Genre and Institutions

This text examines genres as instances of social processes, enacting a range of important institutional practices, hence shaping people's subjectivities. Genres represent purposive and staged ways of building meanings in a culture. Using the systemic functional grammar, the book demonstrates how given genres build or enact social practices; how educational settings provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs; and how theorizing about such matters helps build a theory of social action, revealing how powerful the systemic functional analysis is in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality. The discussion is built around analysis of texts collected in a number of worksites and school settings, and also of some spoken classroom texts.