now it was at this point that a further abuse of process occurred. The calling of the judge into the cabinet was already an infringement of the independence of the judiciary, but could have been justified by appealing to eighteenth-century precedent, when the judge was often called before the king-in-council in order to answer a particu­ lar question: is there good reason to be found in the details of this case or in the conduct of this individual, to commute the sentence? So Starke answered the call. We have two accounts of this meeting, one from Starke, and one from Bolte (Prior, 1990). Digitized by

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What Starke tells us is that he was asked if he agreed with the verdict of the jury (Fitz-Gerald, 1993). This agreement, or disagreement, has no legal standing, and was nobody’s business. So what Bolte did, in this account, was to violate the generic rules in force in the legal arena, making Starke act— speak—out of role. This effectively undermined the authority of the court, and ensured that its discursive rules were no longer in play. When Starke tells this story, he tells it as a dilemma concerning the truth. “I did agree with the verdict,” he says; “I had to weigh a man’s life against the truth.” You will notice that he has allowed himself to be written into the role of a witness giv­ ing sworn evidence. Furthermore, he has, as it were, turned crown witness, in that he has been made to support the case of the prosecution. In other words, he is no longer impartial. Bolte’s account of the story is quite different (Prior, 1990). In it, in his own words, he gave the judge a hard time because he hadn’t checked the facts of some last minute “new evidence.” This was not the job of the judge, but of the prosecutor; as I have now learned from my father, both he and the prosecution had conveyed their doubts to the judge prior to his meeting with the premier. However, in Bolte’s account, it is he who occupies the role of a prosecutor, thus scripting the judge into the role of a defending counsel. In both these stories, Starke loses his speaking position as judge, once as the failed defense counsel, once as a witness for the prosecution: this is a clear case of the political disempowerment of the legal system, and an admirable example of what Lyotard refers to as the silencing of a genre through the vio­ lence of translation. I am inclined, unfashionably, to accept an Austinian analysis of this process: Bolte had imitated the forms of a court hearing out­ side the jurisdictional frame that validates them; that is, he had made a nonserious use of them. But this nonserious use had a very serious effect. We need to go beyond Austin and Searle to find out why. Genre theory can tell us something important about the quotation of generic forms outside their stan­ dard jurisdictional frames. If we were to describe the confirmation of the decision to hang Ryan in specch-act terms, there’s not much we could find wrong with it. The felici­ ty conditions were in place, the sentence was referred appropriately to the executive, which could have commuted or enforced the death penalty with equal propriety under the law. We may have been disappointed by the out­ come, but we could not justify what a large proportion of the citizenry felt at the time, which was that there had been an abuse of process. So I want to go back over my description now, in order to point out what genre theory can tell us that speech-act theory cannot. This is my fourth move. Firstly, I have dwelt on the formal properties of the meeting between the judge and the premier. This allows us to identify a rhetorical strategy that I shall call pastiche: the premier imitated a forensic procedure and scripted the roles accordingly, thus discrediting the decision of the judge. The pastiche Digitized by

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relies on a mimicry of the properties of a courtroom exchange, but outside the ceremonial parameters of a trial, and within a generic setting ruled by a dif­ ferent jurisdiction. Now it is certainly the case that Austin’s account of felici­ ty conditions includes the requirement that certain words be uttered by fit per­ sons at the right time and place, but this account could only tell us that Bolte’s use of forensic rhetoric could not result in a legal decision, and that’s not really what’s important about it. A pastiche would simply be, as Austin puts it, an etiolation, an imitation, a performance without performativity. But in this case, it had significant force, because it was a strategy in a different game, used to void the genre that it evoked. Now it evoked that genre by cit­ ing it, and what it cited are its standardized forms. This mechanism illustrates the technical issue known by genre theorists as the articulation of “form” with “process” (Coe, 1987, 1994). Of course there are standard forms, and effec­ tive rhetoric depends in part— but only in part—upon knowing them. It is clear that if all we do, and all we teach our students to do, is to mimic the standard forms, then our classes will be nothing but exercises in nonserious generic etiolations. But that is not all we do: those forms do not constitute the genre because they do not constitute the mechanism of uptake. In this respect, Bolte’s tactic was rather clever. For it seems to me to be true that the pastiche is an etiolation of the illocutionary force it represents, but that etiolation serves the purpose of confirming the disempowerment of one jurisdiction and the power of the other. This description could give us grounds for a range of judgments, but it still doesn’t tell us why, exactly, the hanging of Ryan counted as an abuse of process. I’ve mentioned two elements of my answer to this question: these are Bolte’s attempt to block the right to appeal, which failed, and his abuse of the translation process. Here is a third: speech-act theory can only tell us about the intentional uptake of one antecedent text, in this case, the sentence, and Bolte’s confirmation of the sentence did just this. But the clemency delib­ erations of the Cabinet were expected to take up multiple, quite heteroge­ neous texts, not all of them generated from the trial. Some, for example, might come from the prisoner’s record of conduct, some from comparisons with other cases, some from church and other community petitions, some from psychiatric assessments. Many of these would be paralegal, or subjudi­ cial. Three in the Ryan case are of particular interest: one was from the prison governor, who was convinced that Ryan should not hang, and I should explain that it was one of his own officers who had been the victim of the killing. Another was from seven out of the twelve jurors, who, although they had found Ryan guilty and did not resile from that, affirmed, in a sworn affi­ davit, that they thought that the killing had been accidental, and that they had been confident that the sentence would be commuted. A third was the sub­ mission by the prosecuting counsel, who informed his minister that he did not think the death penalty was warranted in this case, and that he would not have _ Digitized by

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sought it. One of the things that made Bolte’s decision abusive was that he blocked many of these petitions and submissions from consideration by the cabinet, and the clemency deliberations were held as if they were solely the uptake of the formal sentence. The important thing to note here is that uptake depends on a step that is not specified in speech-act theory. This is the step in which our uptake selects, defines, or represents its object. Those who have practical experience in translation will recognize this step. It is not automatic. If I decide to trans­ late the sonnetness of a sonnet, I will get a very different version than if I decide to attend primarily to the syntax of its component sentences or to its metaphors. And those who have practical experience of such matters will also know that there is no translation, no matter how casual, that does not operate a selection such as this. Uptake is first the taking of an object; it is not the causation of a response by an intention. This is the hidden dimension of the long, ramified, intertextual memory of uptake: the object is taken from a set of possibles. The distinctive methodological move of speech-act theory is to eliminate these possible others. Austin sets these aside, as he sets aside the perlocutionary effects and the sequels of a speech-act in order to isolate it and to characterize it in its pristine unity. As Austin sets the aside the heteroge­ neous antecedents and sequels of an utterance in the interests of philosophical rigor and classificatory clarity, so did Henry Bolte. It is an effective strategy of power. I want to say that we do not understand this strategy, nor do we understand its power to produce intentional outcomes, unless we understand that what it docs is to block and select the memory that generates uptake. Ryan died, and I still have not answered the question, how does a death sentence become a death? We cannot solve this problem by invoking the pervasiveness of discourse. As Cover puts it, “Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another” (Cover, 1986, p. 1601); nor, I believe, can we solve it simply by tak­ ing the institutional dimensions of punishment as a “context” for interpreting the word of the judge. We might think of the execution as consisting of a con­ ventional verbal form—the warrant, with what Austin calls some “accompa­ nying” conventional features of another kind; but it is hard for me to think of the action of the hanging itself as equivalent to the formal gestures that he uses to illustrate his point (you will recall that he mentions the tipping of the hat, the shaking of hands, or other acts of greeting or obeisance). Only an exclusive, philosophical kind of attention to what might count as “purely lin­ guistic” can give this subsidiary status to the actions involved in this act. Cover proposes a useful analogy for dealing with this problem: “The judge in imposing the sentence takes for granted the role structure (of police, jailers or other enforcers) which might be analogized to the 'transmission’ of the engine of justice” (Cover, 1986, pp. 1618-1619). This mechanical model of “transmission” is then restated as a “translation” (Cover, 1986, p. 1626). I’m Digitized by

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sure I don’t need to remind you that this is exactly how physicists use the term “translation” (Serres, 1974). Forces and energies are “translated” from, say, a human decision to a piece of technology, in the same way as from a bil­ liard cue to a ball. And this is the kind of thing that Peirce also means when he insists that the pragmatics of signs involves a translation from mind to matter. It is in order to give practical effect to this principle that I reiterate a slogan I have used on many occasions: I have yet to meet a sign that uses only one language, or a genre that uses only one kind of sign. This is a Peircean challenge to the Saussurean definition: “use,” parole, discourse or whatever are never simply the implementation of an isolated system. Things such as the turning of keys in locks, the knotting of ropes, the weighing of a man’s body, and the calculation of the length of drop necessary to kill him, the release of a lever to drop the trap-door, all these things are actions associ­ ated with knowledges, and Peirce would count them signs exactly as he counts the sentence a sign. They signify in their sequence, in the ways in which each is articulated with other sign-events. In practice, signs work together by translating the material of one into the material operations of another. This point is of the greatest importance for releasing speech-act theo­ ry from its confinement in spccch. All these things arc signs—that’s what guarantees that they can translate into one another; but we are talking about translation, not porridge. They need to be translated because they are formally and materially distinct. If they were not, they would be signs in themselves, and nothing is a sign in itself. Peirce does not explain this mechanism so much as illustrate it in practice, but he also gives an analogy for it. I would like you to notice the neat symmetry between his analogy and the one I have quoted from the law professor, Robert Cover. Peirce, I want to remind you, was a working scien­ tist as well as a philosopher of science, so scientific examples are frequent in his work. But as Cover resorts to an example from mechanical physics, Peirce resorts to an example from the parajudicial operations of the justice system. When Peirce theorizes infinite semiosis, he is at pains to ensure that the realm of signs is subject to no other force hut that of signs. But he is equally concerned not to allow signhood to remain within, or to be defined by, the realm of pure ideality. Signhood has effects in the world, it changes things, gets people to do things, has material consequences. This capacity is inherent in signs of all kinds; it is not confined to a particular class of utter­ ances conditioned by a performative grammar. In order to model the pragmat­ ics of signs, Peirce uses the analogy of the sheriff: W hen we speak o f an “idea,” or “notion,” or “conception o f the mind,” we are most usually thinking— or trying to think—o f an idea abstracted

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from all efficiency. But a court without a sheriff, o r the means o f creating one, would not be a court at all; and did it ever occur to you . . . that an idea without efficiency is something equally absurd and unthinkable? (Peirce, 1932, vol. 1, para. 213)

The idea I wish to put is that, just as the sheriff takes the sentence into execution, so is some such principle required to account for the “significate effects” of any sign. This is uptake. We need a “sheriff’ in speech act theory, but we cannot “create one’’ if we think of speech acts as being con­ fined to speech. Semiotics holds that a semiotic act is constituted by signs from a variety of media and a variety of languages. It is this principle, the always-already of intersystem translation, that grounds the capacity to create the sheriff. And it is also this that ensures that semiosis is infinite, that it does not close and is not confined to a particular domain. Hence, when the hang­ man took up the order to execute, the story did not lie down. Infinite semiosis is not infinite in a single dimension, but can ramify in multiple ways. The formal chain that leads from the sentencing to the exe­ cution does not exhaust the semiosis of the death penalty. There are other more or less conventional uptakes: Legal appeals and formal petitions for mercy intervene, as well as the cabinet deliberations. Less formal genres, too, have their place: press reports of the crime and the court-room drama, editori­ als and cartoons, political meetings, banners, slogans, telegrams and protest letters, public petitions, even obscene phone calls, all accompanied Ryan on his way to the gallows. Ryan had conversations with the chaplain, his lawyers, the prison governor, warders, his mother, he was weighed, several times, the results meticulously recorded; he played cards or accepted “the ineffable comfort of dominoes” (Koestler & Rolph, in Jones, 1968, p. 222). He was saying the rosary as he walked to the gallows and he held it in his pinioned hands as he dropped. He said all the quirky, funny, and touching things that have been quoted ad infinitum (c ’est le cas de le dire) in the sto­ ries. The chaplain prayed, the doctor witnessed death, the journalists signed formal declarations, the public was notified, and Ryan’s body was buried in quicklime in the prison grounds. In a marked or an unmarked grave? It is not clear: mostly they say “unmarked” to say he has been robbed of his biography (Dickins, 1996),3 but lately his daughter was allowed to visit it. It is marked with a code number, carved somewhere on the inside of the perimeter wall of ^Dickins gives Ryan a posthumous soliloquy: “The worst thing the state can do to you is remove a man’s history from himV As though I was never married or had three kid­ dies./ I never ran a fruitshop called Ryan’s Fruit PalaeeV I never loved my mother, Cecilia . . 7 1 never shot George HodsonV The least the Government could do is shout me a tombstone, so my loved ones may place daphne by it, and I shall be remembered” (p. 78). Digitized by

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H.M. Prison Pentridge: no name, and no biography that could be summoned by it, no identifying details, as if this practice had been devised to put a defi­ nite stop to semiosis. But this final genre is not the end of the story. It is there that all the stories start: “Ronald Joseph Ryan was executed at Pentridge on the 3rd of February 1967; he was the last man hanged in Australia.” The sher­ iff is the messenger of the court. Responsible for the execution of the sen­ tence, for its conforming to due process, for the official notifications of death and thus for the closure of semiosis, it fell to him, if the hangman was inca­ pacitated, to “do it." But it was also the sheriff who issued the invitations to the journalists, to attend and write their stories if they must. These stories have had effects. It is commonly believed that the story telling that was generated by the Ryan case was responsible for the abolition o f the death penalty in Australia and continues to be responsible for the impossibility of its reinstatement. So I would have to reiterate my question at this point: how does a sentence become an execution, how does the telling of a story change something in the operations of law and judicial or subjudicial violence? I cannot answer this question in any detail in the space available, but I will say a couple of things to indicate that the answer must lie in the genres that constitute collective memory and the uptakes they condition. This means understanding what other stories were possible and have not prevailed: one of these is the story of the poor man who was killed when Ryan escaped from gaol, and in particular the story of his daughter, who complains every now and then that nobody cares about her. Another is the story of crime and punishment, which is the story the premier was trying to tell, and which failed utterly to impress the populace. The story that is told is a political story: it demonstrates an abuse of power by the state against an individual. This story is often told about capital punishment, and it is rare for the death penalty to be executed without it. Why this is the only story of the Ryan hanging, and why it continues to be so vivid in our memories, requires further generic investigation. I suggest that it fits with three generic traditions, each of which has important things to say about Australian cultural histories. The first of these is a whole set of stories about outwitting the authorities, as Ryan did by escaping from gaol. There are many of these from penal and colonial Australia, all involving Irish Catholics who are outlaws but not evil villains, all of whom are condemned at the hands of the dominant English, and many of whom get away, or become legendary and in that mode immortal. I recommend to you the most recent novel by David Malouf, The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) which tells exactly this story, most beautifully. These stories position their readers on the other side of the law. The second is a genre of writing that accompanied hanging in England from the early nineteenth century, and of which the most illustrious examples are those of Dickens and Thackeray. This genre has an intimate _ Digitized

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autobiographical thread woven in with journalistic reporting, and it so hap­ pens that many of the published stories about the Ryan hanging are by jour­ nalists who witnessed the hanging, and who have gone on, repeatedly, to bear witness to the trauma of the event. In this connection, I mention Sister Prejean’s (1993) book, Dead Man Walking, and the film that was made from it, both of which work in this way. In the very effective examples of this genre, among which I would class Prejean’s book as well as Lewis Fitz­ Gerald’s film about the Ryan hanging, the witnessing is witnessed and the trauma is visited upon its readers and spectators. The performativity of trau­ ma dissociates us from the role in which we are otherwise cast, as the popula­ tion that seeks protection in law and order. As Thackeray ended his essay, so does Lewis Fitz-Gerald end his film: I hope and pray that no Australian of a future generation is fated to share this memory. The Ryan story is the story of the last man hanged in Australia; this is its job, the story must make this so. The third is the much older gallows lore of a popular tradition, in which the bravado and the humor of the condemned person were legendary, exciting pity and admiration for a crowd that identified more with him than with the figures of authority that hanged him. This tradition gave us Punch, the puppet who hangs the hangman, and the magazine that institutionalized political satire and the art of the cartoon. The uptake in this cartoon is a joke, it shows Bolte with a noose around his neck, but it is also a threat. It has been taken up accordingly, because uptake has a very long memory.

REFERENCES Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words: The William James lec­ tures delivered in Harvard University in 1955 (J.O Urmson, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics o f the performative. New York and London: Routledge. Coe, R. (1987). An apology for form; or, who took the form out of process? College English, 49(1), 13-28. Coe, R. (1994): Teaching genre as process. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Learning and teaching genre. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. Cover, R. (1986). Violence and the word. Yale Law Journal, 95(8), 16011629. Dawe, B. (1992). A Victorian hangman tells his love. In Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-1992 (4th ed.). Melbourne: Longman.

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Dickins, B. (1996). Guts and pity: The hanging that ended capital punish­ ment in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press. Fitz-Gerald, L. (1993). The last man hanged. Bill Bennett Productions P/L; ABC and NSW Film and Television Office. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth o f the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Freadman, A. (1994). Anyone for tennis. In P. Medway & A. Freedman (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 43-66). London: Taylor and Francis. Freadman, A. (1999, February). The green tarpaulin: Another story of the Ryan hanging. UTS Review. Freadman, R. (1999). Ronald Ryan. In A. Freadman, The green tarpaulin: Another story of the Ryan hanging. UTS Review. Jakobson, R. (1966). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. Brower (Ed.), On translation (pp. 78-86). New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, B. (1968). The penalty is death. Melbourne: Sun Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1983). Le differend. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Malouf, D. (1996). The conversations at Curlow Creek. London: Chatto & Windus. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal o f Speech, 70, 151-167. Peirce, C. S. (1932-58). Collected papers. Vols. 1-6 (C. Hartshome & C. Weiss, eds.); Vols 7-9 (A. Burks, ed.). Cambridge: The Bellknap Press. Prejean, H. (1993): Dead man walking: An eyewitness account o f the death penalty in the United States. New York: Random House. Prior, T. (1990). Bolte by Bolte. Melbourne: Craftsman. Reddy, M. (1970). The conduit metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 284-324). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saussure, F. de (1972). Cours de linguistique ginirale. Edition critique, pr6par6e par Tullio di Mauro. Paris: Payot. Series, M. (1974). Hermes 111: La traduction. Paris: Minuit. Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical investigations (3rd ed.). (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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3 Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and Ideology Anthony Pare McGill University

The personality is strangely composite. (Gramsci, 19 7 1, p. 324) . . . each act o f writing is a potential struggle because there are competing systems o f values and beliefs at work. (Clarke & Ivanic, 1997, p. 71)

As the chapters in this book indicate, the reconception of genre as social action inaugurated by Carolyn Miller’s 1984 article offers a rich theoretical ground on which to reunite aspects of rhetorical action that were estranged by previous theoretical perspectives. The expanded notion of genre has allowed theorists and researchers to fuse text and context, product and process, cogni­ tion and culture in a single, dynamic concept. In addition, by enlarging the focus of attention in rhetorical inquiry to include the full social and symbolic action of textual practice, the reconception of genre encourages us to consider the complex interconnections among these once-separated aspects of writing.

