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Peggy Bengel
Vol. 4 (4) Mind, Culture, and Activity
Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces:
A Review of Studies That Use Cultural-Historical Activity Theory
David R. Russell
Iowa State University
This essay reviews a tradition of North American research
on writing in higher education and workplaces that draws on
cultural-historical activity approaches. Growing out of college
composition courses, writing-across-the-curriculum programs,
and technical writing courses, the research takes as its object the
roles writing plays in various activities‹particularly those
activities where writing most powerfully mediates work: academic
disciplines, professions, and other large and powerful
organizations of modern life. Genre is an important analytical
category, defined not in terms of formal features but in terms of
typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent social situations.
Researchers use qualitative and historical methods to trace the
ways people create, appropriate, and recreate dynamic genres to
mediate a wide range of social practices.
Navigating the Current of Economic Policy: Written Genres and
the Distribution of Cognitive Work at a Financial Institution
Aviva Freedman
Carleton University
Graham Smart
Purdue University
Like navigating a ship (Hutchins 1993), conducting monetary
policy involves complex processes of distributed cognition. The
difference is that, in a governmental financial institution like the
Bank of Canada, much of the cognitive work and its distribution
are accomplished by means of interweaving webs of genres of
discourse. The genres of the Bank enable both the forming and
reforming of policy as well as the constant reflexive self-
monitoring necessary for maintaining the robustness of the
institution and for achieving its goals. The genres operate as sites
for the communal construction of, and negotiation over
knowledge; and paradoxically, as institutionalized artifacts, they
both channel and codify thinking at the same time that they
function as sites for change.
Genre as Tool in the Transmission of Practice over Time and
Across Professional Boundaries
Carol Berkenkotter and Doris Ravotas
Michigan Technological University
This paper is concerned with the processes through which
a central activity in the natural sciences, classification, is
instantiated in the writing practices of psychotherapists. The
authors examined several psychotherapists¹ grammatical, lexical,
and rhetorical strategies for writing their initial evaluations of
their clients' problems. Using membership categorization device
(MCD) analysis from ethnomethodology, the authors examined
several therapists' written initial evaluations for their use of
microlevel categories and categorizations derived both from
clients¹ own (oral) representations and the therapists¹
professional repertoire. The resulting analysis suggests that
clients¹ emic, contextually- grounded expressions are absorbed
into a monological account reflecting the therapist's professional
interpretive framework. The therapist thus translates the client's
concerns into a set of meanings compatible with the
classifications of psychopathology of the American Psychiatric
Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM IV). The
resulting written account supports a billable diagnosis thereby
fulfilling its institutional purpose. It fails, however, to serve
another important purpose to many therapists, which is helping
the therapist to guide the therapy process by providing a record
of the client's perspective of her lifeworld.
Literate Activity and Disciplinarity:
The Heterogeneous (Re)production of American Studies
around a Graduate Seminar
Paul A. Prior
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Taking up a sociohistoric approach to writing as literate activity
in functional systems and to disciplines as dynamic heterogeneous
networks, I examine writing in graduate education as a critical
site of disciplinary enculturation. Through an ethnographic
analysis centered on the literate activity of students and a
professor in an American Studies seminar, I work to integrate
participants' situated activity around a task (involving field
research and writing) with the historically sedimented
affordances of a few key mediational means. The analysis
particularly foregrounds heterogeneity, as multiple microgenetic,
ontogenetic, mesogenetic, and cultural-historic trajectories are
woven together to form the deeply laminated functional systems
of persons, artifacts, practices, and institutions that (re)produce
American Studies and its interdisciplinarity.
Discursively Structured Activities
Charles Bazerman
University of California, Santa Barbara
Talk helps organize the activities they are part of; people
maintain regularity of activity through the typification of talk.
Similarly, the recognizable similarity among written texts (that
is, recognition of genre), helps maintain social and cognitive
structure within activities producing or using those genres.
Enduring written texts and systems of texts provide a
conservative, reproductive force on local activities. Events are
particularly held accountable with those texts that count as
knowledge, and thus knowledge-bearing texts are influential in
the organization of daily life. Further, disciplines concerned
with the production of knowledge represented in textual form
develop their structures of social and intellectual practice in
dialectic with the textual forms by which knowledge is created
and circulated. An examination of the discursive organization of
the fields of knowledge production gives us tools for examining
the roles knowledge serves within modern culture and opens up
questions of how society is organized and how power is
distributed around the knowledges we
produce.
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