Journal of Business and Technical Communication Jul 1999

Storytelling in a Central Bank

Graham Smart Purdue University West Lafayette

Abstract

Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of the textual practices of economists at the Bank of Canada, this article looks at narrative construction as a communal process of corporate knowledge making. Employing theories of narrative, genre, and distributed cognition as a conceptual frame, the article traces three stages in the development of a narrative known in the bank as the monetary-policy story. Evolving across a number of written genres, this symbolic representation functions as an important site of intersubjectivity among the institution's economists. In its final form, the narrative serves the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for making decisions about monetary policy and communicating these decisions to the Canadian public. This account of knowledge making at the Bank of Canada may be useful as a heuristic for researchers studying the dynamics of discourse in other professional settings.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
1999-07-01
DOI
10.1177/105065199901300302
Open Access
Closed
Topics
race and writing multilingual writers

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (7)

  1. Sánchez (2025)
    Cultivating <i>Phronesis</i> through Wicked Stories
    Pedagogy
  2. Small (2017)
    (Re)Kindle
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  3. Jones (2016)
    Found Things: Genre, Narrative, and Identification in a Networked Activist Orga…
    Technical Communication Quarterly
  4. Jones (2016)
    Narrative Inquiry in Human-Centered Design
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
  5. Gygi et al. (2010)
    Productive Tensions and the Regulatory Work of Genres in the Development of an …
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Show all 7 →
  1. Hovde (2010)
    Creating Procedural Discourse and Knowledge for Software Users: Beyond Translat…
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  2. Swarts (2004)
    Textual Grounding: How People Turn Texts into Tools
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

Cites in this index (5)

  1. STOCKTON (1995)
    Writing in History
    Written Communication
  2. JOURNET (1991)
    Ecological Theories as Cultural Narratives
    Written Communication
  3. DiPARDO (1990)
    Narrative Knowers, Expository Knowledge
    Written Communication
  4. WINSOR (1989)
    An Engineer's Writing and the Corporate Construction of Knowledge
    Written Communication
  5. HARRISON (1987)
    Frameworks for the Study of Writing in Organizational Contexts
    Written Communication
Also cites 3 works outside this index ↓
  1. 10.1017/CBO9780511609268
     ↗
  2. 10.1177/002194369803500107
     ↗
  3. 10.2307/2392360
     ↗
CrossRef global citation count: 34 View in citation network →

Related Articles

  1. Literacy in Composition Studies Feb 2026
    Refusal of Translation: Unsettling Writing Studies ↗
    Hockaday, Jason
    race and writing multilingual writers
  2. Literacy in Composition Studies Feb 2026
    Literacy Sponsorship, GenAI, and the Entangled Economies of Experiential Learning ↗
    Girdharry, Kristi
    service learning literacy studies multimodality race and writing multilingual writers
  3. College Composition and Communication Feb 2026
    Crying Censorship Wolf: Prefiguring Contemporary Realities through Disciplinary History ↗
    Holly Hassel; Kate L. Pantelides
    race and writing multilingual writers
  4. Rhetoric Review Jan 2026
    <i>Radical Advocate: Ida B. Wells and the Road to Race and Gender Justice</i> ↗
    Matthew Edor
    race and writing multilingual writers
  5. College Composition and Communication Dec 2025
    Contextualizing Reflective Writing for Creating Change: A Cross-Institutional Case Study of First-Year Students’ Reflections ↗
    Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday; Lillian Campbell; Jennifer E. Eidum
    writing program administration qualitative research race and writing multilingual writers