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This chapter explores one particularly promising avenue for genre theory and research: the relationship between language and ideology.1-2 As habitual practices, genres serve as one of the chief discursive forces in what Fairclough (1995) calls the “naturalization of ideology”: A particular set o f discourse conventions (e.g., for conducting medical consultations, or media interviews, or for writing crime reports in news­ papers) implicitly em bodies certain ideologies— particular knowledge and beliefs, particular “positions” for the types o f social subject that par­ ticipate in that practice (e.g., doctors, patients, interviewees, newspaper readers), and particular relationships between categories o f participants (e.g., between doctors and patients). In so far as conventions become naturalized and commonsensical, so too do these ideological presuppo­ sitions. (p. 94) 'Ideology has been an unstable and highly contested concept since the word ideology first appeared in English in 1796 (Williams, 1976/1983, pp. 153-157). In some con­ temporary use, ideology describes what other people have: those with an agenda; die so-called “politically correct.” In this sense, ideology suggests ulterior motives and is contrasted with neutrality, impartiality, disinterestedness. O r ideology is used as a label for the grand political narratives: capitalism, communism, fascism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism. In this sense, ideology is philosophy or political power writ large: the actions o f the state, the ruling class, a force from above; this use o f the word implies that most o f us are either victims or observers o f ideology, rather than its agents. Its use in this chapter follows from the work o f Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault and, in d iscip lin e s co n cern ed w ith la n g u ag e, B erlin (1 9 6 6 ), F aig ley (1 9 9 2 ), Fairclough (1992, 1995), Gee (1996), and Lem ke (1995) among others. This use acknowledges what Gramsci (1971) calls the “strangely composite” (p. 324) make-up o f human personality and belief and views ideology as complex, conflictual, and con­ tradictory social practice: as activities in the world that construct and maintain privi­ lege, knowledge, prevailing values, relations o f power, and so on. This is ideology as a process, as socially organized activity, as the daily practices o f a society’s cultural, econom ic, and political institutions— practices that favor a dom inant m inority. Moreover, these ideologically influenced practices “interpellate” (Althusser, 1971) or constitute individuals as social subjects, locating them in multiple and competing sub­ je ct positions within institutional life. Such an understanding o f ideology helps to explain both the disjunctures between stated beliefs (what one says) and actual activity (what one does) and the unconscious ways in which those disjunctures arise as peo­ ple, through their participation in socially organized practices, take on the subject positions, the social roles, the values and the visions o f the communities they join. 2Perhaps the most explicit and methodical of recent research attempts to link ideology and language have been made by Norman Fairclough and his colleagues and associ­ ates (e.g., Fairclough, 1992, 1995 [see, especially, pp. 86-96]; Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996). These efforts— variously known as “critical discourse analysis,” “critical linguistics,” and (in pedagogic m anifestations) “critical literacies” (e.g.,

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The automatic, ritual unfolding of genres makes them appear normal, even inevitable; they are simply the way things are done. And their status as historical practice within institutions or disciplines makes them appear immutable and certainly beyond the influence of the transitory individuals who participate in them, and who become implicated in the subtle ideologies they enact. Coe (1994) argues that “genres embody attitudes,” and adds that “[sjince those attitudes are built into generic structures, they are sometimes danced without conscious awareness or intent on the part of the individual using the genre” (p. 183). Fairclough (199S) makes a similar claim when he argues that “there is a one-to-one relationship” between “ideological forma­ tions” (Althusser, 1971) and “discursive formations” (Foucault, 1972; Pecheux, 1982), and coins the term “ideological-discursive formations” to get at “the inseparability of ‘ways of talking’ and ‘ways of seeing’” (p. 40). He says that “in the process of acquiring the ways of talking which are normatively associated with a [particular] subject position, one necessarily acquires also its ways of seeing, or ideological norms” (p. 39). This chapter explores this ideological action of genre and, in particu­ lar, the ways in which genres locate or position individuals within the power relations of institutional activity.3 For me, as for Green and Lee (1994), “rhetoric is as much concerned with the formation of identities as the con­ Muspratt, Luke, & Freebody, 1997) and “critical language awareness” (e.g., Clark & Ivanic, 1997)— frequently rely on Fairclough’s three-levels o f analysis: “(a) analysis o f text, (b) analysis o f processes o f text production, consumption, and distribution, and (c) sociocultural analysis of the discursive event (be it an interview, a scientific paper, o r a conversation) as a whole” (1995, p. 25). Here, too, genre offers a unifying view o f rhetorical action by encouraging a search for significant patterns at each level o f the analysis and for cohesive significance that relates those patterns across the levels. 3Although it is true that genres can enable and even liberate writers, institutional gen­ res serve primarily to conserve and standardize, and usually offer the individual writer little room to improvise. In this chapter I am interested in exploring this constraining force o f genre— what Carl Hemdl (19% ) calls “the ideologically coercive effects of institutional and professional discourse,” or, “the dark side o f the force” (p. 455). From this perspective, workplace genres may be seen as the scripted text and action of institutional dramas: Within their encompassing language and activity, genres place participating individuals in the relatively inflexible roles and relationships required for the enactment o f institutional values, beliefs, and attitudes (Par6 & Smart, 1994). As Fairclough (1995) puts it: “Each institution has its own set o f speech events, its own differentiated settings and scenes, its cast o f participants, and its own norms for their combination— for which members of the cast may participate in which speech events, playing which parts, in which settings, in the pursuit o f which topics or goals, for which institutionally recognized purposes” (p. 38). In his analysis o f social work records as “institutional narratives,” Lars-Christer Hyd6n (1997) points out that “a narrative always excludes another possible story” (p. 261), and it is this exclusionary effect o f genre that makes it a useful lens on institutional ideology. Original from Digitized

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struction of texts” (p. 208). The workplace settings considered here are those common to social work. By examining a variety of rhetorical situations with­ in different workplaces, the chapter offers a peek through the chinks that develop when a genre’s facade of normalcy is cracked by resistance, inappro­ priate deployment, unfamiliarity, or critical analysis. Evidence to support the chapter’s claims comes from interviews with social work students, educators, and practitioners, as well as from transcripts of supervisory sessions between veteran social workers and their student apprentices.

SEEING THROUGH GENRE Institutional genres are successful patterns in local discursive forms and func­ tions. In the institution’s evolution of textual practices, they have proven effective and endurable; they have shown themselves capable of adapting to (and influencing) the changing scene. But their persistence is not the result of natural selection so much as human volition: genres are soeiorhetoridal habits or rituals that “work,” that get something done, that achieve desirable ends. Their existence raises a series of questions that lead inexorably to ideology: For whom do they “work”? To what end? Do they “work” equally for all who participate in or are affected by them? According to Gunnarson, Linell, and Nordberg (1997), “[w]e must . . . ask ourselves not only how professional genres have been constructed but also for whom, for what needs and why they have been formed the way they are” (p. 3). However, that inquiry may prove difficult because, as Fairclough suggests above, discourse conventions may cloak vested interests or imbal­ ances in power. “Ideology,” says Berlin (1996), “always brings with it strong social and cultural reinforcement, so that what we take to exist, to have value, and to be possible seems necessary, normal, and inevitable—in the nature of things” (p. 78). Fairclough (1995) says it this way: “metaphorically speaking, ideology endeavours to cover its own traces” (p. 44). The result, in Bruce Kidd’s (1987) earthy and memorable phrase, is that “[i]deology is like B.O., you never smell your own” (p. 250). Unlike B.O., however, others’ ideology is also difficult to detect. Further complicating this camouflaging effect is the fact that ideolo­ gy, as manifest in institutional practice, is fragmented and conflictual, so that no single, unadulterated ideological perspective prevails entirely. In other words, power is rarely naked and never monolithic: In most institutional con­ texts, there is a constant struggle for ideological supremacy, with competing visions and values being advanced, challenged, negotiated, and altered. Genres are key institutional sites for such struggles (Schryer, 1994). Consequently, it “is quite possible for a social subject to occupy institutional Digitized by

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subject positions which are ideologically incompatible, or to occupy a subject position incompatible with his or her overt political or social beliefs and affil­ iations, without being aware of any contradiction” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 42). Or, as Berlin (1996) says, “we are constituted by subject formulations and subject positions that do not always square with each other” (p. 62). Just as ideology is masked by convention, so, too, can these contradictions be hidden by the apparent naturalness of daily practice. But genre’s illusion of normalcy may be cracked or exposed at cer­ tain moments: when an event occurs that does not match the anticipated, socially construed exigence to which the genre responds; or, in a related situa­ tion, when the genre is stretched too wide, and its forms and actions are inap­ propriate or ill-suited to the occasion (as when textual forms are transported out of the contexts in which they developed); when newcomers first begin to participate in a genre and find it “unnatural” or counter to their own discourse habits and aims (developed in school, for example); when there are shifts in power relations within institutions, so that the values produced by discourse practices no longer favor those with authority to change or influence those practices. For the past ten years I have taken advantage of these cracks in genre to study the complexities of power in the rhetorical activity of social work, and I have come to agree with Berlin (1996) that ideology is “minutely inscribed in the discourse of daily practice, where it emerges as pluralistic and conflicted. A given historical moment displays a wide variety of compet­ ing ideologies, and each subject displays permutations of these conflicts” (p. 78). As with other professional discourses, social work genres are most ideo­ logically charged and conflicted in institutional settings—such as hospitals, school systems, and courts of law—where multiple communities of practice create overlapping jurisdictions and activity systems (Dias, 2000; Russell, 1997), a highly competitive “linguistic marketplace” (Bourdieu, 1984/1993), multilayered hierarchies, and complex, articulated genre sets (Devitt, 1993) and genre systems (Bazerman, 1994). Within such settings, social work texts move beyond disciplinary boundaries into legal contexts, medical charts, psy­ chologists’ files, and school records; they serve as well to monitor workers and to justify budget cuts or allocations; invariably, and in countless ways, they influence the worker-client relationship. In this intricate web of rhetori­ cal relations, social workers are powerful and powerless simultaneously, and any single genre is both an act of and a response to authority (Hall, Sarangi, & Slembrouck, 1997). And it is most often within the stress of these complex settings that the ideological action of genre can be glimpsed, as the following examples demonstrate.

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THE DOGS OF GENRE Some time ago, I had the extraordinary experience of working with thirteen Inuit social workers in an intensive course in social work writing. The stu­ dents, all women from arctic Quebec, and all practicing social workers, were enrolled in McGill University’s Certificate in Northern Social Work Practice, a course of studies designed, in part, to train the uncredentialed Inuit in the theory and practice of contemporary, “professional” (i.e., southern, urban) social work.4 Although they carry a full case load and are indispensable to the practice of state-supported social work in the north, the women are called “social assistants” and work under the supervision of nonaboriginal social workers. The course was meant to help the workers with their recordkeeping tasks. Social workers in the north, like those elsewhere, must write many dif­ ferent types of records, and each text is woven into complex, regular patterns of discourse and action. There are linked and sequenced texts within their own discipline—what Devitt (1993) calls genre sets—that track a client’s tra­ jectory from initial assessment to discharge summary, and these texts join, overlap, complement, and compete with texts from other disciplines in a com­ plex universe of discourse that Bazerman (1994) calls a “genre system.” The social work texts are entered as court evidence in abuse cases; they justify forced removal of children from their families; they alert health workers to patients’ psychosocial contexts. They share file space with police reports, psychological assessments, medical charts. All their texts contain, and often create, stories of pain, anger, violence, and loss. Both the workers and their managers were dissatisfied with the women’s recordkeeping, but for very different reasons. I was told that the workers needed help with English grammar, spelling, and punctuation so that they could provide more information and more detail in their records. The workers, however, complained that their managers always wanted to know so much about clients. As Katie said, “white people are greedy for other peo­ ple’s problems.” To put them somewhat at ease, I began the course by asking the workers to tell me about something from their own culture: some story, idea, event, or custom that I didn’t know about. They wrote about making bannock, sewing sealskin boots, ice fishing, and other traditional activities. Marta wrote a vivid account of using dog hair to trim parkas and mittens. She stood 4To be fair, the southern, white social work educators who have been most involved in McGill’s Certificate in Northern Social Work Practice have attempted to bring a cultural and critical perspective to the curriculum and, increasingly, have turned teaching responsibilities over to Inuit graduates, who then conduct the courses in Inuktitut.

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beside my desk as I read it. “This is very good, Marta,” I said, “it’s so detailed and clear I could almost do it myself using your instructions, but I still have two questions. First, what do you use to trim the hair and, second, how do you hold the dog still?” Marta looked at me for a long moment, took my pen from my hand, and wrote on the bottom of her paper: “It’s a dead dog.” When the two of us stopped laughing long enough to tell the others what had happened, another worker, Angie, went back to her recipe for misiraq—a dip made from beluga whale fat—and added “step number one: shoot a beluga.” More laughter and, after talking among themselves in Inuktitut, the workers told me that when a white person’s dog goes missing in the north, all the white folks look to see who among the Inuit has a new parka. Apparently, they have good reason to do so. For all of us, the episode was dramatic evidence of the gap in knowl­ edge and trust that separates cultural groups. I spoke of the need to be gener­ ous with detail and explanation when writing as an expert to those less knowledgeable; they spoke of their reluctance to be so open, so revealing. The degree of explicit detail required in documentation— the thorough records that their managers wanted—meant exposing their clients, all of whom were friends, family, or acquaintances, to the white authorities. Most painfully for the workers, records reduced their clients’ stories to narratives of failure and textually organized their lives under institutional and cultural cate­ gories of dysfunction and deviation. Recordkeeping, said Elisuaq, was like “stealing someone’s life.” The workers’ dilemma indicates how participation in workplace gen­ res situates writers in relations of power. Obviously, in the case of the Inuit workers, culture and colonization introduced multiple levels of ideological tension, but their struggles with recording exposed something else: The Inuit workers were being forced to employ rhetorical strategies developed in the urban south, where workers and clients live apart and have no relationship outside the interview, the office, or the courtroom. Transporting textual prac­ tices to the north meant transporting as well the elements of context and cul­ ture that had created and sustained them: the impersonal, detached persona of professional life, the anticipated narratives of southern social work clients, the categories, lifestyles, values, beliefs, and power relations of the urban welfare state. As a result, the Inuit workers were forced into a position between cultures and into the role of professional representatives of the colo­ nial power. As Evelyn, one of the workers, said, I “have to satisfy both dis­ tinct cultures: the paper-work culture [white bureaucracy]. . . and my culture, you know, who I am, who [my clients] are, the way we speak, the way we talk.” More than any other aspect of their work, writing separated them from their everyday lives, their everyday selves. Most striking to me was the way in which participation in the social work genres pushed the workers toward the detached professional self that was essential for participation in those gen_ Digitized

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res in the south. But, as Evelyn said, “If I become a professional person with my family, I’m not going to have any more family . . . I’m going to push them away.”

GENRE AND THE DIVIDED SELF According to Gee (1996), “[discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes” (p. 127). A discourse, says Gee, is an “identity kit” (p. 127). The Inuit workers’ resis­ tance to the distancing role of professional and the ideology it supports is resistance to at least two enforced identities: a nonaboriginal persona imposed and signaled by the use of English, and the detached, professional persona of southern, urban social work. Although this tension may be most apparent and uncomfortable in cross-cultural settings, such as that experienced by the Inuit workers, where participation in a professional or disciplinary discourse may impose dual identities (at least), entry into any new discourse requires new subject posi­ tions, new identities. This was apparent during a workshop I conducted with a group of workers in an urban, state-funded, health and social service agency. The workers were comparing and evaluating two fictional records that I had modeled on actual records produced by the agency. There were certain key differences between the records; for example, one record contained such con­ structions as “I believe,” “I think,” and “I recommend,” whereas the other had typical passive and self-effacing constructions such as “It is recommended” and “the undersigned believes”—the latter a peculiar and deflected reference to the self commonly found in institutional social work discourse. Inclusion of the self in the text, of course, lays bare the workers’ position in power. As usual when I introduce this difference to a group of writers in an institutional setting, there was general agreement that first-person pronouns should not be used in official records, but one senior social worker challenged the others: “Why not,” he asked. At first he got the usual answers: too personal, too informal, not professional; but then one worker, grasping beyond cliches, said this: “The ‘I’ in the record is not the same ‘I’ that sits at home on the couch, eating a hamburger, and watching T.V.” I think the accumulation of mundane detail in his explanation— home, couch, hamburger, and T.V.—points to a division the Inuit workers were trying to resist, but that many social workers feel they must make between the lived experience of their daily lives—the “I” in the world—and the disembodied experience of institutionalized collective life—the “I” sub­ sumed in the professional role of organizational member, and implicated in a Digitized by

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complex and conflicted ideology. As another social worker told me, becom­ ing a professional means 'learning to separate yourself. . . . You can’t let yourself get emotionally attached or involved with your clients; and there has to be a point where you remove yourself.. . . You have to harden yourself to some degree.” Social work ethnographer and practitioner Gerald de Montigny (1995) says that social workers must learn “a grammar of expression and a professional form of disembodied presence marked by containment, control, and managed emotionality” (p. 41). I believe that workers develop this “disembodied presence,” in part, to help them reconcile the ideological conflict between their dual and contra­ dictory role as advocate for the client and agent of the state. But similar dis­ sension exists between their role and status as social workers vis & vis other workers in complex institutional structures (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pard, 1999; Par£, 2000). Social work often proceeds in both concert and con­ flict with more powerful professions, such as law and medicine. In the “lin­ guistic marketplace” (Bourdieu, 1984/1993) thus created, social work suffers: “Social work involves a ‘defensive discourse’, in which accounts offer rebut­ tals to potential charges even before they are made” (Hall, Sarangi, & Slembrouck, 1997, p. 268). In the following interview excerpt, a hospital social worker explains this tension: [D]octors have in their mind one idea, one suggestion for someone, and you have a different idea and the length o f time that it takes you to imple­ ment your idea might not fall in conjunction with the doctor’s. So if the doctor w ants a discharge but the patient has now here to go, then it becomes time for you to advocate on their behalf. But it becomes also very difficult because you’re dealing with a structure, an institutional structure where there are rules and regulations about how long a patient can stay, etc. So it puts pressure on your jo b ___ I think you’re constant­ ly battling with the structure and I think you’re battling with doctors who don’t want to agree with the recommendations that you’ve made if it hin­ ders a patient’s medical progress.

In the same hospital, the director of the social service department told me, “we’re constantly being looked at by the administration to justify our establishment.. . . You’ve got to be able to document who it was that you’ve seen, and what it is you’ve done.” The individual writer is caught between social work and medicine, between the messy complexity of a client’s life and the bottom-line efficiency of budget-conscious administrators. Similar stress exists for a social worker within the juvenile court system, who says that her advisory report “will be totally dissected, usually by two lawyers, a judge, the parents, and the kid; so you have to write this report with shields all around you.” The professional persona of institutional genres provides protection Digitized by

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within these ideological tensions. It divides the individual’s sense of identity, and it allows the workers to manage the ideology of everyday practice and the conflicts between belief and action that results from their multiple subject positions and their location in overlapping and occasionally opposing cultures or communities of practice. The move into the professional persona is an ide­ ological transformation that occurs through participation in workplace genres. “The text,” says de Montigny (1995), “is a mask concealing the embodied speaker who utters this or that claim. Through the text, social workers can promote their claims as though these were the universal wisdom of the profession in general” (p. 64). The role of professional raises the indi­ vidual newcomer above the fray. In narrative terms, the author becomes nar­ rator rather than actor or character: an observer, not an agent, outside the action, recording events for posterity. It is what Hyd6n (1997) calls “the view from nowhere”: “not the perspective of the omnipresent narrator of the nine­ teenth century novel, but rather a story told by an implicit narrator who is allembracing and all-knowing. In this way, a specific effect is produced, namely, the impression of objectivity and impersonal professionalism” (p. 259).

