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1 – 10 of 308To 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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Findings
The chapter argues that the explanatory force of genre theory may be explained with its emphasis on everyday genres, de facto genres.
Originality/value
By providing an overview of genre theory, the chapter demonstrates the wealth and richness of forms of explanations in genre theory.
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Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore the “race report” as a document genre in the serious-leisure pursuit of ultrarunning. Despite the sport’s largely non-documental nature…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the “race report” as a document genre in the serious-leisure pursuit of ultrarunning. Despite the sport’s largely non-documental nature, race reports stand as an anomaly in their importance. This exploration serves as a springboard to investigate the informativeness of story in human life generally.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative survey of the information behavior of ultrarunners was conducted. The 46 participants were runners in a 100-mile footrace in 2016. Responses were first analyzed through phenomenological theme analysis and then were subjected to a deductive audit using a framework of information activities validated for use in serious-leisure pursuits.
Findings
Race reports are bound up in information activities across the information-communication chain. Race reports help athletes choose races, prepare for races, pre-experience races, communicate their race experiences, gather new ideas, extend their training and, finally, find entertainment.
Research limitations/implications
This discussion of genre is synchronic, largely limited to one moment in time, and its findings were limited in depth by the survey method. Further research should investigate race reports historically (diachronically) and infrastructurally.
Originality/value
This work points to symbiosis between genre theory and information behavior theory. It also legitimizes narrative reasoning as a way of knowing, which has been largely unrecognized in information behavior. Some implications of this for information science and technology are discussed.
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The purpose of this article is to develop a contemporary understanding of genre as digital social action. Particular emphasis will be on archiving, tagging, and searching as…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to develop a contemporary understanding of genre as digital social action. Particular emphasis will be on archiving, tagging, and searching as social actions afforded by digital media as a function of their materiality.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach is critical analysis and discussion.
Findings
It is shown through an examination and a concrete example of how the genre is understood as digital social action, how the materiality of digital media affords particular communicative actions.
Originality/value
The article contributes with an understanding of the genre as digital social action consisting of two communicating parts: users’ actions and materiality.
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This paper considers how archival accounting records may support truth-telling about past atrocities during Australia's frontier wars.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper considers how archival accounting records may support truth-telling about past atrocities during Australia's frontier wars.
Design/methodology/approach
The study examines two colonial accounting records – military muster payrolls and the ledger statements of a local tax fund – used during the British's punitive expeditions against the Aboriginal peoples of Sydney in 1816.
Findings
The accounting records reveal new information about the full scale of the campaign, the degree to which the violence was formally endorsed and acts of Aboriginal resistance. However, much of the human toll of the campaign remains obscured by the highly structured, monetary lens of financial records authored and archived by the British colonial regime.
Social implications
Australia's First Nations have called for greater truth-telling about the frontier wars to enable meaningful reconciliation and political recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. This study highlights the potential role of accounting records as a resource for contemporary truth-telling processes.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the literature about the dark history of accounting by explicating genre features in the content, form and context of archival accounting records, which can both render past atrocities more visible as well as perpetrate invisibilities, ambiguities and silences.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Chinese government generates authority during a crisis through discursive practices expressed in social media.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Chinese government generates authority during a crisis through discursive practices expressed in social media.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the theoretical framework of authority and the method of genre analysis, this study examined the top 100 forwarded posts on Weibo about a high-profile murder to determine the mechanisms involved in generating authority.
Findings
This study provides empirical support that building and maintaining authority distinguishes governments from other social actors during crisis communication. The genre analysis demonstrates that the strategic use of genre chain and genre mixing contributes to the construction of governments’ authority during a crisis. Furthermore, this study suggests the performative and social constructionist approach to understand governments’ authority in the digital age on two levels: a situationally-constructed concept that goes beyond the context of fixed institutions and a relationally-constructed concept that is promoted through discursive collaboration among various social actors.
Research limitations/implications
This study does not directly assess the effectiveness of a government’s ability to construct its authority. Nor does it examine the construction of governments’ authority outside the context of an authoritarian regime. These issues should be addressed in future research.
Practical implications
This study offers governmental organizations some practical insights that can be used to infuse a constructive aspect of authority into their crisis communication plans, practices and processes.
Originality/value
Here, authority is seen as a social construction that foregrounds the discursive, performative, constructive and communicative dimensions of crisis communication. Moreover, this study points to the need for a more complex integrated perspective in crisis communication that includes and connects corporate and government crisis communication.
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Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessio Miaschi, Elena Prat and Giulia Venturi
The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.
Findings
The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.
Originality/value
The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.
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Muatasim Ismaeel and Zarina Zakaria
This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.
Design/methodology/approach
Analysis of the features, content and language of CSR reports published by listed companies in the region, to classify the genres of these reports and infer results about ways of companies’ interaction with newly institutionalized genre.
Findings
Three distinct genres are identified: “sustainability reports genre,” “professional CSR report genre” and “light CSR report genre.” When companies interact with institutionally diffused genres, they either adopt them and re-enforce their distinctiveness, mix them with elements from other genres so their distinctiveness will be diluted, or produce the old and established genres under the new name so the new genre will lose its distinctiveness.
Originality/value
The proposed classification of CSR report genres and ways of companies’ interaction with new genres are original and open new horizons for research in social and environmental accounting and corporate communication fields.
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1. Cela fera bientôt un siècle que la sociologie du loisir a commencé à développer une analyse “interne” de ce phénomène, c'est‐à‐dire relative aux comportements existant …
Abstract
1. Cela fera bientôt un siècle que la sociologie du loisir a commencé à développer une analyse “interne” de ce phénomène, c'est‐à‐dire relative aux comportements existant à l'intérieur de la société consommatrice de loisir: VEBLEN a crée un genre où depuis, beaucoup de sociologues se sont essayés avec des bonheurs divers. Ainsi, assez ré‐cemment, un certain McCANNELL non dé‐pourvu de talent, n'a pas hésité à intituler modestement sa contribution “A new theory of leisure class”.