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To provide a small overview of genre theory and its associated concepts and to show how genre theory has had its antecedents in certain parts of the social sciences and not in the humanities.

The chapter argues that the explanatory force of genre theory may be explained with its emphasis on everyday genres, de facto genres.

By providing an overview of genre theory, the chapter demonstrates the wealth and richness of forms of explanations in genre theory.

This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers.

Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support.

In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.

This study focuses on how the creation of a new market identity, defined here by the social categories that specify what to expect of products and organizations, helps legitimize normatively illegitimate products and thereby facilitate the formation of markets for these products. A product is given a legitimate market identity by recombining existing product and status categories in a way that is both isomorphic with and differentiated from these preexisting categories. I argue that the creation of a new market identity helped create a market for feature films that combined legitimate comedy and illegitimate pornography following the legalization of pornography in Denmark in 1969. Topological analyses of the cultural content of all the film posters used to promote Danish films between 1970 and 1978, and regression analyses of the status of the actors appearing in these films document the importance of market identity in legitimizing illegitimacy.

This chapter presents a case study of the communication of information in Copenhagen during the siege in 1807. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how information was formed by different genres and how these genres relate to different genre systems. Finally, a purpose of this chapter is to shed light over how information from different genre systems merged into an information network mainly found on the streets and squares of Copenhagen.

This chapter has not aimed at generalized findings. If any findings should be recounted it would be that the chapter has mapped how, for example, a specific genre as the proclamation was shaped by different genre systems and directed its readers to a desired field of actions. Those actions depended on the specific purposes of the proclamations.

A traditional focus on the siege has been political and military issues. Lately, research has focused on a cultural approach within the frames of urban history. This chapter contributes to this cultural approach by investigating the informational aspects from a genre perspective.

This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those activities and practices constituting and causing concrete knowledge organization activity. Genre and activity theory is put forward as a framework for situating such a re-description.

By means of genre and activity theory, the chapters argues that understanding the genre and activity systems, in which every form of knowledge organization is embedded, makes us capable of seeing how knowledge organization, as a genre, both can be a tool and an object in genred human activities.

In contrast to much research into knowledge organization, this chapter does not emphasize techniques, standards, or rules to be the sole object of study. Instead, an emphasis is put on the genre and activity systems informing and shaping concrete forms of knowledge organization activity. With this, we are able to understand how knowledge organization activity also contributes to construct genre and activity systems and not only aid them.

In this chapter, I bring a rhetorical genre theory lens to the study of two sets of information activities: information seeking and informing in a clinical setting, and personal information management in the household.

I begin by characterizing each candidate genre and show how it is constituted, created, repurposed, and used. I then show how that genre is embedded within a local genre set. This analysis maps the institutional, interactional, and intertextual connections, showing how generic forms interact with other oral and textual genres within the setting. Finally, I situate the single genre and genre set within the broader genre system to show how individual genres are both socially and intertextually connected with institutions and organizations beyond the local setting.

A genre analysis shows how “information” is accomplished out of the social and documentary practices of participants in particular settings and elucidates the shifting and complex nature of contexts in which information actors operate. Combining three levels of analysis shows how the actions of individuals are locally negotiated but also situated within broader structural constraints and discourse communities. A genre approach therefore offers a window on the elusive concept of “context” in information needs, seeking, and use research.

This chapter explores the relationship of rhetorical genre studies with archival studies, and identifies commonalities and differences between the two fields. By complementing and expanding the diplomatics approach to the analysis of the documentary reality of organizations, rhetorical genre studies provides the records disciplines with sophisticated conceptual tools that may be used to enhance understanding of how records are made, used, and transmitted in workplace contexts.

All genres are sites of continuous social, cultural, and ideological negotiations, and organizational records make no exception. By recognizing that records are culturally constructed artefacts that shape and are shaped through social interactions, and recordkeeping is an inherently ideological discursive practice, notions such as evidence and accountability take on new, more dynamic meanings. Record keepers as well as the creators and users of the records become agents who continuously engage in the production, reproduction, and transformation of the documentary reality of their organizations.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, this chapter offers an inclusive, situated, and dynamic view of organizational records that is in line with postmodern accounts of recordkeeping. The new reading of basic archival concepts and methods proposed in this chapter especially contributes to enrich the theoretical framework of records management, which has traditionally been represented as a technical discipline supporting unspecific ideas of organizational effectiveness.

Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is now much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances, making up particular genres, equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach.

Current Genre Studies, as encountered in RGS, is an impressive and highly organized body of knowledge. By re-introducing literary and high rhetorical subject matter, which has been under-studied in RGS, into it, the chapter demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than the “homely discourses” usually discussed in RGS. Formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable simply as derivations from function alone. But this is not limited to works of literature. The chapter finds that though more complex genres, literary and high rhetorical, most consistently invite utterance-based interpretations, other genre-based studies can benefit from them as well.

The chapter offers a perspective on genre which gives renewed weight to formal and thematic interpretations of genre, by allowing the utterances themselves to re-enter center stage. This enables an improved understanding of complex genres. It also revives close reading as a viable approach to understanding genre and thus to inform the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. Finally, it improves our understanding of genre in both a systematic and a historical perspective. The chapter demonstrates, thus, that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances, as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them.

While authenticity, gender, and genre have all been studied in relation to music, the links between the three are underdeveloped theoretically. Specifically, the ongoing gendered process of constructing authenticity and the role of gendered authenticity in the creation and articulation of new musical genres remain fairly unexplored. In particular, more work is necessary to explain the role of gender in the emergence of new subgenres, in the ongoing maintenance of genre boundaries, and in fans' identity work as they construct “authentic” participation in “underground” scenes. In this paper, we examine genre as a gendered process in the Extreme Metal (EM) music scene, a popular subgenre of heavy metal. We explore several gendered dimensions of the EM genre, including the music (instrumentation, vocal style, lyrics, record covers, merchandise), live performance (gender distribution and arrangement, moshing/dancing, audience/crowd interaction), and embodied genre performance (fashion, hair style, makeup). We conclude by suggesting that the construction of new subgenres is, in part, a process of reestablishing and valorizing masculine traits, denigrating feminine traits, and connecting such traits to authenticity, thereby perpetuating gender inequality and hegemonic masculinities.

Using a novel measure incorporating stylistic and acoustic data on recorded music from 1967 to 2017, we search for trends in the evolution of musical diversity in 125,340 albums. We find that temporal patterns of diversity differ for stylistic and acoustic data. We also find that the patterns differ dramatically by genre. Some genres, such as blues, jazz, and pop-rock, decrease in diversity over time; most other genres increase in diversity. The causes of these different trends present a puzzle for future research. We also find different patterns for recordings that made the Billboard 200 charts compared to all recordings, suggesting an association between selection processes driven by consumer popularity and diversity. Moreover, associations of diversity and industry structure found in prior research do not hold when we analyze data beyond the smaller sample of the more popular recordings found in Billboard. These findings have implications for many prior studies based exclusively on best-selling recordings