LEARNING GENRE, LEARNING IDEOLOGY How does this occur? How do individuals leam the divided and disembodied persona that allows them to negotiate the contradictions and conflicts of insti­ tutional ideology? In the following interview excerpt, a social work student describes his experience during field placement in a hospital setting: My first assessment that I wrote . . . I worked closely with my supervisor on and . . . she really reworded a lot o f it. And then the child psychiatrist said to me, “I can’t sign this!” So it was quite a shock. And he had dif­ ferent expectations in terms o f how information should be organized than she did----- So she was speculadng in a way or drawing links throughout the write-up o f the assessment. And what the psychiatrist wanted was fact, fact, fact, fact, fa c t.. . . So he had a couple o f categories which she didn’t h a v e .. . . I understand where they’re both coming from and some­ times I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place.

Thus positioned, the newcomer may find the lure of “fact” irresistible, especially because psychiatry is a more powerful discourse than social work, one with far greater currency in the hospital’s “linguistic marketplace." Even more influential is the discourse of medicine, which strips the institutional nar­ rative down to the minimum and entirely erases the narrator. The student who found himself caught “between a rock and a hard place” experienced a similar division between the ideologies of social work and medicine: Digitized by

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[The doctor] said to me, “your writing is very literary and you are writing in a medical co n tex t” So I think that’s part o f what it’s about, that it’s medical and scientific and so in science we want, well, western science is very much like categorization wouldn’t you say? So I think that’s the justification. Basically what I see I’m learning is how to practice an art, an art o f w orking w ith p eo p le’s lives, an art o f helping people get unstuck and heal themselves and their families through communication and various other things. But it takes place within a scientific domain. So that you can write up a report as artistic and literary and that doesn’t fly. O r you can write it up in a way that looks more scientific and closer to objective.

According to Fairclough (1992), “[w]here contrasting discursive practices are in use in a particular domain or institution, the likelihood is that part of that contrast is ideological” (p. 88). While this newcomer to profes­ sional practice was struggling to reconcile the ideology he had developed through his social work education with the dominant ideology of medicine, the hospital’s social service department was in the process of shortening and standardizing all of its records, in large part because the doctors and nurses would not read the longer accounts typically produced by social workers. The new “ideological-discursive formations” (Fairclough, 199S) thus formed would, in time, turn ways of talking into ways of seeing, and strand the social work writer in a complex web of sometimes competing ideologies. In the following and final example, a brief excerpt from a taperecorded session between a social work student (St) and his supervisor (Su), the supervisor gives the student dramatically explicit advice on removing himself from the social work text. The two are revising a text the student has written: Su: Now, when we write as social workers in a dossier, we kind o f deper­ sonalize it as opposed to taking “ I”; and we use “the worker” or “the social worker.” . . . St: It has to be impersonalized as in “the worker,” even if it’s you, you have to say “the worker”? Su: That’s right. So you wrote here, “I contacted.” You want to see it’s coming from the worker, not you as Michael, but you as the worker. So when I’m sometimes in Intake and [working] as the screener, I write in my Intake Notes “the screener inquired about.” . . . So it becomes less personal. You begin to put yourself into the role o f the worker, not “I, Michael.” . . . [I]t’s a headset; it’s a beginning. And even in your evalua­ tions . . . the same thing: as opposed to “ I,” it’s “worker," and when we do a CTM SP for placement for long-term care, “the worker.” So it posi­ tions us, I think. It’s not me, it’s my role; and I’m in the role o f a profes­ sional doing this jo b----Digitized by

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St: So in the notes all the “l”s— “ I did this, I did that”— should be elim i­ nated; and just “worker” and it has to be like impersonal. Su: Impersonal yet you’re identifying yourself professionally. It’s not “I,” a regular person going into somebody’s dossier, but it’s in the capac­ ity o f a professional.

This erasure of the self or—more accurately, perhaps—this transfor­ mation of the self into a “professional” locates the learner anonymously with­ in the institution’s naturalized ideology. It is a transformation realized through participation in workplace genres, a process nicely summarized in this pas­ sage from de Montigny (1995): Professional consciousness em erges through the intellectual practices required to do organizational work. The semblances o f homogeneity that mark its production, and ultimately its reification as professional knowl­ edge, are rooted in the mundane socially organized methods used by actual practitioners to make sense, sustain the warrant o f claims, and dis­ tin g u is h p ro p e r u n d e rs ta n d in g s fro m im p ro p e r u n d e rs ta n d in g s . Documentary production provides a basis for the practical expression and reification o f a universalized professional consciousness. A documentary reality provides a space where the impersonal, general, and situationally transcendent standpoint o f the profession and the organization can be substituted for the lived standpoints o f those who are subject to and sub­ ject themselves to its determination, (pp. 27-28)

Lemke (1995) makes a similar point when he argues that discourses “function to legitimate, naturalize or disguise the inequities they sustain. They function to get us thinking along particular lines, the lines of a common sense, which are not as likely to lead to subversive conclusions as using other discourses might” (p. 13). The routines of genre—their regularity, their dura­ bility, their status as historical practice—are collective and conservative forces operating to make sense “common” and to locate individuals in identi­ ties and relationships that maintain ideologies and allow them to pass as “sense.” Are we so constrained by institutional discourse that we cannot alter its outcomes or undermine the values and beliefs it promotes? I have seen too many social workers subvert institutional discourse practices to believe that, but it is not easy. The Inuit workers continue to struggle with the “profession­ al” identity demanded by their recording routines, although they have created alternative methods of practice—methods developed within their own cultur­ al and rhetorical traditions. Critical front line social workers in hospitals, agencies, and other institutions learn the words that raise concern among doc­

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tors, psychologists, lawyers, and the police. They learn to play the linguistic m arket, and by subtle rhetorical force can initiate action helpful to their clients. But resistance or subversion is not always easy or possible, especially for the student, the new practitioner, or those who practice social work (or other professions) in the shadow of more powerful disciplines. Learning to participate in workplace genres means learning one's professional location in the power relations of institutional life. Those of us who meet with students or workers might help create the critical consciousness required to undermine that process, but we ourselves will have to work to escape the identities our own discourse compels.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays (pp. 121-173) (B. Brewster, Trans.). London: New Left Books. Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of genres. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). London: Taylor & Francis. Berlin, J. (1996). Rhetorics, poetics, and cultures: Refiguring college English studies. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Bourdieu, P. (1984/1993). Sociology in question (R. Nice, Trans.). London: Sage. Caldas-Coulthard, C. R., & Coulthard, M. (Eds.). (1996). Texts and practices: Readings in critical discourse analysis. London: Routledge. Clark, R., & Ivanic, R. (1997). The politics o f writing. London: Routledge. Coe, R. (1994). An arousing and fulfilment of desires: The rhetoric of genre in the process era—and beyond. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 181-190). London: Taylor & Francis. de Montigny, G. (1995). Social working: An ethnography o f front line prac­ tice. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Devitt, A. J. (1993). Generalizing about genre: New conceptions of an old concept. College Composition and Communication, 4 4 ,573-586. Dias, P. (2000). Writing classrooms as activity systems. In P. Dias & A. Par6 (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Dias, P., Freedman, A., Medway, P., & Pard, A. (1999). Worlds apart: Writing and acting in academic and workplace contexts. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Faigley, L. (1992). Fragments o f rationality: Postmodernity and the subject o f composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study o f lan­ guage. London: Longman. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology o f knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). London: Tavistock Publications. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G.N. Smith, Eds. and Trans.). New York: International. Gee, J.P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press. Green, B., & Lee, A. (1994). Writing geography: Literacy, identity, and schooling. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Learning and teaching genre (pp. 207-224). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann. Gunnarson, B.L., Linell, P., & Nordberg, B. (1997). Introduction. In B. L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell, & B. Nordberg (Eds.), The construction o f pro­ fessional discourse (pp. 1-12). New York: Longman. Hall, C., Sarangi, S., & Slembrouck, S. (1997). Moral construction in social work discourse. In B. L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell, & B. Nordberg (Eds.), The construction o f professional discourse (pp. 265-291). New York: Longman. Hemdl, C. G. (19%). Tactics and the quotidian: Resistance and professional discourse. Journal o f Advanced Composition, 16,455-470. H ydln, L.C. (1997). The institutional narrative as dram a. In B. L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell, & B. Nordberg (Eds.), The construction o f pro­ fessional discourse (pp. 245-264). New York: Longman. Kidd, B. (1987). Sports and masculinity. In M. Kaufman (Ed.), Beyond patri­ archy: Essays by men on pleasure, power and change. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Lemke, J. (1995). Textual politics: Discourses and social dynamics. London: Falmer Press. Miller, C. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal o f Speech, 70, 151-167. Muspratt, S., Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (Eds.). (1997). Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Par6, A. (2000). Writing as a way into social work: Genre sets, genre systems, and distributed cognition. In P. Dias & A. Par6 (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Par6, A., & Smart, G. (1994). Observing genres in action: Towards a research methodology. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 146-154). London: Taylor & Francis. Pecheux, M. (1982). Language, semantics and ideology. London: Macmillan. Digitized by

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Russell, D.R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An activity the­ ory analysis. Written Communication, 14, 504-554. Schryer, C. (1994). The lab vs. the clinic: Sites of competing genres. In A. Freedman & R Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 105124). London: Taylor & Francis. Williams, R. (1976/1983). Keywords: A vocabulary o f culture and society. Hammersmith, UK: Fontana Press.

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4 Genre and Power: A Chronotopic Analysis

Catherine F. Schryer University of Waterloo

Anne Freadman (see Chapter 2) describes genres as “uptakes” (p. 40) or appropriate ways to respond to past utterances. The following exploration of genres and their relationship to issues of power is an “uptake” to an important issue framed in Freedman and M edway’s (1994) Genre and the New Rhetoric. In the introduction both the series’ editor, Luke, and the collection’s editors, Freedman and Medway, point to a problem and a new challenge for genre researchers.1 Luke critiqued most genre research for its acritical tendencies and called for “a new rhetoric tied to an analysis of power.” Without such an approach Luke suggested “genre risks becoming simply a new ‘unit’ of psy­ chological skill, individual competence or cultural virtue” (1994, p. x). He called for genre researchers to develop “some system of analysis that enables normative judgement of genres and texts, that foregrounds whose interests 'T h is chapter owes a great deal to ongoing genre research in C anada and to two important networks o f researchers: the Canadian Association o f Teachers o f Technical W riting (CATTW) and to Inkshed. Both organizations endured various versions o f this chapter over the last several years. ^ Digitized

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they serve, how they construct and position their writers and readers, and who has access to them” (p. ix). In their overview of the multiple traditions that shape genre research, Freedman and Medway acknowledged that North American researchers have tended to be descriptive because of the empirical nature of much genre research. Using qualitative methodologies and good fem inist research practices that require respect for participants, genre researchers such as Par6 (1993), Smart (1993), Medway (1994), and Forman and Rymer (1999) have produced illuminating, context-sensitive descriptions of the workings of genres among social workers, bankers, architects, and business students. At the same time, linguists, particularly in Australia, have developed genre approaches that attempt to document in a descriptive way the textual practices associated with genres. Yet, as Freedman and Medway admit, both traditions need, a more “reflexive and critical turn” (p. 15) to probe at questions of power so that all genre researchers can explicitly acknowledge the ideological dimensions of genres. This chapter aims to assist in the development of methodological and theoretical tools that genre researchers can use to explore the ways genres work to reproduce power relations within and between organizations and individuals and to apply this perspective in a limited way to one representa­ tive genre—examples of “bad news” letters produced by an insurance compa­ ny. In effect, this chapter takes up Luke’s challenge by developing critical perspectives that genre researchers can use to reveal the resources that genres enact to “construct and position their writers and readers” (1994, p. ix). From the methodological perspective, I argue that genre researchers need to develop research projects that combine contextual and textual approaches. We need genre research that provides both participant accounts as well as analytical, close readings of texts that instantiate a genre. Based on such accounts, I believe that we will be able to more closely document the resources available to a genre and interrogate the way agents strategically use genres and their resources in specific contexts. Consequently, we will be able to see more clearly the relationship between genres and issues of power. Such projects, I believe, could profit from the work of structuration theorists such as Giddens (1993), Bourdieu (1991), and Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) who explore the relationship between social structure and agency. From this theoretical perspective genres can be viewed as constella­ tions of regulated, improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization or “habitus” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 139), and an organization or “field” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 17 ). To echo Lemke (1995), as constellations of flexible yet constrained resources, genres function as “trajectory entities” (p. 12) or sets of strategies that we use to m utually negotiate or improvise our way through time and space. Moreover, these constellations of resources, as Bakhtin (1981) suggests, often express a particular relation to space and time, and this relation is always axiDigitized by

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ological or value oriented. In other words, genres express space/time relations that reflect current social beliefs regarding the placement and actions of human individuals in space and time. Bakhtin calls this expression of place, time, and human values the “chronotope” (p. 84). In each chronotope differ­ ing sets of values are attached to human agency. Agents in some chronotopes have more access to meaningful action or power than in other chronotopes. In an effort once to explain to a class chronotopes or socially con­ structed time/spaces, I asked them to consider the classroom space which we were occupying. The room was a long rectangle, wider than it was deep. A blackboard covered the front part of the room with the instructor’s desk posi­ tioned in the center. A single door allowed entry from the side of the room and the opposite side was occupied with windows covered by black curtains. Tables with chairs facing the front of the room were provided for the students. As we considered the room, certain tendencies became evident. The designers of the room evidently believed that all validated information came from the center front of the room. All the sight lines of the room were oriented in that direction; people on the far side of the room could not see people on the other side of the room. More importantly, those located on either side of the room had difficulty hearing each other because of the presence of a ventilator shaft located at the back. Only sound emanating from the front of the room could be heard by all. The placement of the tables and chairs also supported this ori­ entation. It was clear, too, that time had a salient presence in this room. The room itself was spartan, the chairs uncomfortable, and a clock was positioned above the board at the center of the room. Clearly, this was a room in which we were expected to spend little time. We could, of course, try to make this time/space more flexible. We did hold workshops, but inevitably groups had to report their findings from the front of the room, and, of course, the time constraints (as anyone in an educational institute knows) were inescapable. Our access to various forms of action were constrained by the socially defined time/space that we occupied.2 Other research projects (Bender & Wellbery, 1991; Fabian, 1993; Schryer, 1999) have also noted the way certain text types are associated with “characteristic time/space formations” (Bender & Wellbery, p. 8). For example, Bourdieu, Passeron, and de Saint Martin (1994, originally published 1965) in their analysis of academic discourse noted the impact of teaching space on instructor and student interaction and more importantly on the genres associated with academia. Describing the instructor as “Physically elevated and enclosed within the magisterial chair which consecrates him ,. . . the instructor is in fact 2I was not the only analyst who encouraged a critique o f this classroom. As I stood in the focal spot that we had identified as the center o f validated information, I happened to look up at the ceiling There carved in the ceiling tiles, where only the instructor could see them, were the words “F... You!”

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condemned by an objective situation more coercive than the most imperious regulation to dramatic monologue and virtuoso exhibition” (p. 11). They sug­ gested that academia, despite changes towards more interactive teaching, still reflects this “virtual space” (p. 13). More importantly, however, the academic genre par excellence, the essay, is also affected by this time/space. As they noted, “The magisterial lecture from the professorial chair and the student essay are functionally related, rather than isolated, acts of communication” (p. 13). Instructors expect to hear in student papers the same kind of rhetoric they use to create distance and authority. In other words, both the lecture and student papers reflect the same chronotope, the same invisible, unacknowledged view of space/time and possibilities of human action. In effect, then, I am suggesting that when we address the issue of genre and power, we also need to explore a genre’s relationship to time and space. In particular, we need to examine the possibilities for human action that exist within specific chronotopes. Genres are forms of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 163) and could be forms of “sym bolic violence” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 139) if they create time/spaces that work against their users’ best interests and their users perceive them as naturalized or “just the way we do things around here.” One of the purposes of genre research, then, should be to catch a glimpse of the “chronotopic unconscious” or “set o f unspoken assumptions about space and time that are so fundamental that they lie even deeper (and therefore may ultimately be more determining) than the prejudices imposed by ideology” (Holquist, 1990, p. 142).

GENRE THEORY A T PRESENT Before discussing this critical approach to genre theory, it is important to rec­ ognize the contributions that various schools of genre theorists have made to our understanding of discourse practices. Two major theoretical approaches— the rhetorical and the linguistic—are producing genre research, although these schools overlap and mutually influence each other.3

3Another important school o f influence is emerging at this time— activity theory. To a large extent, activity theories take the direction of rhetorical theorists, their interest in context, to its logical extreme. An examination o f this important school and its advo­ cates is beyond the scope o f this chapter. For a good introduction to this area see D a v id R. R u s s e ll, “ R e th in k in g G e n re in S c h o o l an d S o c ie ty ,” Written Communication, 14 (1997), 504-554.

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Rhetorical Approaches North American genre theory emerged from discussions on texts sharing commonalities of form (Black, 1965), of audience (Mohrmann & Leff, 1974), and of rhetorical situations (Halloran, 1978; Ware & Linkugel, 1973; Windt, 1972). In her seminal article “Genre as Social Action,” Miller (rpt. 1994, originally published 1984) shifted the discussion away from discussions of textual similarities towards a more pragmatic understanding of genre—one that understood genres as forms of social action. To make this move, Miller defined genres as typical responses to recurrent rhetorical situations. Of course, the only people who can label a situation as “recurrent” or a response as “typical” are the social actors involved in that social setting. Consequently, Miller acknowledged that the impulse towards genre classification or the ten­ dency for people in social settings to identify text types as the ways they accomplished tasks was inherently “ethnomethodological” (p. 27). In effect, Miller reconceptualized genre theory by bringing to the forefront the issue of social context. To her credit, however, Miller balanced this interest in context with a continuing focus on the necessity that genres have “recurrent patterns of language use” (p. 37). She did not lose sight of the fact that genres are texts in their contexts. Miller’s insight required that genre researchers begin to look at text types as responses to particular social contexts. Bazerman (1988) took up this challenge in his diachronic study exploring how the scientific article evolved strategies in response to specific social exigencies. Bazerman was interested in the “sociopsychological” (p. 319) process wherein the practices involved in such a powerful genre as the scientific article become regularized and part of the production and reception strategies of the producers of scientific discourse. Although some composition researchers (Devitt, 1993) have brought genre theory into university classrooms, it has been empirical researchers in professional communication who have most profited from and most devel­ oped Miller’s linking of genres to social contexts. My own work on veteri­ nary medicine (Schryer, 1993, 1994), for example, used insights from Miller, Bakhtin, and Smith (1987) to suggest that genres are evolving, dynamic enti­ ties that both shape and are shaped by their users. In order to echo the flexible yet powerful effect of the genres of medical record-keeping and the experi­ mental article, I conceptualized these genres as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action” (Schryer, 1993, p. 200). The major contribution of this work was that it revealed both the dynamic nature of genres and their ability to reflect and shape tacit social values, what Williams (1976) so aptly called “common sense” (p. 38). In his qualitative study of a major Canadian Bank, Smart (1993) focused specifically on the “contextual factors” (p. 125) that shaped executives’ reading practices and

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thus the writing practices of their subordinates. This interconnected set of expectations led to the continual reenactment of certain text types that Smart called genres. In his study, Smart assumed that “a genre can usefully be con­ ceived as a distinctive profile of regularities across three dimensions: a set of written texts, the composing processes involved in producing these texts, and the reading practices used to interpret them” (p. 127). In their comparative study of the predisposition report produced by social workers in a social ser­ vice agency and the automation proposal characteristic of a large Canadian bank, Par6 and Smart (1994) built on Smart's original definition to redefine genres as “a distinctive profile of regularities across four dimensions: a set of texts, the composing processes involved in creating these texts, the reading practices used to interpret them, and the social roles performed by writers and readers” (p. 147). This research has resulted in several important contribu­ tions: a theorization of the nature of context (defined as production and recep­ tion regimes), and a detailed examination of “regularities” between texts and between texts and their contexts. However, the most important result of this research tradition has been its implications for teaching. Based on her empirical projects investigating the teaching of specific genres and the process wherein neophytes acquire new genres, Freedman (1995) has concluded that genres are, in fact, context-depen­ dent and their features cannot be isolated and taught explicitly. Using her own research results, research derived from second language acquisition (specifi­ cally Krashen, 1984) as well as recent work investigating practical cognition (specifically Lave & Wegner, 1991), Freedman made a strong argument for refusing to teach genres explicitly as sets of rules. Rather the teacher’s or men­ tor’s task is to create “facilitative environments” (p. 204) in which students can acquire real genres in real contexts. Her work constructed, in fact, a strong case for writing centers and co-op work programs. The recent work of Dias et al. (1999), so aptly titled Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts, reflects Freedman’s point and makes an even stronger case for the contextual nature of genre production and reception.

