Angeli

Chapter 17 - Writing and Social Change Purpose: To explore how writing enables __social communities__(e.g. organizations, institutions, and communities of work) to initiate, manage, and stabilize sociocultural change. Questions: 1. What is the relationship between writing and social change? 2. How does writing simultaneously __constitute__ and __reflect__ social practices?

I. Overview of current research & theory on writing & cultural change in social systems (organizations) In science (Latour, 1990), cultural production (Jameson, 1991), & organization/ professional life (Foucalt, 1973, 1979), written communication has functioned as a constitutive form of legitimacy & social power. Not only are organizations a product of written communication, social and cultural changes are also a product of discursive & social conditions. A successful transition argument must coherently link from the existing to the new, “protect” the new system from “misinterpretation”, and convince (condition) adopters that the new is vital and important. || Freyerabend Bazerman Note: assumes that initial discursive activities will destabilize current contexts ||
 * Freyerabend (1991): change in disciplinary communities occur primarily through argumentation
 * Bazerman (1999): written documents will create “stabilized representations” that articulate the final transition within a changing social context



Example of Destabilizing Discourses: Commodifying Higher Education II. Research on the motivation and rationale for change Destabilization occurs when an organization’s narratives and images no longer support or construct a viable identity Example: Image and Narrative in destabilized Contexts of Higher Education []
 * Encroachment of capitalist values into education – students become customers, faculty become retailers, research becomes a commodity, university administration becomes management, and university facilities become resources
 * Fairclough (2004): this change is often accomplished through “co-hyponyms” which are certain words that are made equivalent under a core concept like, skills/knowledge, training/education
 * In an education market, skills/knowledge are gained from normalized [education/training] procedures” and they are “[taught/transferred} across contexts, occasions and users”.
 * INTERESTING: As the new discourse stabilities transitional terms, other more radical terms (standardization, efficiency, cost containment) can be introduced legitimately.
 * Dutton & Dukerich (1981): organizations present images to their members and non-members to build and reflect specific perceptions of the organization
 * Dutton, Dukerich, & Harqusil (1994): these perceptions enable member to define and identify themselves as member of the organization
 * Mumby (1987, 1993): organizational narratives are key to constructing social contexts within an organization
 * 1980s – 1990s: university experience alienated and disenfranchised large social groups; minority groups were discriminated against by university entrance requirements & standard exams, course curriculum & testing procedures, & campus community & residential activities (Giroux, 1988, 1992; Rose, 1990; Spivak, 1993)
 * Additionally, there were economic pressures from the govt. in the form of declining financial support for universities and images of universities as places of exploitation, bias, and unclear messages and purposes
 * Advocates of market-based education began creating and situating their own narratives of education
 * Hein (1999): corporate education better responds to and integrates students’ diverse cultural & economic backgrounds

III. Discourse-based research that has attempted to characterize change at the linguistic level

Harrison & Young (2004): key grammatical and pragmatic features of change-enacting texts – 1. Verb Choice (verbs associated with completed processes; passive verbs combined with nominalizations that together entailed background decisions but removed agency from those decisions) 2. Grammatical metaphor (nominalized processes in the subject position that obscured agency, made activities appear completed, and concealed a lack of staff input in the process) 3. Theme construction with given information (new information was assumed to be taken for granted) 4. Genre hybridity (bureaucratic texts contained traces of advertising & promotional genres within bureaucratic discourse)

Harvey (2004): Speeches of Steve Jobs of Apple Computer
 * Used “‘do’ + Range” phrases (ex. Do this, do something, do nothing)
 * Used metaphors (ex. Drive a stake in the ground)
 * Used collective pronouns (we)
 * These strategies created contextual ambiguity (destabilizing the current context)
 * Jobs restabilized the changing context by appealing to his followers’ own self-efficacy & self-worth

Lemke (1995): technocratic discourse – characteristic of discourses that are transformed from discourses of knowledge to discourses of social policy; problematic – present issues of choice and they deflect and elude issues of value, morality, accountability, or personal choice Grammatical features of technocratic discourse include: 1. Few processes of direct action 2. Nominalized themes & agents (grammatical metaphor) 3. Agentless passive clause structures 4. Dominant use of third-person forms Effect: minimization of interpersonal exchange & subjective forms; functionally, these features serve to establish & maintain a social elite, its claims to privilege & its access to power

Conclusion: Written discourse is an important influence on social change.