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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 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.

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.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the relationship between and among genres, discourse communities, and their associated ideologies by means of a historical case study of the rise and decline of a particular archival finding aid genre, i.e., the calendar, within the Public Records Office of Great Britain (PRO) between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

The study demonstrates the ways in which the calendar genre, as it evolved in the PRO, reproduced, framed, and perpetuated a progressive, consensual understanding of the history of the British nation, and worked to construct a community of historical workers comprising select members of the PRO’s professional staff and select users.

The study deepens and extends understanding of discourse communities and the ideologies they promote and suppress and contributes to the emergent understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts by exposing the ways in which they participate in the formation and shaping of knowledge.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.

To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.

Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.

The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.

This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a qualitative research approach based on current developments in the field of practice theory. The novelty of this approach is that it positions organizational practices as a central unit of analysis of archival and recordkeeping work. The goal of the paper is to highlight the continuity between practice theory and archival and recordkeeping scholarship and to then propose how practice theory could be used in archival and recordkeeping research.

The paper traces the continuity between practice theory and two influential bodies of literature in archival and recordkeeping scholarship developed in the last two decades. It then outlines a practice theory research agenda for archival and recordkeeping research by drawing on the disciplines of cultural sociology, science and technology studies, ethnomethodology and organizational studies. The potential research application of practice theory is illustrated with examples from an on-going doctoral project on appraisal and preservation practices in a digital broadcasting archive.

The analysis of current literature shows an agreement that archival and recordkeeping practices exhibit a complexity that makes them important foci for further research. By placing these insights into contact with practice theory, the paper champions a new research agenda for archival and recordkeeping research.

The paper positions and outlines the tenets of practice theory, making them methodologically available to archival and recordkeeping scholars and practitioners. It also indicates how practice theory offers a new perspective for conceptualizing the causal effects of organizational culture on organizational practices.

The purpose of this study is to raise awareness of the benefits and drawbacks involved in using digital technologies for business meetings, and identify key concerns. The shift from in-person to virtual meetings has multiple consequences, some of which impact recordkeeping.

Drawing on research from records management, anthropology, organizational theory and computer science, this study establishes the norms of physical meeting spaces and recordkeeping and explores how these norms are challenged as meetings become virtual.

Virtual meetings allow for collaboration to work across time and space and offer multiple affordances that do not exist in on-site meetings; however, they also involve the additional barrier of technical access and reduction in user attention. Virtual meetings also enable the creation, capture and sharing of increased contextual data, and this increased documentation challenges traditional recordkeeping models. Meeting technologies are also worryingly invasive. This study shows that concerns over privacy have been dismissed in the design of virtual meeting spaces, and therefore the authors recommend their more thorough consideration.

Meetings are a pervasive feature of organizational life whose significance has been overlooked in the recordkeeping literature. By bringing together research about in-person and virtual meetings in a novel and necessary way, the authors started to fill a gap and hope to inspire further studies.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how recordkeepers in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy experienced accomplishing their tasks from home over varying lengths of time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A multilingual survey including 44 questions was designed and administered to the six countries identified above in 2022. This research was preceded by an environmental scan looking at existing studies considering archival and records management responses to the pandemic.

The impact of working from home on recordkeeping and, more generally, work performance was perceived differently by the survey respondents depending on various factors. The study also identified a number of similarities across countries, such as an increased awareness of the importance of records management shared by organizational actors. Surprisingly, the pandemic did not appear to have a great impact on the perceived quality of records management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study aiming to capture records professionals’ perceptions of their role while working from home during the pandemic.

This paper aims to demonstrate how teaching the discourse of critique, an integral part of the video production process, can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills helping more young people become producers rather than consumers of digital media.

This paper describes an instrumental qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) in two elective high school video production classrooms in the Midwestern region of the USA. The author conducted observations, video and audio recorded critique sessions, conducted semi-structured interviews and collected artifacts throughout production including storyboards, brainstorms and rough and final cuts of videos.

Throughout critique, young video producers used argumentation strategies to cocreate meaning, multiple methods of inquiry and questioning, critically evaluated feedback and synthesized their ideas and those of their peers to achieve their intended artistic vision. Young video producers used feedback in the following ways: incorporated feedback directly into their work, rejected and ignored feedback, or incorporated some element of the feedback in a way not originally intended.

This paper demonstrates how teaching the discourse of critique can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills. Educators can teach argumentation and inquiry strategies through using thinking guides that encourage active processing and through engaging near peer mentors. Classroom educators can integrate the arts-based practice of the pitch critique session to maximize the impact of peer-to-peer learning.