Linguistic Approaches If rhetorical theorists have been exploring genres in their contexts, it is fair to say that linguists have been exploring genres in their contexts. Linguists such as Kress (1993), Martin (1993), Cope and Kalantzis (1993), as well as Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) have been working within theoretical frameworks that allowed them to document the linguistic resources available within dif­ ferent genres. Another important difference between the two approaches is their motivation. From its inception the rhetorical tradition focused on genres from different “discourse communities” such as medicine, banking, and Digitized by

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architecture. Much of the motivation of this research tradition seemed focused on explaining the discursive strategies of professional communica­ tion. On the other hand, linguistic researchers were motivated from the begin­ ning for a concern for school literacy. Consequently, much of their research centered on recording the conventions associated with different genres deemed important in school settings or in documenting conventions operating in professional contexts so that English as a Second Language speakers could more easily acquire these genres.4 Unlike the rhetorical tradition, the linguistic tradition has experi­ enced much more internal controversy, a controversy that stemmed not only from differing concepts of genre but also from differing views on the peda­ gogical implications of genre research. The linguistic tradition for the most part derives from the work of Halliday and Hasan (1991) and their theory of systemic functional linguistics. Halliday and Hasan, intent on producing a practical linguistics, one that facilitated a systematic close reading of the ways language works, developed the concept of “register” to describe the way a constellation of linguistic features worked together. Register analysis, as Cope and Kalantzis explained, explores the “interrelation of field, or what a text is about; tenor, which explains the interpersonal relations in text; and mode, which demonstrates how the text interacts with the world” (1993, p. 14). It is important to note, however, that for Halliday and Hasan and later for Kress genre or register analysis had two important characteristics. First, genre analysis was not a way to classify texts into formal categories, but a “tool for analysing texts in their infinite variety and subtle variations” (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, p. 14). Secondly, Halliday and Hasan and Kress argued that an important distinction exists between texts and their contexts. The social context cannot be collapsed into a text—rather they are separate yet related entities. Martin, although adopting much of Halliday’s theoretical apparatus, broke with these last two points. For Martin, the critical reader, using a semi­ otic analysis, could locate and describe all the linguistics features of a set of texts or genre and thus the linguistic characteristics of a genre could be codi­ fied. Furthermore, for Martin, the critical reader could also discover all they needed to know about social context in the text. Consequently, resources used to address the social context (as if such a thing as “the” social context could exist) could also be identified and codified. These two breaks had important pedagogical consequences. In the pedagogy derived from this position, stu­ dents were given detailed models to work with as they wrote in school genres such as the report or the story. Furthermore, these models were often viewed as fixed products, not as flexible sets of resources that should vary according 4Both John Swales and his school as well as V. J. Bhatia have been particularly important in this effort.

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to social contexts. As Hasan suggested, this approach leads all too easily to a “structural formalism which does not reflect the fluid social and textual re la ­ tions that characterize text in context" (qtd. in Cope & Kalantzis, 1993, p. 14). To a large extent, then, genre researchers have adopted a “text-incontext” approach to examining recurring linguistic events. H ow ever, depending on their orientation, they have emphasized descriptive accounts o f either context (rhetorical approaches) or text (linguistic approaches). At th is time I believe methodological and theoretical models are needed to allow genre theorists to account for both contextual and textual practices in a m ore critical way.

METHODOLOGY RECONSIDERED As is probably evident by now, I believe that we need research studies that bring the insights of both streams of genre research into the same project and that we already have many of the tools from both traditions in order to do so. From the rhetorical tradition the emphasis on ethnographic, qualitative pro­ jects (see Dias et al., 1999) has led to detailed studies on the context of genre production and reception. From the linguistic tradition, we have not only the work of descriptive linguists such as Swales (1990) and the many researchers influenced by his school (for example, Connor & Mauranen, 1999; Holmes, 1997; Skulstad, 1996), but also the work of critical discourse analysts such as Fairclough (1989), Hodge and Kress (1993), and Stillar (1998), all of whom provide ways to analyze the linguistic features of specific texts. What we lack is an overall framework in which to conduct such studies. Bourdieu suggests a methodology that combines both types of analy­ ses in order to undercover the structures that maintain and reproduce power. He called his method “social praxeology” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 11) and indicates that it consists of two crucial steps: First, we push aside mundane representations to construct the objective structures (spaces o f positions), the distribution o f socially efficient resources that define the external constraints bearing on interactions and representations. Second, we reintroduce the immediate, lived experience of agents in order to explicate the categories o f perception and apprecia­ tion. (p. 11)

From the perspective of genre research the first step entails the close reading of texts that instantiate genres in order to describe and critique the strategies that some genres activate in order to represent power. The second step involves acknowledging the practical logic or problem-solving techniques Digitized by

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that social agents employ in different contexts. As Bourdieu makes clear, although both steps are necessary, the first step takes priority. In other words, disciplinary forms of analysis are crucial and lead to what he calls “objective” analysis. It should be understood, however, that Bourdieu is not invoking the objectivist paradigm of truth and validity to which feminist researchers and postmodernists have so rightly objected. Bourdieu sees disciplinary forms of analysis as situated language practices that themselves require reflection to see what values and ideologies they espouse.

GENRE THEORY RECONCEPTUALIZED Such a program of research, if it is to avoid charges of reductive formalism, needs a theoretical frame that reflects the dynamism of genres and the multi­ ple and innovative ways that their users employ them. Other disciplines, espe­ cially linguistic anthropology, have experienced the same dilemma as genre researchers—that is, conducting studies that incorporate both textual and con­ textual approaches. For example, based on his synthesis of formalist and con­ textual traditions and his own ethnographic studies of Mayan genres. Hanks (1987, 1996) concluded that “discourse genres” ought to be the unit of analy­ sis for research into communicative practices.3 He defined discourse genres as sets “of enduring dispositions to perceive the world and act upon it in cer­ tain ways” (19%, p. 246). He suggested that, neither “rigid, formal types” nor “formless” moments, genres were “schemes for practice that formulate the habitus” (p. 246). At the same time, Hanks insisted that, like the workings of habitus, genres are improvisational by nature. “They are produced,” he observed, “in the course of linguistic practice and subject to innovation, manipulation, and change” (1987, p. 677). However, because they are so rou­ tinely used and we become so habituated to them, genres, he suggested, could be powerful instruments of social control because they “make certain ways of thinking and experiencing so routine as to appear natural” (p. 246). These ways of thinking and experiencing are, of course, not “natural”; rather they are ideological and enact the ways of perceiving the world characteristic of some groups rather than of others. In effect, Hanks linked the formalist and contextual traditions to Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Bakhtin’s “sociological poetics” (Hanks, ^Hanks’ Language and Communicative Practices (19% ) is an essential resource for genre theorists. In this study he reviews the contributions o f both the adherents o f the “irreducibility” thesis (linguistic formalists) and the “relationality” thesis (phenomenologists or those interested in situated language practices), and concludes that the best work is being conducted in the nexus between the two positions. He produces a model for research that keeps the two position in active tension with each other. Original from Digitized

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1987, p. 670). Hanks, in fact, suggested that a homology exists between Bourdieu’s concepts of practice and habitus and Bakhtin’s concept of genre. Quoting Bourdieu, Hanks asserted that “Practice . . . arises out of the inter­ play between the lasting dispositions to action that comprise ‘habitus’ and temporality, improvisation, and the constraints inherent in any ‘language mar­ ket'” (p. 670). Habitus, for Hanks, “comprises actors’ abilities to produce dis­ course and to understand it in relatively systematic ways" (p. 671). Hanks then links Bourdieu’s insights to Bakhtin’s “nonreductive approach to verbal form” (p. 670) or genres. He echoes Bakhtin’s observation that form (and this includes thematic and stylistic construction) always has ideological commit­ ments and thus “every genre has its own value-laden orientation" (p. 671). In order to fully understand and build on Hank’s synthesis, it is nec­ essary to review Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of habitus, and field or “language market” as well as the ideological and critical nature of Bakhtin’s concept of genre.

Habitus and Field Throughout most of his 40 years as an anthropologist and social theorist, Bourdieu has been exploring the implications that a dialectical relationship exists between structure and agency (Mahar, Harker, & Wilkes, 1990, p. 1). Bourdieu is, in fact, a structuration theorist and sees that social structures both structure and are structured by human agency. The concept of “habitus” best captures Bourdieu’s vision of how agency interacts with structure. As Thompson (1991), quoting Bourdieu, explains: The habitus is a set o f dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and atti­ tudes which are “regular” without being consciously co-ordinated o r gov­ erned by any rule. . . . D ispositions are acquired through a gradual process o f inculcation . . . the dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the sense that they unavoidably reflect the social condition within which they were acquired, (p. 12)

Habitus thus describes the sociophysical and sociocognitive process wherein we all acquire our practical logic, our problem-solving strategies, and our lin­ guistic capacities. Habitus, a product of prior and ongoing social experiences (especially institutional or group experiences—the family, schools, organiza­ tions), creates an individual social potential or social trajectory. Wacquant describes the relationship between habitus and practical logic thus: “The ‘practical sense’ precognizes\ it reads in the present state the possible states with which the field is pregnant. For in habitus, the past, the present and the Digitized by

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future intersect and interpenetrate one another. Habitus may be understood as virtual ‘sedimented situations’ (Mallin, 1979, p. 12) lodged inside the body w aiting to be reactivated” (Bourdieu & W acquant, 1992, p. 23). For Bourdieu, habitus, especially linguistic habitus, affects perception, classifica­ tion systems, and prepares individuals for more or fewer opportunities as they encounter distinctive fields or linguistic markets (such as disciplines or spe­ cific organizations). Just as Bourdieu has been working towards a dynamic understanding of agency so he has also been working towards a dynamic understanding of structure. The concept of “field” or “market” or “game” is his way of concep­ tualizing oiganizations, disciplines, or social systems. For Bourdieu, society is not a seamless totality, but rather an “ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of play” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 17). A game, market or field is a “structured space of positions in which the positions and their inter­ relations are determined by the distributions of different kinds of resources or capital” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 14). As Bourdieu explains, agents in each field are in the constant process of attempting to distinguish their field from other markets and thus acquire more symbolic power and a better position vis-&-vis other fields. At the same time agents within fields are also jockeying for posi­ tions within their field trying to acquire more recognition (and thus symbolic power) for themselves. In other words, agents are structured by their experiences within a “field.” A field itself is “a socially structured space in which agents struggle, depending on the position they occupy in that space, either to change or to preserve its boundaries and form” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 17). An agent’s position within a field is determined by his or her access to three dif­ ferent forms of power or capital: “economic (material wealth); cultural (knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educa­ tional or technical qualifications); symbolic (accumulated prestige or honor)” (Thompson, 1991, p. 14). At the same time as agents are structured by the structures within fields, they also structure or reproduce those fields, but not in purely reductive ways. Rather because agents occupy different positions within their fields (agents have different access to power) and because fields themselves occupy different positions in relation to each other, agents enact different (although only within a specific range) strategies. It is these regulat­ ed, improvisational strategies, triggered by the interaction between habitus and field, that Bourdieu called “the logic of practice” (Robbins, 1991, p. 112). Linguistic habitus or agents’ improvisational “feel for the game” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 129) consists, then, of the strategies that agents can access in order to enhance and distinguish their own position and thus play the game successfully. Language, particularly that aspect of lan­ guage called “style,” is deeply implicated in this struggle. Bourdieu observes that “style exists only in relations to agents endowed with schemes of percep­ _ Digitized

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tion and appreciation that enable them to constitute it as a set of systematic differences” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 39). Furthermore, this process of differentia­ tion or style-production is deeply implicated in the reproduction of symbolic power. Bourdieu (1991) notes: This production o f instruments o f production, such as rhetorical devices, genres, legitimate styles, and manners and, more generally, all the formu­ lations destined to be “authoritative” and to be cited as examples o f “good usage” confers on those who engage it a power over language. . . (p. 58)

As instruments of production, some genres, especially those enacted by wellpositioned agents in well-positioned fields such as education and medicine, can reproduce forms of symbolic pow er that can literally shape their receivers’ view of the world. These genres are, in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, “symbolic structures” and he observes: As instruments o f knowledge and communication, “symbolic structures” can exercise a structuring power only because they themselves are struc­ tured. Symbolic power is a power o f constructing reality, and one which tends to establish a gnoseological order: the immediate meaning o f the world (and in particular o f the social world) depends on what Durkheim calls logical conformism, that is “a homogeneous conception o f time, space, number, and cause, one which makes it possible for different intel­ lects to reach agreement.” (p. 166)

From Bourdieu’s perspective, then, genres can be seen as constellations of regulated, improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization or “habitus” and an organization or “field.” At the same time, he also opens up the possibility that some genres can function as “symbolic structures” that shape deeply shared world views based on com­ mon perceptions of space and time. It is Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, however, that most clarifies this insight.

Chronotope Bakhtin suggested that every genre expresses a particular relation to space and time, and this relation was always axiological. In other words, every genre expresses space/time relations that reflect current social beliefs regard­ ing the placement and actions of human individuals in space and time. Bakhtin calls this expression of place, time, and human values the “chrono­ tope.” The workings of the chronotope become clearer as Bakhtin applies them to text-types. For example, he examined Greek adventure romances in Digitized by

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which two lovers are separated by chance, endure a set of impossible adven­ tures in distant lands, and then are reunited, totally unchanged by their experi­ ences. Bakhtin pointed out that as soon as adventure time begins, time stands still for the protagonists although space expands. This space, however, is abstract; the places the protagonists are sent to are marked only by strange­ ness or difference; places have no social or cultural connections to specific peoples or groups. Time and change only begin again when the protagonists return to their own place, traditional Greek culture. Individual protagonists have an abstract identity in these novels, and as characters they are totally subject to chance. Their identities cannot change; they remain unaffected by their experiences. Bakhtin contrasted this chronotope with a very different chronotope at work in metamorphosis stories. In these accounts, protagonists are also subject to chance. Yet they are often responsible for the crisis that precipitates their fate, and they learn from their experiences. In each chronotope differing sets of values are attached to human agency. Agents in some chronotopes have more access to meaningful action than in other chronotopes. Each genre, then, has a different trajectory, a different potential for producing world views and representing human agency. In my view all genres operate in this fashion. They function as discourse formations or constella­ tions of strategies that instantiate a “commonsense” understanding of time and space that can affect their writers or readers. We can become habituated to these constellations of resources and fail to see the possibilities for the con­ straints on human action that they enact.

THE CASE: NEGATIVE MESSAGES IN AN INSURANCE COMPANY This view of genres as regulated improvisational strategies that agents enact to promote certain forms of gnoseological order emerged not only as a result of reading Bourdieu and Bakhtin but also as a result of an empirical research project—a case study of negative letters in an insurance company (Schryer, 2000). I was called in as a consultant for this company, as managers believed that assessors were experiencing difficulty with the “grammar” and “tone” of letters refusing Long Term Disability (LTD) benefits. Originally the company just wanted some workshops for the writers focusing on grammar and style. However, I convinced them that a study of the correspondence was needed. Little empirical research exists on negative correspondence (see Locker [1999] for an overview), and I could not offer worthwhile workshops until I understood this correspondence and what it was trying to accomplish. Original from Digitized by

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The study consisted of an analysis from various perspectives of a set of 26 negative letters selected by management as representative of both “suc­ cessful” and “less successful” letters as well as interviews with some of the assessors. In collecting the example letters, I asked the managers to label three or four letters as either “effective” or “ineffective” and to leave the rest uncategorized and in a random order. In an effort to enact Bourdieu’s “objectivist” methodology I analyzed these letters from a number of different ana­ lytic perspectives in order to determine some of the strategies that writers were using and to determine the difference between more or less successful letters from the perspective of local standards within this organization. I then tried to enact Bourdieu’s “subjectivist” methodology by consulting the agents’ practical knowledge or “phronesis” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 128) in order to understand what passed for “common sense,” or “decorum” in this company. I conducted interviews with three writers, Bev, Karla, and Iona, identified by management as “successful.”6 During each interview I presented the writers with contrasting sets of letters: one I believed was “effective” and the other less so. I asked the writers to identify the letter that they viewed as more effective and to explain the difference between the two letters. I also enquired into the system of production that produced these let­ ters—the availability of software, templates, boilers, models— as well as information regarding training and the role these writers occupied in the com­ pany. The project was an attempt to see these texts in their contexts and to provide an account of the constellation of improvisational strategies that these agents had access to as they enacted this genre. In this brief chapter I cannot provide a detailed account of all my findings.7 Instead I will focus on a brief analysis of a few letters (see exam­ ples in Appendices A and B) from rhetorical and critical discourse analysis perspectives in order to reveal some of the strategies present in these letters and to catch a glimpse of the chronotope at work in the genre. Throughout I will balance my analysis with the writers’ accounts of their own practice.

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS In his work on genre, Coe (1994) points out that genres have formal or struc­ tural properties. They function as “incipient actions” or “potential actions waiting for an activating situation” (p. 183). The structure of these negative 6This research project could have profited from interviews with a range o f writers. However, the company was reluctant to allow me to interview any participants, and I did not want any o f the participants to be labeled by the company as “ less effective” or “inexperienced.”

