- A genre set, functioning as an intrinsic part of an organizational activity system, may comprise a number of spoken and written genres that, mediated by a range of technologies and built environments, function together, often interactively, to prompt, shape, coordinate, and apply the collaborative intellectual and discursive work that allows the organization to accomplish its mandate or mission.
- Within an organizational activity system, a genre set is linked to various intersubjectivities - domains of shared focus, perception, and understanding that cognitively connect the members of a community-of-practice. A central area of intersubjectivity is genre knowledge—the rhetorical awareness of the ways in which the genre set functions. Four keys aspects of genre knowledge relate to the goals of the activity system, the division of intellectual and discursive labor, a vernacular of shared terms, and the discursive construction of outside groups as audiences.
- Within organizational activity, genre sets may function either to build active disciplinary knowledge by encouraging a diversity of views and internal debate or to produce public information and a unified rhetorical position to be communicated to the world outside the organization.
- In its evolution, a genre set reflects—and contributes to—processes of continuous change within the activity of an organization, with changes in activity, discourse, and technology occurring dialectically in complex patterns of causality.
- Given the emergent, dynamic nature of an organizational activity system, all the members of its community-of-practice are continuously engaged in learning as an inevitable consequence of performing their everyday rounds of work. Two central areas of learning are the acquisition of knowledge about the external world needed by the organization in order to accomplish its mandate and the development of genre knowledge.
Key Terms/Concepts
- Genre system: “encompass[es] the full range of discourse genres used by two or more social groups to interact with one other in pursuing a joint endeavor of some kind (Bazerman’s concept 16)
- Uptake: “a text in one genre…will frequently elicit, in the natural course of social events, a response in the form of another text” (Anne Freadman’s concept 16)
- Genre knowledge: “participants’ rhetorical awareness of the ways in which a genre set functions” (16). While some genre knowledge is explicit, it is often tacit (26).
- Activity system: “a local, historically situated sphere of collaborative endeavor, in which thinking, knowing, and learning are distributed across a number of people and their work practices and, at the same time, mediated by an array of culturally constructed tools – all with the larger aim of accomplishing a set of communally defined goals” (Cole and Engestrom’s concept 16).
- Community-of-practice: “the group of collaborating individuals who participate in the activity system” (Dias, Freedman, Medway and Pare’s concept 16).
- Situated change: “change occurs as individuals perceive and, in ad hoc ways, respond to unfolding events in their work-world” (Wanda Orlikowski’s concept 17).
- Intersubjectivities: ‘domains of shared focus, perception, and understanding that cognitively connect individuals within community-of-practice, with particular intersubjectivities populated according to individuals’ respective professional roles” (Jean Lave’s concept). “A central area of intersubjectivity is that of genre knowledge” (25).
- Organizational genre: “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 interactions of writers and readers performing variety of professional roles” (37).
- Organizational genre set: a complex meta-profile of texts, composing processes, reading practices, and reader/writer roles and interactions (37).
- Weak distributed cognition: “although the collective thinking-in-activity of a social group may be privileged, individual cognition is also recognized as significant and seen to interact with collective cognition” (Gavriel Salomon’s concept 48).
- Strong distributed cognition: “the existence of ‘solo’ cognitions is denied or ignored” (Gavriel Salomon’s concept 48).
- “situated leaning occurs continuously, though for the most part tacitly, in communities-of-practice – and…engages all members, veterans as well as newcomers, through their ongoing involvement in organizational activity” (Etienne Wenger’s theory 51).
Three key characteristics of organization activity systems:
- Within an organizational activity system, cognition - that is, thinking/knowing/learning -is diffused, or distributed, across a community-of-practice and its culturally constructed tools, with the pattern of cognitive distribution reflecting the division of labor among the participants.
- The various culturally constructed tools in use within an organizational activity system, with their respective affordances, or functional capacities, exert a significant mediating influence on participants’ cognition, discourse, and work practices, and are frequently, if not always, infused with particular values and interests.6 Such tools can include, for example, digital technologies, built environments, analytical methods, systems of classification and standards, the regularized social interactions associated with written and spoken genres, and texts in various symbol systems.
- An organizational activity system, while having a strong cultural-historical dimension, is constituted through the moment-to-moment agency and social negotiations of the people who participate in it. The system changes constantly, continuously recreated in response to internal tensions or initiatives, to the possibilities afforded by newly available tools, or to external pressures and influences.