Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication

Cognition/culture/power

Carol Berkenkotter, Thomas N. Huckin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134956227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Although genre studies abound in literary criticism, researchers and scholars interested in the social contexts of literacy have recently become interested in the dynamic, rhetorical dimensions of speech genres. Within this burgeoning scholarly community, the authors are among the first researchers working within social science traditions to study genre from the perspective of the implicit knowledge of language users. Thus, this is the first sociocognitive study of genre using case-study, naturalistic research methods combined with the techniques of rhetorical and discourse analysis. The term "genre knowledge" refers to an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations -- from immediate encounters to distanced communication through the medium of print, and more recently, the electronic media. One way to study the textual character of disciplinary knowledge is to examine both the situated actions of writers, and the communicative systems in which disciplinary actors participate. These two perspectives are presented in this book. The authors' studies of disciplinary communication examine operations of systems as diverse as peer review in scientific publications and language in a first grade science classroom. The methods used include case study and ethnographic techniques, rhetorical and discourse analysis of changing features within large corpora and in the texts of individual writers. Through the use of these techniques, the authors engaged in both micro-level and macro-level analyses and developed a perspective which reflects both foci. From this perspective they propose that what micro-level studies of actors' situated actions frequently depict as individual processes, can also be interpreted -- from the macro-level -- as communicative acts within a discursive network or system. The research methods and the theoretical framework presented are designed to raise provocative questions for scholars, researchers, and teachers in a number of fields: linguists who teach and conduct research in ESP and LSP and are interested in methods for studying professional communication; scholars in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and sociology of science with an interest in the textual dynamics of scientific and scholarly communities; educational researchers interested in cognition in context; and composition scholars interested in writing in the disciplines.

Chapter 1
Rethinking Genre From a Sociocognitive Perspective

The significance of generic categories ... resides in their cognitive and cultural value, and the purpose of genre theory is to lay out the implicit knowledge of the users of genres.

—Ryan (1981, p. 112)

... the shapes of knowledge are ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements.

—Geertz (1983, p. 4)

Written communication functions within disciplinary cultures to facilitate the multiple social interactions that are instrumental in the production of knowledge. In the sciences and humanities, maintaining the production of knowledge is crucial for institutional recognition, the development of subspecialities, and the advancement of scientists' and scholars' research programs. Scientific and scholarly productivity are also the criteria by which careers are assessed, tenure given, and grants awarded. Knowledge production is carried out and codified largely through generic forms of writing: lab reports, working papers, reviews, grant proposals, technical reports, conference papers, journal articles, monographs, and so on. Genres are the media through which scholars and scientists communicate with their peers. Genres are intimately linked to a discipline's methodology, and they package information in ways that conform to a discipline's norms, values, and ideology. Understanding the genres of written communication in one's field is, therefore, essential to professional success.

A great deal has been written about the literary genres, and in rhetorical studies, genre theory has had a healthy resurgence since the late 1970s. Much of this material can be seen as various attempts to develop taxonomies or classificatory schemes or to set forth hierarchical models of the constitutive elements of genre (for reviews, see Campbell & Jamieson, 1978; Miller, 1984; Swales, 1990). This taxonomical scholarship and theory building has been based largely on analyses of the features of written or oral texts. Although such an approach enables one to make generalizations about what some writers refer to as a genre's form, substance, and context (see, e.g., Yates & Orlikowski, 1992), it does not enable us to determine anything about the ways in which genre is embedded in the communicative activities of the members of a discipline. Nor does a traditional rhetorical approach enable us to understand the functions of genre from the perspective of the actor who must draw upon genre knowledge to perform effectively.

Bakhtin (1981) argued that genres and other forms of verbal communication are sites of tension between unifying ("centripetal") forces and stratifying ("centrifugal") forces. "The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance" (p. 272). Genres are "typical forms of utterances" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 63), and as such, they should be studied in their actual social contexts of use. In particular, analysts should pay attention to ways in which genre users manipulate genres for particular rhetorical purposes. Bakhtin (1981) argued that this "intentional dimension" can only be fully understood and appreciated by observing "insiders":

For the speakers of the language themselves, these generic languages and professional jargons are directly intentional—they denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of expressing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those not participating in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, as typifactions, as local color. For such outsiders, the intentions permeating these languages become things, limited in their meaning and expression. (p. 289)

To date, very little work on genre in rhetorical studies has been informed by actual case research with insiders. Instead, there has long been a tendency among genre scholars to reify genres, to see them as linguistic abstractions, and to understate their "changeable, flexible and plastic" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 80) nature.¹

In this chapter we argue for an alternative way of looking at the genres of academic cultures, focusing on the ways in which writers use genre knowledge (or fail to use such knowledge) as they engage in such disciplinary activities as writing up laboratory experiments, judging conference proposals, negotiating with reviewers over the revisions of a research report, reading the drafts of a scientific article, or creating a new forum for scholarly publication. Our thinking is based on 8 years of rhetorical and linguistic analyses of case study data that foreground individual writers' language-in-use; this approach has led to our present view that writers acquire and strategically deploy genre knowledge as they participate in their field's or profession's knowledge-producing activities.