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letters supports Coe’s insight that genres function heuristically; they provide moves that writers follow. In this correspondence, for example, all the letters followed the traditional, “commonsense,” pattern of negative messages: a neu­ tral buffer opening, the explanation for the decision, the decision, and a closing section. In these letters the explanation was divided into two sections. The writer first explained company policy and then explained why the medical evi­ dence did not support the reader’s claim for disability under company policy. From the interview data, it was clear that both the assessors and man­ agement believed that this pattern was the only way to compose these mes­ sages. As Bev explained, after the introduction, “All we do is go over the con­ tractual definition, explain the medical evidence and then say sorry that you didn’t like the decision.” The other writers all agreed that this structure was the only way to write this correspondence. Yet paradoxically, the writers also believed that their readers did not follow this pattern. As I reported to the writers, no research study exists that actually tests this organizational structure on readers (Locker, 1999). In fact, anecdotal evidence (Brent, 1985) suggests that readers skim down to the decision and then return to struggle through the explanation. Oddly enough the writers in the company also believed that read­ ers read this way. As one reported, “The clients get these lengthy letters that are to them filled with technical material. They quickly look over the letter, looking, looking for the decision. They have to figure out difficult contractual and medical language. Finally they find the decision in the middle of the let­ ter. And it’s not what they wanted to hear. They get angry." Evidence also suggests that alternate structures do exist for negative messages. As Scott and Green (1992) reported, British negative letters tend to be far more direct than their American counterparts. Yet at this insurance company both writers and managers believed that the buffer, explanation, decision, closing structure was the only way to compose these letters, even though management admitted that the company had never tested its letters on readers. So why, then, does this structure remain unchallenged in this organi­ zation? Interview data revealed that several social practices are maintaining this heuristic. The assessors worked within an email “shell” or template that generated the traditional structure of the “negative letter” and they were required to follow that structure. From their perspective, the existence of the template made their lives easier, as they did not have to make any decisions regarding form. Ironically, past workshops and career development courses also played a role. As Karla noted: I took a letter writing course when I first got here and they told us to put in a neutral opening, then explain the bad news and then express sympa­ thy. The system at least gets readers to read over the whole letter before reacting.

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The irony here is that our own pedagogy might be maintaining an outmoded system. Many professional writing textbooks are still advocating the tradi­ tional pattern (Locker) despite a glaring lack of evidence as to its effect on readers and writers. However, it is clear that the chronotopic orientation of this genre has important implications for both its readers and writers. In the North American setting it seems we share a common belief that readers of negative messages need to be kept waiting. Implicit within the genre is the strategy of attempting to force anxious readers to “listen” to the explanation first and await the writer’s decision. Paradoxically, the writers of this genre, at least in this one instance, know that the structure itself is one factor that generates anger and ill will and, as they report, they dread receiving phone calls questioning their decisions. A close reading of the letters as well as reports from the writers also disclosed that a range of other strategies was associated with this structure. The writers whom I interviewed and the writers who participated in the work­ shops agreed that a letter that simply regurgitated the structure in its purest, barest form was ineffective. Instead, letters needed to prove to readers that their case had been taken seriously. Consequently, in the opening “buffer” section it was important to include details of the case such as claimant’s physician’s name, and in the medical explanation section it was important to be logical and detailed. As one writer reported: I always refer to all the information that I have reviewed. I say that I have this and this piece o f evidence. I try to let them know that I have looked at everything. If you don’t do that, they get back to you saying— W hat about the file that Dr. Jones sent you?

In other words, the underlying strategy was to argue that “we have read your file carefully” so that the claimant had no grounds for a future response. Another writer explained what logical meant in the context of this correspondence. While examining a letter that she considered more effective, she noted This letter is more logical because it sets up the criteria and then explains them. It also acknowledges that we know that the claim ant does have some restrictions (just not enough to warrant long term disability bene­ fits). It’s important to acknowledge this because if you don’t the claimant will get back to you suggesting that you haven’t noted his restrictions.

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these writers could not include too much information. Not only might too much information prove confusing to claimants, but they also had another group of readers to satisfy—the claimants’ physicians. The assessors were not in a position to provide too much medical analysis because many lacked med­ ical training. Also, they could not appear to be critiquing the claimant’s med­ ical treatment. As one writer observed, We have to be careful about our treatment o f the doctors. We can’t be judgm ental about them. Sometimes we know that the doctor could have provided better treatment, but we can’t say that. We have to walk a fine line in this area.

These comments reveal aspects of the “logic of practice” among these writ­ ers. Many had discovered strategies that their managers deemed “effective.” H ow ever, these strategies also revealed a chronotopic orientation. Experienced assessors carefully read claimants’ letters and files looking for their readers’ future arguments in order to prevent responses. As Iona observed, “It’s a challenge to write a letter that doesn’t generate fifteen phone calls.” In effect, these writers were caught in an almost impossible rhetorical dilemma. They were working with a constellation of resources that attempted to close off future correspondence with their readers, and yet, at the same time, these same readers remained clients of the company. The comment regarding the assessor’s attitudes towards physicians was also salient, as it revealed aspects of the assessors’ ambiguous position within the organization. In fact, most of the assessors were women, many worked part-time, and most only stayed in the position for about three years. Most lacked a completed university education. Some had medical experience as nurses, but many lacked that background as well. After six weeks of train­ ing, they were expected to take on a full case load. Each case consisted of between 100 to 300 pages of documentation that had been scanned into com­ puter files. As far as I could ascertain, their actual letters were rarely reviewed (although their decisions were reviewed). They were discouraged from seeking assistance from each other in terms of difficult cases. Collaboration seemed out of the question. As noted earlier, they also worked within an email program that contained a template for their decision as well as already preformulated sections (boilers) regarding policy that they simply imported into their letters. They did not, however, have access to a wordprocessing package, as management felt that it would take too long for the asses­ sors to master the required skill set.8 In other words, despite having the power to make decisions that profoundly affected their reader, these writers had little 8This situation has now changed, partially as a result o f this study. The assessors now have fully functional systems. Digitized by

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power in their organization. Instead these writers had power, as Bourdieu sug­ gests, only as “authorized spokespersons” (Thompson, 1991, p. 9) by virtue of their relationship to the organization and their ability to use the genre.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Besides submitting the letters to a general rhetorical analysis, I also submitted a subset of six to a form of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Hodge and Kress (1993) summarized a main insight of CDA when they noted, “The grammar of a language is its theory of reality” (p. 7). In other words, an analysis of the related set of categories and processes of any language pro­ vides insights into the commonsense or deeply embedded beliefs characteris­ tic of the social system and its users that constitute and are constituted by that language and its grammar. One of the more interesting CDA tools is transactive analysis. Transactive analysis looks for all subject (agent), verb (process), and object (patient) constructions because such constructions represent subjects (agents) as directly affecting objects (patients), and therefore as having some form of power. So, for example, in the sentence “We will be terminating your claim file effective September 16, 1994,” the company (we) is represented as capa­ ble of terminating a claim file.9 In nontransactive constructions, as in “Mary runs away” or as in “However, in view of the fact that you are currently involved in a rehabilitation program . . . ”, only one entity—the subject or agent—is involved. Thus, nontransactive constructions represent agents as acting but not as acting on the world. These constructions can be representa­ tions of a lack of power. I also looked for relational constructions (agent, process, attribute as in “Mary is good”). These constructions fundamentally involve classification and often involve evaluation or judgment. In the following clause from a poli­ cy section, “total disability means that the member has a medically deter­ minable physical or mental impairment . . ”, the agent “total disability” is equated or classified as meaning a person with a disability. In the clause “your depression is not totally disabling” (see appendix B ) an attribute, in this case a negative attribute, is assigned to the agent. Hodge and Kress indi­ cate that classification is a form of power. “Classification,” they suggest, “imposes order on what is classified. So classification is an instrument of control in two directions: control over the flux of experience of physical and social reality . . . and society’s conception of that reality” (1993, p. 63). 9ln this case the writer has tried to soften the impact by declining the “claim file,” as if a file folder were being refused.

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In this set of letters I also looked for evidence of nominalization, pas­ sive constructions, and negations. As Hodge and Kress suggest, nominaliza­ tion is a particularly interesting formation (pp. 21-24). In die sentence “We have received and reviewed the additional medical documentation requested from Dr. Smith and Dr. Taylor” (Appendix B), for example, the nominaliza­ tion “documentation” has three important effects. The original process might be represented in this way: someone (doctor) documents something (records, tests results, signs, symptoms). But in the transformation we lose sight of the specific identities of the actor and the affected. We do not know exactly who documented what. Secondly, this transformation directs our attention only to the “verbal version of the action which was performed” (Hodge & Kress, 1993, p. 21) and away from the process wherein the information was con­ structed. And finally, nominalizations deprive processes of an orientation to specific times and places. This stabilization has the effect, Hodge and Kress suggest, of creating “a world of thing like abstract beings or objects, which are capable of acting or being acted on” (p. 24). This kind of alternate world can have two effects on readers: first, these alternate linguistic worlds can pre­ vent readers from seeing or believing in the world of physical events and processes; secondly, these shadowy words of abstract entities can lead to ambiguity and confusion, especially for readers who cannot undo the transfor­ mations, a set of abilities that is probably related to class and education level. These tools of CDA were applied to six letters ranging from least effective to most effective in order to locate patterns of usage, but more importantly to describe the chronotope or patterns of human action available to participants. The focus of the analysis was always on what “we” the orga­ nization were represented as being able to do, what “you” the reader were able to do, and what “other” entities were able to do. The intent was not only to locate some of the linguistic “rules and resources” (Giddens, 1993, p. 118 ) or “member resources” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 140) available to these writers, but also to see if the more effective letters had a different profile than the less effective letters. The results of this analysis were surprising (see Schryer, 2000, for the full results). Overall the letters were composed of more transactional and nontransactional constructions then passive and negative constructions. Furthermore, there was a high percentage of nominalization across all the let­ ters. The analysis also revealed some possible different linguistic resources between more effective and less effective letters. More effective letters employed generally more transactive and nontransactive constructions and far fewer relational as well. This results, however, did not really tell me very much until I looked at this data through the lens of a chronotopic analysis in which the partici­ pants’ access to action and thus power was represented. Consequently, I re­ examined the set of letters from the perspective of what “you,” the reader, Digitized by

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could do, be, or have; what “we,” the writer/organization, could do, be, o r have; and what other entities (doctors, files, documents) could do, be, o r have. In this analysis, if nominalizations were proceeded by a possessive p ro ­ noun, they were assigned to one of the three categories according to w h o owned them. So, for example, “our belief’ was assigned to the “we” category. Again some trends emerged in the data. The most interesting pattern was that relationals never appeared associated with the writer/company. T h e company (we) did not classify or judge itself, although it did judge readers and sometimes harshly. Better letters had a generally higher level of activity and much of that activity was assigned to readers, even if only at the nontrans­ active level. Another interesting strategy in this discourse concerned the use of nominalizations assigned to other entities. Most nominalizations fell into this category as in this example: “As you aware (sic), as of May IS, 1994, in order to be considered 'totally disabled’ the Member must have a medically determinable physical or mental impairment.. . . ” Several nominalizing struc­ tures such as “totally disabled” and “impairment” occur in this instance, but it was striking that they were not assigned to “you,” the reader, but to the “Member,” a third-person entity that existed in the company’s legal docu­ ments. In fact, the strategy here seemed to be that the reader (you) could never be allowed to see himself or herself as associated with a debilitating condition. A clearer view of the world being enacted in this genre can be glimpsed by an individual analysis of specific letters. The attached sample letter (see Appendix A) was identified as effective by management and the writers. This example has a higher than average number of transactive units. In this letter, “we” the company can inform you, conclude that you are capa­ ble, terminate your claim, base our decision, receive documentation, and decline your claim. So “we” are represented as active agents who can both receive information and make decisions that affect the reader’s future. “You” the reader can appeal your claim, make a request, give reasons, and obtain documents. So “you” are represented as an entity basically limited to speech acts. “Other” entities in these documents typically include doctors, files, med­ ical conditions, and other nominalizations. These nominalizations were often represented as powerful, and they often appropriated actions that could per­ tain to the reader. For example, in this letter an “impairment prevents her” (the member), and “occupations provide income.” In another chronotope the reader could possess the impairment, and the reader could provide income. The role of nominalization, in fact, was particularly compelling. It is “our” decision but “your” claim, condition, improvement, clinical findings, and return to work. Other entities control benefits, duties, occupation, educa­ tion, training, experience, provision, information, and determination. The typ­ ical strategy across all the letters was that these other entities support the decision of the “we,” the authorized voice of the letter. In fact, a whole world of inanimate documentation is ranged against the reader. Digitized by

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O f all the examples that I examined, this letter, however, is the most positive in that the writer used resources available to her to construct a world in which the reader has improvement, can return to work, and has access to a range of nontransactive actions. Other letters deemed less effective deployed a slightly different range of linguistic resources to create an even more restricted trajectory for their readers. In the attached letter labelled “ineffective” (see Appendix B) “we” receive and review documents, decline your claim, and receive evi­ dence. “You” claim benefits, appeal your claim, make a request, and give rea­ sons (all speech acts). Even other entities have more power than you do: med­ ical information can or cannot support your condition and reasons can or can­ not support your appeal. And all these nominalizations are ranged against the reader, information, decision, impairment, education, training, experience, provisions, treatment, diagnosis, and so forth. Furthermore, “you,” the reader, are judged pretty harshly: you have signs and symptoms, you are overweight, and you have hypothyroidism. In this letter the reader not only has little future action but is almost blamed for that very limited future. Most of the letters resembled the second letter. The set of linguistic strategies available within the genre, I contend, created a trajectory in which the reader’s control of time/space was severely constrained at the level of lin­ guistic representation. Most often readers did not even own their own medical conditions, and certainly they had few future choices. The better letters had, however, figured out strategies that left readers with some limited freedom of action—particularly the freedom to improve and get better. The writers who had hit upon the use of nontransactives and avoided the use of relationals, particularly negative relationals, seemed to produce the kind of letter that both management and the effective writers themselves identified as having a good tone. This account of the logic of practice dramatizes the very fine line around which these writers maneuver. Built within their linguistic and techno­ logical resources was a whole set of practices that attempted to reproduce a chronotope that constrained the future actions of readers. Supporting these practices were the writers* own beliefs in the necessity of mandated sections and the rhetorical structure of this genre. And yet room to maneuver did exist. Some writers had located strategic ways to avoid blaming readers, and some had located ways to represent readers as getting better, even if they were deprived of the LTD benefits they requested. At the same time the chronotopic orientation of the genre severely limited options open to the writers.

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CONCLUSIONS It is clear that several forces are working to maintain the trajectory of this dis­ course formation. Our own disciplinary belief in the efficacy of the traditional “bad news” letters is one of those forces, despite the fact that this traditional structure has never been tested. Ironically, this structure is now built into the models and templates that shape this discourse in this company and will prove difficult to challenge and reconsider. The structure is now part of the “rules and resources” or “common sense” of both assessors and managers. This limited case study also suggests that genres function as “con­ gealed events” (Morson & Emerson, 1989, p. 22) or “symbolic structures” (Bourdieu) that attempt to reproduce certain kinds of “gnoseological order” or “a homogeneous conception of time, space, number, and cause” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 166). Genres seem to function chronotopically in that they represent worlds of human action or movement. In the case of this discourse formation, a critical examination of the linguistic resources present in the letters reveals a world in which readers are kept waiting, a world in which their movements are restricted often to speech acts, a world in which they are not encouraged to respond, and a world in which they are often judged harshly. At its heart, this genre attempts to freeze its readers in space and time and reduce them to passivity and nonresponse. And yet this same analysis also suggests that some room for change does exist.10 The “better” writers at this company have figured out ways to remain within the trajectory of the genre and yet treat their readers as both clients and claimants. Their resources included more nontransactive construc­ tions, far fewer relational that judged readers, a future orientation in which the reader could improve, and sometimes expressions of regret.11 At the same time, the contextual information gathered during the interviews revealed a network of power relations. The rhetorical form being reproduced within this correspondence operated both as a constraint and resource and demonstrated the complex and contradictory operations of power within organizations. These writers were enacting and reproducing this set of discursive practices while at the same time these discursive practices were affecting the writers* own habitus or regulated improvisational strate­ gies. It is possible to argue as well that some of the discursive practices were against the writers’ best interests. All the writers mentioned the difficulties 10lt is tempting to call these strategies forms o f resistance. However, I believe such a labelling would be naive. Certainly, these writers would not see what they are doing as forms o f resistance. In fact, they called it “developing a good tone.” 1'The possibility o f expressing regret came as a surprise to many writers in the work­ shops. Some w riters felt quite am bivalent about expressing regret in that it w as “phoney.” In the end, we decided that expressing regret was a resource that writers could use if they genuinely felt regret and felt comfortable expressing it. _ Digitized

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they faced trying to explain their decisions to their readers and the intense frustration that they experienced. These writers made decisions that pro­ foundly affected their readers’ lives, and yet, paradoxically, to a large extent these writers were in turn constrained by their organization's discursive prac­ tices as embodied in this one genre. To echo Bourdieu, these writers exercise power only in relation to their organization. They are “like the Homeric ora­ tor who takes hold of the skeptron in order to speak’’ (Thompson, 1991, p. 9). To echo Smith, we have here an example of institutional discourse rather than the discourse of individual subjects, a discourse that is now embedded in institutional practices such as computerized templates. In conclusion, when we examine genres as trajectory entities or flex­ ible constellations of improvisational yet regulated strategies that agents enact within fields it is probably useful to think of genres as actions or verbs. As discourse formations or constellations of strategies, gemes provide us with the flexible guidelines, or access to strategies that we need to function togeth­ er in the constant social construction of reality. They guide us as we together and “on the fly” mutually negotiate our way from moment to moment and yet provide us with some security that an utterance will end in a predictable way. They are, as Lemke (1999) suggested, “trajectory entities,” structured struc­ tures that structure our management of time/space. At the level of organizations or fields genres also represent sets of paradigmatic choices. We genre all the time in the sense that we classify pos­ sible sets of paradigmatic choices. People in organizations can tell researchers as part of their “logic of practice” whether they are writing reports, user refer­ ence guides, or appeal letters. Finally, at the level of individual human agents, we are genred all the time. We are socialized through genres and acquire our linguistic capital through our exposure to various genres. It is through the genres associated with different fields that agents acquire the “habitus” or practical logics that they need in order to negotiate their way through their various fields or lin­ guistic markets. Genres are, in fact, local and in a constant state of construc­ tion; they are dynamic; they are structured structures that structure; they are strategy-produced and driven and produce strategy. Constellation like, they function as strange attractors, creating patterns of connected content, form, and style. They create gnoseological systems—systems where commonsense visions of time/space and the possibility of human action exist. Consequently, they are profoundly ideological. But we need to look at the schemes of order we are negotiating and in particular at the ideologies they create and especial­ ly at the subject positions they create and maintain. Some genres that control will function at all levels as discursive sets of practices that construct space/times against some of their participant’s best interests. These genres— such as the negative letter— will more often consist o f authorized speakers/voices that create constricted spaces and futures for their readers. _ Digitized

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96 Schryer APPENDIX A A More “Effective” Letter According to Managers and Writers Dear Ms. J. We are writing to inform you of our decision regarding your claim for Long Term Disability (LTD) benefits. As you aware (sic), as of May 15, 1994, in order to be considered “totally disabled” the Member must have a medically determinable physical or mental impairment due to injury or illness which prevents her from per­ forming the duties of ANY occupation: 1. for which she is or may become fitted through education, training or experience, and 2. that provides an income that is equal to or greater than the amount of monthly disability benefit payable under this provision, adjusted annually by the Consumer Price Index. The availability of work for the member does not affect the determination of totally disabled. On March 11, 1994 we wrote to your physician, Dr. Smith, for an update on your medical condition. This medical information has been reviewed, along with your entire claim file. We have noted that you have had some recent improvement in the symptomatology of your condition, ie. grip strength, stiffness and joint assessment. We have concluded that based on your current clinical findings, you would be capable of performing a light sedentary occupation as of May 15, 1994 and therefore we would not consider you to be totally disabled for ANY occupation. However, in view of the fact that you are currently involved in a rehabilitation program and attempting to return to your own occupation, we are willing to continue your claim on a rehabilitation basis only for a further period of time. Providing you do not return to work on a full-time basis prior to September 15,1994, benefits will be released until this time to assist you with your return to work plans. We will be terminating your claim file effective September 16,1994 If you believe the evidence on which we have based our decision is incorrect, or if there is other evidence which is not known to us, you may appeal your claim. If you decide to do so, please make such a request in writ­ Digitized by

