Berkenkotter is looking at genre as a means to expose meaning about organizations, human activity, and the “systems” in which certain genres are called into being – institutional genres.
Genre theory addresses the processes by which texts are produced and mediated through their relationship with prior discourse. Consider the simple specification templates used by many software development organizations -- a genre system within the specific domain of a larger institutional system – a particular configuration of genres (specifications, use-cases, test scripts, etc.) in particular relationship to each other.
Berkenkotter is claiming that professions are organized by genre systems, and that their work is carried out through genre systems. “Genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action” (329).
Genres and their systems instantiate structures of social and institutional relations… Again, let’s consider the specification template used in a software development organization. Who created the initial template and for what purpose? Who is it used by and why is it used? The intertextual aspects of the specifications produced using the template are transformed by the template – the prior text – and used to restructure existing specs when the template changes.
I’m intrigued by Berkenkotter’s description of meta-genres – genres around which professional activities (and their genres) are organized. Back to the specification example: We have the spec itself (a particular genre), which contains and is based on a series of meta-genres (use-case analysis, risk assessments, project constraints, etc).
Genre theory (and activity theory) are complicating my mapping effort. Where do they fall in relation to other theories and pedagogies?
1 comment:
Do we have Miller's "Genre as Social Action" or Bazerman's relevant work on your list? There are some clues there, and also in Spinuzzi's first book.
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