Journal of Business and Technical Communication Oct 2004

The Collaborative Construction of a Management Report in a Municipal Community of Practice: Text and Context, Genre and Learning

Diana Wegner Douglas College

Abstract

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies and recent work in activity system theory, this study focuses on the collaborative development of a new written form, a municipal plan for protecting and managing natural areas. The author advances a twofold claim: (a) that the written plan is developed in the absence of a stable textual model and (b) that the text, as part of the context, functions, in turn, as a mediational tool for solving the rhetorical problem of audience resistance. Findings show that as participants reconfigure the project into successive cycles of activity, they create corresponding zones of proximal development. This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the text-context relationship and to recent elaborations of genre as an activity system that help explain the relationship between genre and learning.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
2004-10-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651904266926
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Topics
rhetorical criticism genre theory collaborative writing
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

  1. McNely (2017)
    Moments and Metagenres: Coordinating Complex, Multigenre Narratives
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  2. Knievel (2008)
    Rupturing Context, Resituating Genre: A Study of Use-of-Force Policy in the Wak…
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  3. Dayton (2006)
    A Hybrid Analytical Framework to Guide Studies of Innovative IT Adoption by Wor…
    Technical Communication Quarterly

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CrossRef global citation count: 10 View in citation network → Build reading path →

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