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ing, as soon as possible, giving reasons to support the appeal. Medical rea­ sons must be accompanied by supporting documentation from your specialist at your expense. Until we receive such evidence, your file will remain closed. Sincerely Paula Jones Disability Claims Assessor DISABILITY CLAIMS DEPARTMENT

APPENDIX B A Less “Effective” Letter According to Managers and Writers Dear Mrs. S. We have received and reviewed the additional medical documenta­ tion requested from Dr. Smith and Dr. Taylor. This information, as well as your entire file, has been reviewed and a decision has been made about your eligibility for disability benefits. Our decision of whether or not to grant benefits must take into consideration both the terms of the group plan and the medical evidence received. The group plan states, in part: During the two-year period immediately following the date the mem­ ber becomes totally disabled, total disability means that the member has a medically determinable physical or mental impairment due to injury or illness which prevents her from performing the regular duties of the occupation in which she participated just before the disability started. After the two-year period, totally disabled means that the member has a medically determinable physical or mental impairment due to injury or illness, which prevents her from performing the duties of ANY occupation: 1. for which she is or may become fitted through education, training or experience, and 2. that provides an income that is equal to or greater than the amount of monthly disability benefit payable under this provision, adjusted annually by the Consumer Price Index. The availability of work for the member does not affect the determi­ nation of totally disabled. Digitized by

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You are claiming disability benefits due to reactive depression, mor­ bid obesity, hypothyroidism, and fibrositis. While it seems that you have some signs and symptoms that are compatible with depression, by the level of treatment being suggested and received, it would seem that your depression is not totally disabling. Apparently you have been overweight and have had hypothyroidism for some time and have still been able to work. While mention is made of fibrositis as a diagnosis, there is minimal information on file to support this condition. It is our belief that the medical evidence provided does not support your being totally disabled and unable to perform your own occupation. Therefore, we must decline your claim for long term disability benefits. If you believe the evidence on which we have based our decision is incorrect, or if there is other evidence which is not known to us, you may appeal your claim. If you decide to do so, please make such a request in writ­ ing, as soon as possible, giving reasons to support the appeal. Medical rea­ sons must be accompanied by supporting documentation from your specialist at your expense. Until we receive such evidence, your file will remain closed. Sincerely Mary Jane Evans Disability Claims Assessor DISABILITY CLAIMS DEPARTMENT

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5 Genre Systems: Chronos and Kairos in Communicative Interaction JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Since Miller’s (1984) important proposal that genres be seen as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,” considerable work in rhetori­ cal studies (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995) has used this framing to identify and investigate communicative interaction in scientif­ ic and professional communities. This view of genre has also informed stud­ ies of communication, and especially electronic communication, in organiza­ tions (Crowston & Williams, 1997; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994; Schultze & Boland, 1997; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Yates & Sumner, 1997). Recently, the focus of genre research has also broadened to examine not only single genres, but also the relationships among genres within a community. Such an expanded focus recognizes that although understanding the individual genres used within a community sheds significant light on particular norms, prac­ tices, and ideologies, understanding the interactions among genres and the communicative phenomena that emerge over time and space from genre inter­ dependence gives us access to additional, larger insights. Various concepts for describing interactions among genres have been proposed, including genre set (Devitt, 1991), genre repertoire (Orlikowski & _ ^1 ~ Digitized

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Yates, 1994), generic intertextuality (Berkenkotter, 1997), and genre system (Bazerman, 1994a). Whereas all these concepts attempt to characterize con­ nections among the genres of a community or related communities, each emphasizes a different form of connectivity. The notions of genre set and genre repertoire point to the collection of genres recognized and used by members of an identifiable oiganizational or professional community, such as tax accountants (Devitt, 1991) or computer language designers (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994). In contrast, Berkenkotter (1997) emphasizes the intertextual nature of professional genres; that is, how and why professional genres con­ tain reference to and elements of both prior local texts and canonical texts in the field. In his concept of genre system, Bazerman (1994a) focuses on the series of genres comprising a social activity and enacted by all the parties involved. He suggests that in the enactment of consequential social action, members of various communities engage in “a complex web of interrelated genres where each participant makes a recognizable act or move in some rec­ ognizable genre, which then may be followed by a certain range of appropri­ ate generic responses by others” (1994a, pp. 96-97). Building on Bazerman’s notion of genre system as a series of genres comprising a social activity and enacted by all the parties involved, we exam­ ine how genre systems serve as organizing structures within a community, providing expectations for the purpose, content, form, participants, time, and place of coordinated social interaction.1 After looking generally at how genre systems structure genre expectations in these areas, we focus more specifical­ ly on the temporal dimension and draw on the Greek concepts of chronos and especially kairos as used in ancient and modem rhetoric to help us think about issues of time and timing in genre systems. In particular, we explore the role of genre systems in structuring the timing of coordinated social interac­ tion, illustrating this by referring to some of our empirical studies of electron­ ic communication in communities. We find that members of communities use the temporal aspects of genre systems—both tacitly as habitual mechanisms and explicitly as strategic devices—to facilitate coordination and shape their electronic collaboration. We believe that genre systems may be an especially important means of structuring interaction in electronic communities where shifts in time, space, and media create ambiguities in interaction norms and expectations. We further suggest that the general understanding of genre sys­ tems may be advanced by a deeper examination of how time shapes (and is shaped by) the structuring of communicative interaction in communities.

*We have used this notion o f genre systems in previous work on electronic com muni­ cation (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994; Yates, Orlikowski, & Rennecker, 1997), but with­ out focusing specifically on how genre system s are used to structure coordinated activity.

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GENRE SYSTEMS AS M EANS OF STRUCTURING INTERACTION We find it useful to think about genre systems as structuring (Giddens, 1984) several aspects of communicative interaction: why, what, how, who/m, when, and where. In introducing this structuring notion, we will focus on the exam­ ple of the academic journal peer reviewing system, a familiar genre system not typically based in electronic media.2 The journal peer reviewing system may be said to start with a specific call for papers and/or a general invitation to submit papers appearing within the journal.3 Potential authors submit man­ uscripts to the journal for review, typically following guidelines for length, topic and approach, and reference methods. The editor chooses a set of reviewers and sends them a review packet, typically consisting of the manu­ script, a letter requesting the review by a certain date, a set of instructions for reviewing, a form for structured assessments intended for the editors, and a form or instructions for comments intended for the authors. After completing their reviews, the reviewers return the forms and their comments to the editor. The editor must then decide on one of several paths to take from that point (reject, revise and resubmit, accept after minor revisions, and accept), and then write an editorial decision letter to the authors). If the decision is a rejection, the interaction typically ends there. If the decision is an acceptance, the interaction shifts to the domain of the individual managing the publishing process, who deals with the authors) to prepare the manuscript for publica­ tion. If the decision is a revise and resubmit, the author(s) may revise the manuscript, responding to relevant reviewers’ comments, and resubmit it with a letter to the editor. For many journals, this resubmission letter must address the reviewers’ and editor’s comments in detail, explaining how the authors) has responded to them. The editor typically sends the manuscript and letter to reviewers for a second review. This loop can continue until the manuscript is either rejected, at which point the interaction ends, or accepted, at which point it follows the path to publication. This description, abbreviated though it is, suggests the range of gen­ res and sequences of genres that may be followed for a particular instance of the journal reviewing genre system. Now let us look at how this genre system structures expectations about the interaction among the members of the rele­ 2Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995, pp. 63-77) argue that scientific peer reviewing is a “ social mechanism” for “certifying new knowledge” (p. 62) and, using speech act the­ ory, argue further that the “peer review correspondence can be viewed as an argumen­ tative discussion” (p. 63). Our focus, instead, is on the genre system as a whole, rather than on the arguments within its constituent genres. 3T he boundaries around genre system s may be construed broadly o r narrow ly, depending on the focal community and set o f interactions being studied.

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vant scholarly community (e.g., authors), editor, peer reviewers, and publish­ ers). In doing so, we analytically separate several areas in which genre sys­ tems shape expectations—why, what, how, who/m, when, where— that are closely intertwined in practice. Why: Most obviously, the genre system provides expectations about its socially recognized purpose and those of the genres that compose i t The journal review genre system is used to choose and shape articles for publica­ tion in a scholarly journal. The genre system also shapes expectations about the socially recognized puiposes of the specific genres within the system. For instance, the editorial decision letter follows norms intended to convey the editorial decision and elicit follow-up steps on the part of the authors). What: A genre system provides expectations about the generic con­ tent of both the genre system and its constituent genres. For example, the journal reviewing system shapes our expectations about which genres appear in most instances of the genre system (e.g., initial manuscript submission) and which depend on certain circumstances (e.g., resubmission of a revised manuscript). Further, each of these genres has norms for appropriate types of content, including expectations about uptake; that is, how one or more mem­ bers of a community might take up a genre and respond to it (Freadman, 1994, p. 63). The peer reviews intended for the authors) are expected to con­ tain commentary on overarching concerns and on specific textual issues, whereas the author(s)’s response to the reviews is expected to take up each of the reviews, whether to demonstrate compliance with or argue against the rec­ ommendations. How: A genre system provides expectations about the form of both the genre system and its constituent genres. The peer review genre system can accommodate some but not an infinite variety in which genres it includes (e.g., an editorial decision letter based on reviews must typically contain at least some of the reviews in written form). Similarly, the specific genres in it contain recognizable form features (e.g., the peer reviews intended for the authors) include a heading identifying the manuscript and references to the article text, but not usually identification of the reviewer). Who/m: A genre system provides expectations about participants in specific types of communicative actions and interactions. It specifies who (i.e., individuals occupying what roles) can enact which genres as rhetor, and for whom such genres are intended. In this latter case, genre rules embody notions of what Bakhtin (1986, p. 95) refers to as “addressivity,” that is, “the quality of being directed to someone." He suggests this addressivity is a con­ stitutive feature of genres, noting that each genre “has its own typical concep­ tion of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre” (p. 95). Thus a peer review is typically addressed to the authors), although it is also read by the editor, and the editorial decision letter, which can be issued only by an editor, is addressed to the author(s). Digitized by

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When: A genre system provides temporal expectations (sequencing and pacing or timing) for the entire genre system as well as specific con­ stituent genres.4 Clearly authors) would not expect to receive reviews before submitting a manuscript. Moreover, authors recognize expectations about timing embedded in the journal review system when they complain about the entire review process stretching out “too long.” Editors often attach more spe­ cific expectations for timing, typically stated as deadlines, to different con­ stituent genres. Reviewers are asked to return their reviews within a specified time period, and editors are expected to issue editorial decision letters within a period more loosely defined but nevertheless bounded by community expectations, if not specific deadlines. Where: Finally, a genre system provides locational (place) expecta­ tions for the genre system and its constituent genres. Journals typically indi­ cate whether manuscripts should be submitted to the editorial offices or to specific senior editors directly, and authors) indicate where all related corre­ spondence should be addressed. The genre system, thus, may be seen to coordinate or choreograph a multiparty interaction within the community. It serves as a template or schematic representation of the interaction that participants— including authors, editor, and reviewers—draw on in accomplishing this interaction. If participants draw on institutionalized norms tacitly, accepting the genre sys­ tem and the expectations surrounding it as givens, they implicitly allow and even depend on it as a mechanism for coordinating their interaction, thereby reinforcing and reproducing the structure. Participants may also allow slippage in specific expectations. As long as such slippages are occasional and viewed as variations, rather than serving as the basis for shifting the norms and expec­ tations of other participants, they do not change the genre system as institu­ tionalized. More lasting changes may occur through tacit action as the relevant community members respond without reflection to changing circumstances (e.g., change of editor), but they require sustained modification of norms by multiple actors, eventually changing the expectations of most participants. Participants may also use the genre system more deliberately, as a strategic device for coordinating interaction.5 They can do so both through reinforcing existing genre system norms or encouraging changes in norms. In the former case, an editor might draw on explicit deadlines if slippage was threatening to undermine the current instantiation of the genre system, con­ 4Genre systems are, in Bakhtin’s sense, “chronotopic” (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986); they are situated in the interconnected nexus o f time-space. See Catherine Schryer’s contribu­ tion to this volume for a more complete explanation o f the chronotope term and appli­ cation o f it to a specific genre. sSee Yates et al. (1999) for a discussion o f tacit and explicit changes in genres in response to the adoption o f an electronic conferencing tool in a Japanese R & D pro­ ject group. Digitized by

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tacting a reviewer and pressing for a review, or sending the manuscript to another reviewer. Similarly, an authors) anxious for a response on a manu­ script might contact the editorial office and invoke timing expectations to push for a decision on a manuscript. Conversely, a participant might use a genre system as a strategic device for improving the accomplishment of its purpose by attempting to change the norms around it. For example, an editor might want to improve the timeliness of publication in the journal by moving to electronic submission of papers and reviews, then reinforcing or even tightening the deadlines for reviewers. Of course, one person cannot singlehandedly effect the change of an institutionalized structure; other relevant participants must adopt and reinforce the attempted change for it to be imple­ mented and sustained in practice.

CHRONOS AND KAIROS We have proposed that communities use genre systems (whether tacitly or explicitly) to structure multiple aspects of communicative interaction through shaping expectations about the various aspects of interaction discussed above: why, what, how, who/m, when, and where. We will now focus on one of these aspects, when, and explore more fully how genre systems shape (are shaped by) the sequence and timing of interactions. As noted, the notion of genre sys­ tems proposed by Bazerman (1994a) embodies assumptions about the sequence of genres constituting the system. We see the sequencing of genres as part of the broader issue of timing in a system, which, we suggest, may be understood in terms of the rhetorical concepts of chronos and particularly kairos. These two Greek concepts for time have been characterized by Miller as “quantitative” and “qualitative” notions of time respectively (1992, p. 312). The notion of chronos is generally understood as measurable, quanti­ tative time (Miller, 1992; Smith, 1986). It refers to the specific time or dura­ tion of some event or action as conceived in terms of a socially agreed-upon temporal measure, such as that represented by the clock or the calendar. This notion of time is typically seen as “objective time,” although standard time measures are, of course, social constructions (as exemplified by the fact that different calendars are used in different societies), but their broad usage and intersubjective acceptance renders chronos essentially taken for granted. The qualitative notion of kairos as “rhetorical timing or opportunity” has often been understood as the opportune or appropriate moment to stage some event or perform some action. However, another, more action-centered perspective on kairos has recently received considerable discussion (Bazerman, 1994b; Kinneavy & Eskin, 1994; Miller, 1992). Miller (1992) notes that a key difference between these two perspectives on kairos hinges Digitized by

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on the assumptions made about its ontological status: whether it is objectively given or humanly constructed. On the objective side, kairos is understood as the rhetorical opportunity associated with a particular, objectively definable situational context. Here, ‘‘the situation exists independent of the rhetor; thus a kairos presents itself at a distinct point in time, manifesting its own require­ ments and making demands on the rhetor/’ which the rhetor may or may not meet (p. 312). In contrast, the constructivist view suggests “that situations are created by rhetors; thus, by implication, any moment in time has a kairos, a unique potential that a rhetor can grasp and make something o f ’ (p. 312). To resolve this opposition, Miller proposes a third perspective that recognizes the “dynamic interplay between objective and subjective, between opportunity as discerned and opportunity as defined” (p. 312). Hence, the concrete, given particularities of any situation as well as the actions of humans in turning those qualities into rhetorical resources are emphasized. Our view reflects this dual perspective; we see kairos as emerging from the communicative activities of human actors (i.e., rhetors and audi­ ences) in specific situations (e.g., institutional context, task, place, and chrono­ logical time). Further, we argue that kairos may be viewed as enacted, arising when socially situated rhetors choose and/or craft an opportune time to interact with a particular audience in a particular way within particular circumstances. Rhetors are influenced by the pre-existing institutional context of their com­ munity or organization (its norms, protocols, funding sources, work practices, etc.), the audience (real or imagined) they are interacting with, the task or activity they are engaged in, the chronos or chronological time associated with their activity, and their own interests, intentions, and interpretations of their situated action. Typically drawing on, but occasionally undercutting, existing structures shaped by these influences, rhetors take communicative action with regard to others, and in this way shape the kairos of that moment. This shaping is a social act. As Bazerman (1994b, p. 185) notes, “We not only learn to time our actions for our own advantage, but we sympathetically construe what tim­ ing or what actions at a particular time might be best for another person.” An especially eloquent statement of this action-centered notion of time comes from a keynote speech made by Dr. Benjamin Mays, the presi­ dent of Morehouse College, to a 1946 convention of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) at which delegates were debating a proposed (and, at the time, very progressive) interracial charter. In this speech,6 he suc­ cessfully overcame inertia and motivated action, in part through his character­ ization of time as something to be manipulated: “I hear you say that the time is not ripe . . . but if the time is not ripe, then it should be your purpose to ripen the time.” 6As recalled by Dorothy Height, chair of the National Council o f Negro W omen, in an interview on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, February 27,1998. Digitized by

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Although genres have been discussed as typified communicative actions enacted in response to a recurrent situation (and thus to a kairos), w e suggest that kairos also plays a key role in the enactment of genre systems. Bazerman (1994b, p. 184) refers to “kairotic coordination” as the mutual and ongoing coordination of communicative activities within organizations and communities. He writes that “kairotic coordination can lead to the kinds o f shared orientations to and shared participations within mutually recognized moments.” Bazerman hints at but does not directly connect this notion o f kairotic coordination to his concept of genre systems.7 We believe that the notions of kairos and chronos can help us understand the timing and sequenc­ ing of the genre system and its constituent genres, and understand how indi­ viduals coordinate activities by tacitly using or deliberately shaping kairotic time. Kairotic coordination can be seen both to emerge from participants’ enactment of a genre system and to shape that enactment as participants situ­ ate the com m unicative action w ithin a p articu lar tim e and place. Chronological time serves as one resource upon which participants may draw in focusing other participants’ attention and thus coordinating their commu­ nicative activities. This resource, like others that participants draw on in act­ ing, both constrains and enables those activities (Giddens, 1984). As an example, consider again the peer review genre system. Once authors submit their manuscripts, they expect to receive an editorial decision letter with reviews sometime in the future. The contextualization of this peer review system to particular journals by their editors (as well as their adminis­ trative staffs and editorial boards) sets more specific expectations for time and timing. Reviewers, for example, may be told that their reviews are due back to the editorial offices within a specific period of time (e.g., six weeks). In specifying this period of time, the editors have drawn on chronological time as a resource for focusing participants’ attention and thus for facilitating, either tacitly or strategically, their kairotic coordination of the process. Nevertheless, chronos rarely serves as a precise and absolute constraint in the operation of this genre system, as deadlines often give way to the contingen­ cies of particular individual reviewers. Still, kairotic coordination of the order and genera] timing of each communicative action within the genre system is a key feature of the expectations created by an institutionalized genre system such as the journal reviewing process. Authors’ sense of timeliness is offend­ ed if the entire review and publication process stretches out for much longer than the expected time, for example, and in such cases they may begin to question the legitimacy of the genre system as it is being enacted. 7In his paper about systems o f genres, Bazerman (1994a, p. 99) makes the following suggestive comment: “By considering the ways in which generic utterances open up pathways to certain consequent speech acts and close off other pathways, we give a new precision to the concept o f kairos, or timeliness.” He does not, however, develop this idea. Digitized by

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KAIROTIC COORDINATION IN ELECTRONIC COMMUNITIES Thus far, we have used the journal peer review genre system, a familiar genre system in which most of the genres involved are typically realized in the paper medium, to exemplify the role of genre systems in structuring the time and timing (chronos and kairos) of communicative action. Now we will shift our focus to communities using electronic communication media to coordi­ nate activity. Media such as electronic mail (e-mail) clearly speed up the time to transfer messages over distance (measurable or chronological time), allow­ ing rapid and asynchronous coordination. Proponents of groupware, a term used to designate electronic communication tools designed to support collab­ orative action and interaction,8 claim that such software offers even greater benefits in the coordination of groups and communities. Others, however, have noted potential problems in coordination via such media. Sproull and Kiesler (1986), for example, have suggested that electronic communication lacks social cues present in face-to-face and even in paper-based communica­ tion. Others have suggested that this characteristic is not inherent in the medi­ um, but also involves its use by specific communities (Foulger, 1990; Markus, 1994; Matheson & Zanna, 1989). In particular, problems of kairotic coordination may arise from the lack of institutionalized norms for communication in the new medium, or from mismatches between local norms that have emerged in different con­ texts. For example, one person may send information necessary for coordinat­ ing action to another and, based on social norms in one context, await a con­ firmatory reply, whereas the recipient, drawing on different norms from a dif­ ferent context (perhaps including a different medium), may not think a reply is necessary. A further flurry of messages may occur to clear up this misun­ derstanding. Conversely, the recipient may confirm and thank the sender of the message, who in turn acknowledges that message, potentially continuing the message exchange beyond what is indicated by norms in the pre-electronic world. Such coordination problems are generally tied to unclear social norms around use of the electronic medium, not to the medium itself. The notion of genre systems, combined with those of kairos and chronos, provides a useful framework for understanding such problems in coordinating orga­ nized activity via electronic media. As we have seen, genre systems are an important means by which interrelated sequences of communicative actions in communities or groups are structured in traditional media (e.g., face-toface and paper), and we would expect them to play a similar role in electronic media. E lectro n ic mail may be considered a basic form o f groupware, but the category is perhaps best exemplified by Lotus Notes, which supports the establishment of discus­ sion databases accessible to and used by groups and communities. Digitized by

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In this section we examine how genre systems serve as a means of kairotic coordination for two specific communities using different types of electronic communication. In the first case, we focus on the use of e-mail by a geographically dispersed group of computer language designers in the early 1980s (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994). In the second, we look at the mid-1990s use of a new groupware tool, Lotus Corporation’s Team Room, by a collocat­ ed team within a single corporation (Yates, Orlikowski, & Rennecker, 1997).