Our thesis is that genres are inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to the conditions of use, and that genre knowledge is therefore best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities. For writers to make things happen (i.e., to publish, to exert an influence on the field, to be cited), they must know how to strategically utilize their understanding of genre. Their work must always appear to be on the cutting edge. This means that they must understand the directions in which a field is developing at any given time and possess the rhetorical savvy necessary for positioning their work within it. An academic writer needs to possess a highly developed sense of timing: At this moment, what are the compelling issues, questions, and problems with which knowledgeable peers are concerned? What is the history of these issues in the field? In the humanities, and the social and natural sciences especially, knowing what winds are blowing in the intellectual Zeitgeist is essential to good timing (Miller, 1992).

The theoretical view we espouse here is grounded (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) in our observations of the professional activities of individual writers, specifically in the data that we have been collecting since 1984 on adult writers in disciplinary communities. Our method, however, has not been purely inductive. Over the last several years our perspective has been informed by a number of disciplines and by various writers' theoretical constructs. These include structuration theory in sociology,² rhetorical studies,³ interpretive anthropology,⁴ ethnomethodology,⁵ Bakhtin's theory of speech genres (1986), Vygotsky's theory of ontogenesis,⁶ and Russian activity theory⁷ as it has shaped the movement in U.S. psychology called situated or everyday cognition.⁸ From our research and from this literature we have developed five principles that constitute a theoretical framework:

• Dynamism. Genres are dynamic rhetorical forms that are developed from actors' responses to recurrent situations and that serve to stabilize experience and give it coherence and meaning. Genres change over time in response to their users' sociocognitive needs.
• Situatedness. Our knowledge of genres is derived from and embedded in our participation in the communicative activities of daily and professional life. As such, genre knowledge is a form of "situated cognition" that continues to develop as we participate in the activities of the ambient culture.
• Form and Content. Genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of what content is appropriate to a particular purpose in a particular situation at a particular point in time.
• Duality of Structure. As we draw on genre rules to engage in professional activities, we constitute social structures (in professional, institutional, and organizational contexts) and simultaneously reproduce these structures.
• Community Ownership. Genre conventions signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology.

In the sections that follow we explicate each of these principles in detail, referring to a number of constructs in the literature mentioned earlier. We are not so much articulating a fully developed sociocognitive theory of genre as we are working toward one by integrating concepts from a number of fields. Thus we present a synthesis of perspectives and constructs from which a sociocognitive theory of genre can be developed.

Dynamism

Genres are dynamic rhetorical forms that are developed from actors' responses to recurrent situations and that serve to stabilize experience and give it coherence and meaning. Genres change over time in response to their users' sociocognitive needs.

This principle is derived from contemporary rhetorical examinations of genre (as reviewed by Campbell & Jamieson, 1978; Miller, 1984) and is perhaps best exemplified by Bitzer's (1968) discussion of recurrent rhetorical situations:

From day to day, year to year, comparable situations occur, prompting comparable responses; hence rhetorical forms are born, and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established.... The situations recur and, because we experience situations and the rhetorical responses to them, a form of discourse is not only established but comes to have a power of its own—the tradition itself tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form. (p. 13)

Although Bitzer did not use the term genre, his notion of rhetorical forms emerging in response to recurrent situations sparked several scholarly discussions of rhetorical genres. A number of scholars invoked Bitzer's notion of recurring rhetorical responses to situational exigencies to characterize genre (Campbell & Jamieson, 1978; Harrell & Linkugel, 1978; Miller, 1984; Simons, 1978). And recently in an essay that examines the genres of organizational communication, Yates and Orlikowski (1992) treated Bitzer's claim as a concept symbol (Small, 1978) to mean that "genres emerge within a particular sociohistorical context and are reinforced over time as a situation recurs.... These genres, in turn, shape future responses to similar situations" (p. 305).

In a widely cited essay that reconceptualizes rhetorical views of genre from a sociological perspective, Miller (1984) proposed that "recurrence" does not refer to external conditions (a realist view) but rather, is socially constructed: "What recurs cannot be a material configuration of objects, events, and people, nor can it be a subjective configuration, a 'perception,' for these too are unique from moment to moment and person to person. Recurrence is an intersubjective phenomenon, a social occurrence, and cannot be understood on materialist terms" (p. 156).