Kairotic Coordination in the Common U8P Project In a previous study (Orlikowski & Yates, 1994), we examined the communi­ cation of a group of artificial intelligence (AI) language designers who spent over two years designing the Common LISP computer language. Most of the interactions among members of this group were conducted electronically and asynchronously via an e-mail distribution list, although some members met for face-to-face discussions twice during the project. The designers represent­ ed several different universities and companies around the United States, but they shared many norms for electronic and face-to-face communication based on their membership in the AI professional community. In addition, most of them were already using electronic mail (though it was still a relatively new medium in the early 1980s) in this AI community. These shared communica­ tion norms helped the group to structure their initial genre repertoire within the e-mail list, through their importation of existing paper-based (e.g., memos, proposals) and e-mail-based (e.g., dialogue) genres. As we have shown in the earlier study, over time their genre repertoire changed, reflecting task needs in different phases of the project as well as long-term trends. In particular, this group enacted the balloting genre system, an addi­ tion to the group’s initial genre repertoire that emerged when closure on vari­ ous design decisions was needed. The person coordinating the writing of the Common LISP manual (the coordinator) realized that the group’s existing electronic genre repertoire had no mechanism for achieving such closure. Thus he deliberately introduced the balloting genre system to break the ongo­ ing electronic discussion in order to focus the members on and coordinate them in resolving as many outstanding issues as possible. In the preamble to the first ballot questionnaire, he stated its purpose in a way that attempted to shape a mutually recognized kairotic moment for closure: Here is what you have all been waiting for! I need an indication o f con­ sensus or lack thereof on the issues that have been discussed by network mail since the August 1982 meeting, particularly on those issues that were deferred for proposal, for which proposals have now been made.

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As he explained in an interview, in choosing his proposed means of closure he was influenced by the voting process that the group had used in its two face-to-face meetings. The rest of the group ratified the kairotic moment he shaped and reinforced the balloting genre system by participating in enacting it. Moreover, he and others invoked the genre system several more times dur­ ing the remainder of the project, each time achieving closure on some, if not all, of the ballot questions. The genre system he introduced was composed of three interdepen­ dent genres in a specific order: (1) the ballot questionnaire, which was a mes­ sage from the ballot initiator (originally the coordinator himself, but in some later instances another individual) listing and describing the issues to be voted on; (2) the ballot responses, which were messages from the members back to the ballot initiator containing their votes and comments on issues in the bal­ lot; and (3) the ballot results, which was a message from the ballot initiator to the group summarizing the voting and its implications. The timing of these interrelated genres reflected and shaped the activity within the group. The ballot initiator typically issued the ballot questionnaire when a large number o f undecided issues and proposals had accumulated and some resolution was needed to move the design process forward. As one key member of this group explained to us: “[Balloting] was a way of seeing if we had consensus and a way of putting all the little details away—a way of sticking a pin through our decisions.” The first and subsequent instances of the electronic ballot ques­ tionnaire included directions, especially with regard to time, for responding to it. The ballot initiator deliberately drew on chronos as a resource in creating uigency by requesting replies by a certain date and time. For example, in a ballot questionnaire sent on a Monday, the initiator noted: “Please reply by Wednesday afternoon to [me] or the list.” After receiving, compiling, and assessing the ballot responses from the group's members, the initiator issued the ballot results to summarize the voting and to register closure, where possible. The initiator had to wait until the self-imposed deadline for replies had passed before he could tally the votes. But the timing of his issuance of the ballot results was not determined solely by this chronological deadline. The initiator’s processing of the ballot results had to take into account the comments and qualifications members had attached as explanations for their votes, weigh the importance of any objec­ tions to a strong majority vote (according to the individual’s perceived exper­ tise as well as the status of that person in the Common LISP community), and formulate an interpretation of the results for each design issue (whether ade­ quate closure had been reached, or whether the issue should remain open for further discussion). As one member noted, “Our voting process was never democratic. We had to balance those with knowledge and power. So [the coordinator’s] decisions were never just a simple count; his was a weighted voting.” Preparing the ballot results message thus took considerable delibera­ Digitized by

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tion; far from being a mere exercise in counting, it required sensitivity to the audience and its motivations, an understanding of project phase and work remaining, and a weighing of priorities and conflicting interests—in short, the shaping of an appropriate (kairotic) uptake of the responses, in which chronos was just one of the resources drawn upon. The enactment of the balloting genre system during the Common LISP project focused members’ attention on the key unresolved issues and elicited their input on how to move forward. At the same time, by punctuating the project’s ongoing momentum with these moments of explicit deliberation and decision making, the balloting genre system served as a means for coordi­ nating the varied activities of the geographically distributed members and cre­ ating important milestones for the project, highlighting what had been accom­ plished to date and what still needed to be done. The system as strategically initiated by the coordinator and enacted by the entire group thus drew on chronos to provide Bazerman’s kairotic coordination of the group’s activity.

Kairotic Coordination in the ISQI Team Room In another study (Yates, Orlikowski, & Rennecker, 1997) we examined how the teams within a high tech firm, “Mox Corporation,” adopted and used Team Room, a collaborative tool built within Lotus Notes and designed specifically to support teams in organizational settings (Cole & Johnson, 1995). Use of Team Room centered around a shared team database with post­ ed documents and threaded comments to these documents. The tool also included a number of features intended to encourage teams to establish com­ mon norms. At the time of our study, three collocated teams within Mox were serving as test sites for this new groupware tool. These teams all used several genre systems, adapted from genre systems currently enacted in other media, to coordinate various interactions among members and across time. We will discuss how one of these genre systems, designated as the meeting genre sys­ tem, served as a means of temporal coordination in the team using Team Room most extensively, the Information Systems Quality Improvement (ISQI) team. Located within the Mox Information Systems (IS) department, this team stated its mission as follows: “to [o]versee and drive the implemen­ tation of TQM in Mox I.S.” The team was composed of three core members working close to full time on the project and a larger extended team of people who were informed of progress in the TQM effort and some of whom attend­ ed regular team meetings. The team leader initiated the use of Team Room at the time the team was formed, seeing the groupware tool as “. . . a way of cre­ ating a running documentation for the, quality improvement project that would also support interdependent work and inclusion of those outside the immediate work circle.” Digitized by

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The meeting genre system in its most complete form included four genres surrounding and including a face-to-face meeting: the announcement of meeting logistics, the agenda, the meeting itself, and meeting minutes. The genres enacted in Team Room (all except the face-to-face meeting) were imported into this groupware tool from paper media, often by way of other electronic media such as e-mail. Within Team Room they were available to all team members with access to the ISQI Team Room database, rather than solely to those members who were explicitly designated to receive a paper or electronic document. The meeting genre system was most commonly used around regular meetings of the team (initially every week, but later, as the project task shifted, once every two to three weeks), although announcements o f and/or minutes from relevant meetings external to the ISQI group (for example, meetings about TQM held by the ISQI team for laiger groups of people from the IS department) were also posted in the ISQI Team Room. The meeting genre system carried expectations about sequence and timing of these genres, and thus for coordination of the team’s activities. The genre system was typically initiated by the team leader’s announcement of the logistics—day, place, time, and general purpose—of the meeting.9 In this initiating genre of the sequence, chronos served as a resource (i.e., a con­ straint and enabler) in the team’s recognition of a kairotic moment for gather­ ing and conducting some business. On first consideration, the more passive sense of kairos as the recognition of a predetermined coordinating moment designated in terms of chronos seemed to operate in pacing the regular team meetings. After the weekly schedule was initially established, the team leader tacitly drew upon the chronologically designated time in scheduling the meet­ ings. However, we can see the team’s active shaping of kairos in its decision to shift its regular meetings from weekly to bi- or triweekly meetings when activities and perceived needs changed. This decision is documented through several postings, but the reason is stated most compactly in the minutes of one meeting, as posted by the team leader: 1 - There was general agreement that the [larger] group wanted to stay involved in the Quality rollout, and that meeting every two weeks . . . would serve that purpose.

Thus chronos served as a resource on which members drew, sometimes tacit­ ly and in this case deliberately, in recognizing and/or shaping the appropriate (kairotic) timing of the meetings.

9ln some cases, dates for three or four o f the regular staff meetings o f the ISQI group were announced in a single posting. Also, in some cases, the subordinate to the team leader posted the announcement for the team leader. Digitized by

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The second genre of the system, the agenda, was made available as early as the meeting logistics announcement (in some cases these two genres were collapsed into a single posting) or as late as the meeting itself (in which case no agenda appeared within the Team Room). The exact form of the genre system used in a particular instance was tied to the specific context and particular team exigencies. Posting the agenda earlier allowed the team time to prepare for the meeting more deliberately and actively, as in the following Monday posting, which includes both a logistics announcement and the agen­ da for a Thursday meeting: R E M IN D E R : TQ M M E E T IN G - T h u rs S ep t 26 from 10 to 11 in Conference Room C The agenda for Thursday’s meeting is:

1.... 2....

Because the meeting itself took place face to face in this collocated group, it never appeared within the Team Room itself. The final genre of the system, the meeting minutes genre, was regarded as optional for regular team meetings in this firm, as expressed by a member of another team in an inter­ view: “Minutes are not a routine thing. Not for staff meetings at all.” Nevertheless, minutes for many of the ISQI team’s meetings were posted in the Team Room. One ISQI team member explained in an interview the condi­ tions under which minutes might be posted: Either it had been a very productive meeting and we thought that we needed to capture what we had gleaned from the meeting, or [not every­ one] had been there and we needed to share some agreements we’d made with other people.

Thus minutes resulted when a member recognized and/or shaped an appropri­ ate moment to produce minutes. These minutes, in turn, retrospectively shaped the meeting through the interpretation of what had occurred at the meeting. Although the sequence just described (logistics, agenda, meeting, minutes) is typical, the genre system also accommodated some variation in it, as already noted. Perhaps the most interesting variation appeared in the fol­ lowing message posted by the team leader, in which the minutes of a previous meeting are linked to a meeting announcement and used to justify the change in meeting logistics mentioned above:

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[Subject]: UPCOMING ISQI MEETINGS As per our discussion on August 3 (see minutes here [icon]) I’ve aban­ doned our weekly meeting schedule and substituted 1 hour approximate­ ly every two weeks for TQM updates and discussions. Thurs, August 24 from 10-11 in Conference Room B Thurs Sept 7 from 10-11 in Conference Room B Thurs Sept 28 from 10-11 in Conference Room B

Team members could click on the icon to read a prior meeting’s minutes in conjunction with reading the announcement of upcoming meetings. Most often, however, the standard sequence was followed, though some genres (such as the agenda, if handed out or developed at the meeting, or the minutes, if not compiled) might be omitted in any given instantiation of the system. Drawing on chronos as a resource, the ISQI team structured the kairotic coordination of meetings through the use of the meeting genre sys­ tem, both habitually or passively and deliberately or actively.

Implications for Electronic Communities We have shown how two communities drew on chronos to enact genre sys­ tems that kairotically coordinated their interactions in electronic media. Sometimes these genre systems were invoked tacitly by participants, who seemed to accept the kairotic moment as chronologically given. The meeting genre system as used around the ISQI team’s initial weekly meetings illus­ trates such use. At other times, however, participants deliberately invoked or even initiated genre systems in order to shape kairotic coordination more actively. The ISQI team leader, for example, announced the logistics of upcoming regular meetings in a message that explained and incorporated a change in the previously accepted timing for such meetings. In an even more strategic communicative action, the Common LISP coordinator introduced the balloting genre system as a means of achieving closure on outstanding issues. Clearly, genre systems can serve as an important means of coordinat­ ing electronic communicative activity over time. Given the lack of broadly agreed upon norms in using these new media, common understandings of temporal norms around genre systems are important to any community using them. If such common norms do not already exist, a community must be more explicit about them. The technology itself cannot, however we might wish it, provide that common understanding. Although Team Room, as a groupware application intended to facilitate team communication, has a builtin place for recording normative agreements about its use, the ISQI group Digitized by

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recorded almost no such agreements, and certainly none having to do with the interrelated communicative acts that compose a genre system. Moreover, the meeting genre system (as well as other genre systems not discussed here) that was enacted in the ISQI Team Room was frequently incomplete, lacking agenda or minutes. In contrast, even using e-mail with no such features, the Common LISP coordinator was able to introduce a device for achieving clo­ sure when he perceived a need for one, and all instances of this genre system were, in fact, completed. The shaping of kairotic coordination by the partici­ pants in the community is seemingly more critical than the technology per se. It is interesting to note that the geographically dispersed group per­ formed the balloting genre system more consistently than the collocated ISQI group did the meeting genre system. We may speculate that in a collocated group such as the ISQI team, members may assume that they can always coordinate face to face, and thus may be less careful to complete their parts in the genre system. In some cases, face-to-face coordination may, in fact, occur, but in others it may not, presumably reducing the effectiveness of the genre system as a coordinating means. The Common LISP group, on the other hand, suffered many difficulties in coordinating its task over distance as well as time. Nevertheless, the coordinator strategically and successfully intro­ duced a genre system to shape kairotic coordination in that group. Thus the collocation or dispersal of the community is not necessarily determinative of its ability to coordinate communicative activity electronically. Again, the awareness and strategic use of genre systems and the active shaping of kairot­ ic moments (rather than passive acceptance of chronology) through such devices can lead to successful coordination, whatever the external characteris­ tics of the community or the media at their disposal.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have noted that genre systems, interlocking sequences of genres, structure (and are structured by) several aspects of communicative interactions, including why, what, how, who/m, when, and where. In particu­ lar, we have focused on the issues surrounding when—issues of timing and sequencing of the genres making up a genre system. The rhetorical concepts of chronos (measurable, clock or calendar time) and kairos (qualitative time) have given us a way to elaborate and sharpen our understanding of the struc­ turing process around genre systems. Genre systems may provide multiple genre choices, often linked to continuing paths, at certain key points, while precluding other choices. Understanding the role of chronos and kairos in the unfolding enactment of a genre system can help us understand conditions under which actors exercise discretion about whether and when to take cer­ Digitized by

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tain communicative actions. For example, although deadlines take the appar­ ent form of chronos, or measurable time, they may be used as a resource by the actors in creating a rhetorical opportunity, or kairotic moment. Kairos, as Miller (1992) has noted, can be understood as objectively given or humanly constructed, but is perhaps best understood as the “dynamic interplay between . . . opportunity as discerned and opportunity as defined” (p. 312). Each rhetor may either accept the kairotic moment as a constraint shaping the genre most appropriately enacted (e.g., may see chronological deadlines as binding) or see it as an opportunity to be shaped through enact­ ing a chosen rather than imposed genre (e.g., may see deadlines and deliver­ ables as negotiable). We have seen this interplay between kairos as chrono­ logically determined and kairos as shaped in the introduction and use of the balloting genre system in Common LISP and in the ISQI group’s use of the meeting genre system in Team Room. We thus see that participants decide (whether consciously or not) between using kairotic time as chronologically defined opportunity or as a potential to be shaped. In the latter, dynamic and emergent case, kairos may draw on chronos as a resource but emphasizes change, or more specifically, as Kinneavy (1986, p. 90) put it: “the possibili­ ties [for change] inherent in the moment.” Bazerman (1994a, p. 100) has stat­ ed that “Only by uncovering the pathways that guide our lives in certain directions can we begin to identify the possibilities for new turns and the con­ sequences of taking those turns.” In this chapter, we have tried to demonstrate that using the notions of kairos and chronos to augment our understanding of the temporal aspects of genre systems allows us to identify when we might encounter, or indeed craft, such new pathways.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds., & C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds., & V.W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity o f the experimental article in science. Madison: The U niversity of Wisconsin Press. Bazerman, C. (1994a). Systems of genres and the enactment of social inten­ tions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 79-101). London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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Bazerman, C. (1994b). Whose moment? The kairotics o f intersubjectivity in constructing experience (pp. 171-193). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Berkenkotter, C. (1997). Some features o f genres within genre systems: Intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and recontextualization. Paper present­ ed at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston. Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. N. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Cole, P., & Johnson, E. (1995). Lotus deploys team room: A collaborative application fo r work teams. Unpublished manuscript. Crowston, K., & Williams, M. (1997). Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World Wide Web. Proceedings o f the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Honolulu. Devitt, A. (1991). Intertextuality in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In C. Bazerman & J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics o f the professions (pp. 336- 380). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Foulger, D.A. (1990). Medium as process: The structure, use, and practice of computer conferencing on IBM PC computer conferencing facility. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Freadman, A. (1994). Anyone for tennis? In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 43-66). London: Taylor & Francis. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution o f society: Outline o f the theory o f struc­ ture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kinneavy, J.L. (1986). Kairos: A neglected concept in classical rhetoric. In J.D. Moss (Ed.), Rhetoric and praxis: The contribution o f classical rhetoric to practical reasoning (pp. 79-105). Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Kinneavy, J.L., & Eskin, C. R. (1994). Kairos in Aristotle’s rhetoric. Written Communication, II, 131-142. Markus, M.L. (1994). Finding a happy medium: Explaining the negative effects of electronic communication on social life at work. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 1 2 ,119-149. Matheson, K., & Zanna, M. (1989). Impact of computer-mediated communi­ cation on self-awareness. Computers in Human Behavior, 4 ,221-233. Miller, C.R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal o f Speech, 70, 151-167. Miller, C.R. (1992). Kairos in the rhetoric of science. In S. P. Witte, N. Nakadate, & R. D. Cherry (Eds.), A rhetoric o f doing (pp. 310-327). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Orlikowski, W. J., & Yates, J. (1994). Genre repertoire: Examining the struc­ turing of communicative practices in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39, 541-574. _ Digitized

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Schultze, U., & Boland, R.J., Jr. (1997). Hard and soft information genres: An analysis of two notes databases. Proceedings o f the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Honolulu. Smith, J.E. (1986). Time and qualitative time. Review o f Metaphysics, 40, 316. Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1986). Reducing social context cues: Electronic mail in oiganizational communication. Management Science, 32, 14921512. Yates, J., & Orlikowski, WJ. (1992). Genres of organizational communica­ tion: A structuralonal approach to studying communication and media. Academy o f Management Review, 17,299-326. Yates, J., Orlikowski, W.J., & Rennecker, J. (1997). Collaborative genres for collaboration: Genre systems in digital media. Proceedings o f the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Honolulu. Yates, J., Orlikowski, W.J., & Okamura, K. (1999). Explicit and implicit structuring of genres: Electronic communication in a Japanese R&D organization. Organization Science, 10,83-103. Yates, SJ., & Sumner, T.R. (1997). Digital genres and the new burden of fixi­ ty. Proceedings o f the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Honolulu.