Miller's major contribution to the discussion of genre was to take the notion of genre as recurrent response to a rhetorical situation and link it to Schutz and Luckmann's (1973) construct of "typification" as a socially construed meaning-making process. Our "stock of knowledge," Miller (1984) argued, following Schutz and Luckmann, is based on types:

useful only insofar as [this knowledge] can be brought to bear on new experience: the new is made familiar through the recognition of relevant similarities; those similarities become constituted as a type.... It is through the process of typification that we create recurrence, analogies, similarities. What recurs is not a material situation (a real objective factual event) but our construal of a type. The typified situation, including typifications of participants, underlies typification in rhetoric. Successful communication would require that the participants share common types; this is possible insofar as types are socially created, (pp. 156-157)

Miller's social constructionist view of genre, which incorporates Schutz and Luckman's notion of typification, has been significant to rhetorical studies of genre for a number of reasons. First, it has influenced scholarship in the rhetoric of science (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Swales, 1990). Second, it has provided scholars with an interpretive framework for dealing with the thorny issue of the relationship between socially determined human communicative activity and agency.⁹ Finally, Miller's application of the construct of typification—grounded as it is in Schutz's sociological perspective of actors' behaviors in the life-world, in contrast to previous rhetorical and literary notions of genre—extricates the concept from its moorings in Aristotelian and literary classification systems, relocating it in a more microlevel understanding of the generic communicative behaviors of actors in everyday life. As she stated:

To consider as potential genres such homely discourse as the letter of recommendation, the user manual, the progress report, the ransom note, the lecture, and the white paper, as well as the eulogy, the apologia, the inaugural, the public proceeding, and the sermon, is not to trivialize the study of genres; it is to take seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves. (Miller, 1984, p. 155)

Miller's insistence that considerations of genre encompass the typifications of the agora as well as those of the senate has been important to studies in technical and organizational communication (see e.g., Devitt, 1991; Herndl, Fennell, & Miller, 1991; Miller & Selzer, 1985; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). And in locating genre in the social actions and practices of everyday life (in the professions and other social institutions such as the school), Miller's essay anticipates the interest in Bakhtin's construct of speech genres, which will figure importantly later in this discussion.

But just as language itself has to accommodate both stability and change, genres must do more than encapsulate intersubjective perceptions of recurring situations. They must also try to deal with the fact that recurring situations resemble each other only in certain ways and only to a certain degree. As the world changes, both in material conditions and in actors' collective and individual perceptions of it, the types produced by typification must themselves undergo constant incremental change. Furthermore, individual actors have their own uniquely formed knowledge of the world; and socially induced perceptions of commonality do not eradicate subjective perceptions of difference. Genres, therefore, are always sites of contention between stability and change. They are inherently dynamic, constantly (if gradually) changing over time in response to the sociocognitive needs of individual users. This dynamism resembles that found in other aspects of language acquisition, including, for example, the negotiated learning and use of individual words (cf. Huckin, Haynes, & Coady, 1993; Pinker, 1984), and to a lesser extent, the construction of sentences via "emergent" grammar (Goodwin, 1979; Hopper, 1988).

An example of this internal dynamism can be found in Huckin's study of 350 scientific journal articles published between 1944 and 1989 (chap. 2). In this study, Huckin analyzed formal patterns and interviewed a number of working scientists who regularly read and contribute to the literature. The scientific journal article has long been thought of as a conservative, relatively static genre, especially on the formal level, yet Huckin found that it had actually undergone significant changes over this 45-year period. For example, he found experimental results increasingly being foregrounded in titles, abstracts, introductions, and section headings, but methods and procedures sections increasingly being relegated to secondary status. The interviews with scientists revealed perhaps the main reason for these changes, namely, that in this age of information explosion, readers of scientific journals cannot keep up with the literature and are forced to skim journal articles the way many newspaper readers skim newspapers. These scientist readers are also writers, and their individual reading behavior affects their writing strategies. Inasmuch as they also belong to a scientific community, they find themselves responding in similar ways to similar communicative pressures. Thus, on both a communal and individual (i.e., sociocognitive) level, scientists shape the genre to better serve their needs. The result is a continually evolving, not static, genre.

Situatedness

Our knowledge of genres is derived from and embedded in our participation in the communicative activities of daily and professional life. As such, genre knowledge is a form of "situated cognition" (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) that continu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective
• 2 News Value in Scientific Journal Articles
• 3 You Are What You Cite: Novelty and Intertextuality in a Biologist's Experimental Article
• 4 Sites of Contention, Sites of Negotiation: Textual Dynamics of Peer Review in the Construction of Scientific Knowledge
• 5 Evolution of a Scholarly Forum: Reader, 1977-1988
• 6 Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention
• 7 Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer: An Apprenticeship Tale of a Doctoral Student
• 8 Suffer the Little Children: Learning the Curriculum Genres of School and University
• Appendices
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index