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6 Fuzzy Genres and Community Identities: The Case of Architecture Students’ Sketchbooks Peter Medway Carleton University

In the short history o f genre studies w ithin N orth A m erican “New Rhetoric”—studies located within the disciplines of rhetoric, linguistics, com­ position studies, technical writing, and writing for academic purposes rather than within their traditional home of literary studies—a consensus has emerged around the notion of genre as mode of action (Bazerman, 1988; Bazerman & Paradis, 1991; Devitt, 1993; Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Par6, 1999; Freedman & Medway, 1994a; Miller, 1994). Certainly, genres are still expected to display characteristic textual forms, so that linguistic analysis and the study of discourse features remain highly relevant. Identifying patterns of text format, syntactical and lexical choice, and discursive ordering, however, is no longer considered sufficient for pinning down the genre. In the unlikely •Based on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Genre, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, January 15-17, 1998. The chapter has benefitted from the comments o f participants at that event, and also o f faculty and students o f the English department at Kent State University to whom a version was presented in February 1998. T he research was funded by a Strategic Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council o f Canada. _ Digitized

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but not impossible event of a business executive and a business student inde­ pendently generating identical texts, the one to get something done by subor­ dinates, the other to display proficiency in writing business memos, the two texts would not be instantiations of the same genre (Freedman, Adam, & Smart, 1994). The criteria of generic membership, according to this view, require that a text should address a particular type of “exigence” (Bitzer, 1968)—that is, a situation that calls for action in order to change or maintain it—and that it should arise from a particular socially recognizable motivation (Miller, 1994). Exigences that occur with sufficient frequency and regularity to be recognized by participants as a type and to elicit the emergence of an institutionalized, relatively consistent form of textual response tend to be found in durable social organizations such as academic disciplines, profes­ sions, high school and university programs, bureaucratic departments and corporate divisions, all of which have recently been examined by researchers concerned to get at the nature of genre as one level or instantiation of social order within a society (Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1988; Chamey & Carlson, 1995; Couture, 1992; Detweiler & Peyton, 1999; Dias et a!., 1999; Dias & Parg, 2000; Duin & Hansen, 1996; MacKinnon, 1993; McCarthy, 1991; McCarthy & Gerring, 1994; Medway, 1996a; Mitchell, Marks, Harding, & Hale, forthcoming; Myers, 1990; Par6, 2000; Smart, 1992; Spilka, 1993; Winsor, 1994). Whereas researchers in this tradition have been emphatic in their insistence that genres, and hence their textual instantiations, are not fixed but merely, in Schryer’s (1994) now classic phrase, “stabilized-for-now,” and that they change because the world and its importunate exigences change, some­ times giving rise to new genres (e.g., Newton’s research article—Bazerman, 1988; new genres in banking—Yates & Orlikowski, 1992), synchronic studies have tended to find, or at least to foreground, a fair degree of consistency within genres at the particular moments when the investigation occurred. This chapter, while offering yet another synchronic study, will differ in the range of variation it reports within the genre it examines, a student genre within a university discipline. On a traditional (pre-New Rhetoric) generic member­ ship test that made textual similarity the prime criterion, this body of student work would not count as a set of manifestations of a single genre. On criteria of common social motivation and exigence, however, it does appear to count Thus, although I conclude that this is a case of a genre, there is certainly room for debate. Engaging in that debate will be the first concern of the discussion that follows the description. My second main concern—again raised in challenging form by the examples I discuss—is the question of what genres are fo r and what they do. The answers to date have been various, though not necessarily incompatible. Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), the Russian literary theorist and philosopher who has been claimed by North American students of genre as a legitimating precur­ Digitized by

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sor, says that we cannot speak (“speech" here encompassing both spoken and written discourse) without employing a genre. The “speech genres” are one of the levels at which sets of “conventions and presuppositions maintained by ‘the mutual acknowledgement of communicating subjects’” (in Lyons’ famous formulation, quoting Urban [Lyons, 1964, pp. 82-84]) are activated. Without this activation our utterances are simply unintelligible in their prag­ matic import, even though a meaning may be able to be ascribed to the con­ stituent sentences. To this very plausible claim recent scholars have added the observation that, within the institutional contexts they have studied, genres remove the need to treat each exigence as a distinct problem that requires the time and effort of fresh invention for its solution; the problem has been faced before and the solution, in the form of a more or less completely worked out textual response, is available for re-use. With the aid of electronic storage, standardized genres are one of the main technologies of “rationalized” admin­ istration (cf. Fairclough on “the technologization of the word"— 1992, pp. 215-218) and “fast capitalism’’ (they make it faster). Further, researchers have pointed out, the sharing of genres within a functionally oriented assemblage of people such as a firm (and unlike a fami­ ly) is one of the means by which social cohesion is achieved. “We” are the folks who know how to write and read the texts that get the work done here, texts whose features serve to differentiate them more or less strongly from related genres in other organizations. This means in turn that, for novices, learning the genres can be a major vehicle of enculturation into the organiza­ tion or field (Berkenkotter et al., 1988; Dias et al., 1999; Dias & Pai£, 2000; McCarthy, 1987; Par6 & Szewello, 1995). The generic socialization processes may be experienced either as enabling—“At last, the key to entering this desirable world!"—or as an arbitrary and oppressive imposition by a regime o f power (a common experience of university students). Often, it’s a bit of both (compare the experience of Chinese students learning to operate in North American academic contexts—[Fan Shen, 1989; Liu, 1998; Mohan & Lo, 1985]). Our genre studies have therefore, finally, brought us to issues of identity, forcing us to consider the complexity of the relationship between the self of the informal lifeworld and the self as neuropsychologist, central bank statistician, Microsoft executive, “team leader” or “facilitator” in a firm that has been turned over to Total Quality Management (Farrell, forthcoming, a; forthcoming, b), or Ph.D. student (Berkenkotter et al., 1988). This issue—the linked issue of community-maintenance and identity-formation—will be at the heart of the second main concern (what genres are for and do) that I have said I will address. It relates to the first, that of the nature of genre, through a question: Is it possible for texts that are strikingly diverse and that may be unread by anyone but the writer, and yet are recog­ nizable responses to the problematics and opportunities (the “exigences”) of a shared situation, to contribute to the building and sustaining of shared com­ _

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munal identities? And if, as appears, this is indeed possible, how does the process work?

THE CONTEXT Schools of architecture are unusual entities within universities, sitting uneasi­ ly among the more prototypical academic and professional disciplines. The data in this study derive from several years of research in a Canadian school, though I know that in many respects schools across North America are simi­ lar, sharing with schools in many other countries around the world essential features of curriculum and pedagogy deriving from the nineteenth century Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. For those unfamiliar with architectural educa­ tion, I should perhaps mention some features that contribute to the situational “exigences” experienced in common by architecture students and arguably shaping the genres they have evolved. Undergraduate architectural education is protracted—five years in this school—so that the student body lives together for a long time. And “lives together” is no exaggeration. Architecture has its own building; its curriculum rarely allows students to take courses elsewhere in the university; students are expected, certainly in the first three years, to do all their work in the building and not at home; the intensity of the workload and the strictness of project deadlines can mean regular all-night sessions—again, within the building; and organized study trips lasting from a few days to a whole term involve groups sharing living accommodation and spending leisure as well as working time together. Thus, even without any amplification by mediating genres, the forces binding these students into a “community” are powerful indeed. In addition, two aspects of pedagogy need to be stressed. The first is “studio.” The main context of instruction is the design studio—a curricular entity, formally a course, rather than a place, though in fact each group does have its physical space, also called the studio. The latter is an open-plan area, interrupted only by bare concrete columns; within it students construct indi­ vidual den-like work stations out of drafting tables, mobile storage units, movable lamps, and any amount of CD-players, photographs, books, objects, mementos, cups, caps, and other paraphernalia. In the studio course (assigned three half-days a week but occupying many more hours of the students’ unscheduled time), the professors typically set design projects that are worked on individually by the students for a period of weeks. On occasions they call the group together for advice and instruction and for a communal inspection of work in progress; mostly they circulate, spending time with each student and discussing his or her project, often at considerable length. These individual tutorials are called “desk crits,” critiques offered by instruc­ Digitized by

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tors at the student’s desk. The stress on individual, not team, assignments contrasts strikingly with practice in architectural offices. Equally integral to the studio system of instruction, however, is the “crit,” as opposed to the desk crit. The crit or review—the second pedagogical feature to which I want to draw attention—is an oral examination; evaluation is almost exclusively based on the students’ designs (pinned-up drawings, models, photographs, computer video walk-throughs, and so forth) and on the account they give of them under questioning from a “jury” of critics comprising faculty from the school and outside critics from other schools and the profession. For large projects these crits can be extended and stressful experiences, with students on their feet typically for 20 to 40 minutes. Among teachers of architecture there is a division of opinion as to how far the design should be expected to “speak for itself’ and how far the students’ verbally framed rationale is critical; at all events, students go into the crit with the expectation that they may well have to explain themselves at length. They therefore need to have the appropriate dis­ course at their fingertips—or rather at the tip of their tongue, a point that will become relevant in the discussion below. A tight community, bonded by proximity and stress; and, on the one hand, a highly individualized practice, involving intense one-to-one interaction with the teacher, through which students learn design contrasting with, on the other, a public mode of examination in which the spoken word carries great weight—these are the most striking features of the situation in which all the students find themselves, and in the light of which their textual productions will certainly need to be interpreted. The nature of that connection, however, is complex and will exercise us considerably in the later part of the chapter.

THE TEXTS In this school of architecture some students, but not all, own and use sketch­ books. The most popular type is 8” x 5” (large pocket size), black, hard-cov­ ered and perfect-bound, contains unlined cartridge paper of good quality and is sold for about ten Canadian dollars in art stores. There are also other for­ mats that may display some combination of different dimensions, lined paper, and coil binding. Students keep their sketchbooks on or around their drafting tables when working, and carry them between school and home and to all classes, seminars, reviews, talks and the like, and also on visits to sites and on study trips overseas. Not all students have them, however, and their use is not required or evaluated in any course that I know of.2 It is therefore up to the students whether to buy a sketchbook and what to use it for, for those who have it, it is a personal resource. *One first year history o f architecture course that I observed did require the students _ Digitized by

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These documents display similarities not only in their outer appear­ ance but also in their contents. The work inside often deals, not surprisingly, with buildings; there is almost always a mix of drawing and writing; and the medium is almost always black ink. The drawings, discourse features, and handwriting are usually of types that I have learned to associate particularly with architects. The texts, then, do not fall neatly within a narrow definition of “writing research” because they make use of other semiotic media as well, sometimes to the near exclusion of writing. The need to move away from “writ­ ing" as the focus of our studies and to acknowledge the importance of texts that are multimodal was argued decisively by Witte (1992) and has informed a num­ ber of subsequent studies (Ackerman & Oates, 19%; Medway, 1996a, 1996b; Winsor, 1994). I do not propose to dwell on this aspect here. Over the years I have examined a large number of sketchbooks, usu­ ally in the context of studying either the design process or the role of writing. In the present study I focus on sketchbooks as research objects in themselves. I was given access to six current sketchbooks, the work of five final (fifth) year students all working on their thesis,* and was able to talk with the stu­ dents. The thesis comprised a design or a written and graphical study of an architectural work or some phenomenon or issue relevant to architecture. Its production involved library research, sometimes studying a site, and planning and implementing a variety of textual, graphical, photographic, and 3D-modeling artifacts. The sketchbooks I examined, however, had all been started before the thesis term and contained material relating to previous activities. These included local site studies and overseas visits with extensive investiga­ tions of buildings, urban spaces, and works of art. The most immediately striking aspect of the six notebooks handed me by Doris, Emmanuelle, Edwin, Jackie, and Viiginie was their diversity in sev­ eral respects. The first was physical format: Only two of the books, those belonging to Emmanuelle and Virginie, were black, perfect-bound, and of the standard size. Doris’s was 6” x 10”, maroon-covered and coil-bound with the printed label, “Annotated Sketchbook”; the top three-quarters of each page was blank and the bottom quarter ruled with seven lines, though Doris mainly ignored the distinction. Edwin’s was 8” x 11”, buff-covered and coil-bound; Jackie’s 10” x 6”, coil-bound and green. Emmanuelle also had a second small­ er book, 6” x 4”, that “I got because I was in Rome. It was the last day and I needed to buy one and that one sort of looked nice and pitted and it was an old buy these books, but the prescribed use— which was evaluated— was very different from the purposes for which students bought and used them voluntarily. 3I wish to thank Barry Bell, the instructor who approached the students on my behalf, and the five students who will be referred to as Doris, Edwin, Emmanuelle, Jackie, and Virginie.

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sketchbook from the 1940s and it seemed appropriate, now it’s easier to carry.” When I asked, the students produced various rationales for their choice of for­ mat: for example, thick paper that would take ink without showing through; large dimensions so that loose sheets of regular size such as professors’ hand­ outs could be kept in the book; or looseleaf for removability of pages. The internal organization of the books was likewise diverse. Some had been systematically divided into sections by means of stickers or labels, with titles such as “Sessions,” “Journal of Drawings,” “Architecture and [illegible] Modem Science.” In others the pages seemed to have been used in no particular order, and any way up; one could not determine the chronology of the contents from their sequence. The amount of use the sketchbooks had had also varied greatly. In terms of “inscriptional” (Latour, 1990) semiotic modes, writing was a significant component in all the books and all contained some drawing, though this might be as little as D oris’s single diagram or as much as Emmanuelle’s and Edwin’s long sequences of drawings, covering many pages, made on visits (especially to Rome). The variety of drawing styles would be a fascinating study in itself, as would the range of different relation­ ships of drawing and text—from complete interdependence in the creation of meaning to total unrclatcdncss.4 Functionally, written and graphical processes can often receive the same weighting and significance and be treated as sim­ ply alternative and equivalent modes in terms of their contribution to thought. Thus Edwin spoke of the necessity of writing and drawing for “figuring things out—it’s very different when it’s just in your head versus on the paper. Writing it down forces you to translate thought into words or images. You may think you know how to build it but unless you sketch it out it doesn’t seem real.” The casual switch from writing to sketching in the last two sen­ tences reflects the easy fluidity, apparent in his sketchbook, with which Edwin switches between them in practice. Traditional genre analysis was interested above all in patterns of tex­ tual and linguistic organization. In relation to these, too, the picture was of great divergence. At the level of spatial and graphical form, the extremes are represented by Doris, who wrote well-spaced notes that left ample white space, organized under headings, hierarchized by dashes and indentations and displaying frequent use of periods but few complete sentences (Figure 6.1 ),s 4This is an issue I have discussed elsewhere: Medway (1996a, 1996b, 1999, 2000); see also the architecture chapters in Dias et al. (1999). 3Doris explained: “It never comes across the way I want it to, as I translate it in writ­ ing. W hen I think o f it, it’s Oh no, that’s not quite it, but it’s kind o f it. It’s not fast enough, I can’t register the writing fast enough when I think o f it in my mind___ My writing is very very sporadic. It’s usually never in complete sentences and it’s a big struggle to compose it, the document, in such a way that everything had to be in com­ plete sentences.” ^ Digitized

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to E m m anuelle, who produced pages o f solid prose w ith never a nonsentence.6 Also noteworthy—and indicative of the writers’ awareness that these texts were not for public consum ption— is the fact th at both Emmanuelle and Jackie use more than one language, Emmanuelle switching regularly, sometimes on the same page, between her three home languages of English, French, and less commonly, Italian, and Jackie writing mainly in English but sometimes in Spanish. I analyzed what the sketchbooks were used for; Table 6.1 maps the range of functions I noted and reveals a picture, here too, of diversity, both across and within the individual students’ work. Indeed, we often see a vari­ ety of functions being served on the same page (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). 6Emmanuelle attributes her ease with writing (though she appears equally fluent in drawing) to her French-Canadian education: “I went to a French school so I guess I think the way the French express ideas is quite different from the way you express them in English, and I think we had to write a lot, and our phrases were long and they were elaborate so it probably had something to do with it." Digitized by

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Table 6.1. Functions Served by the Notebooks. Non-Work Related lisas • Diary-type personal notes on trips, relationships, experiences (e .g ., Emmanuelle's written vignette of an incident in an airport); Notes of friends' addresses; Plans for photographing a friend's wedding

Recording and Preserving • Noting formulas, maxims and principles to be borne in mind during the work (e.g., Doris: "PLOT / is the path through the thing / is the struc­ ture which unveils the intention of the work") •

Noting points from books and articles (including extensive notes running to many pages)

•

Recording quotations (some long: Edwin copies out a translation of Horace's Carmen Saeculare)

• Recording bibliographic information such as library call numbers • Recording professors' comments, advice from crits •

Storing-by^asting-in: photographs, prints, postcards, and so forth, of art and architectural works

• Storing-by-interleaving: loose items: business cards, receipts for materi­ als, maps

Thinking and Learning • Observing and scrutinizing phenomena: drawing (both sketches and mea­ sured drawings) and writing as a means of close attention to and recording of architectural sites and art works • Designing buildings and other artifacts by drawing and writing • Devising end organizing arguments and rhetorical structures: planning structure of thesis; clarifying project ideas (Figure 6 .3 ); planning the content and layout of display drawings and thesis book • Devising end organizing sequences of argument: rationales for action and proposed accounts of phenomena, sometimes in drawing and writ­ ing simultaneously • Formulating an evaluative personal response to the progress of the work Preparing Action • Setting out sequences of actions to be taken (e.g., a sequence of design procedures to be gone through) • Compiling lists of things to do, places to visit, and so forth

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132

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