Abstracts Producing Work and the Economy • A Central Bank's "Communications Strategy": The Interplay of Activity, Discourse Genres, and Technology in a Time of Organizational ChangeGraham Smart, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee This chapter reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-mediated discourse practices of a professional organization in a period of major transition. Employing theories of genre and activity along with other theoretical constructs, the study examined how the Bank of Canada, the country’s central bank, employs a “Communications Strategy” to orchestrate the organization’s communicative interactions with other social groups in the Canadian public-policy sphere. After identifying a set of written and spoken genres associated with the Communications Strategy, the chapter suggests that the genre set and various mediating technologies can be usefully viewed as parts of a local sphere of organizational activity. The chapter then describes two features of the genre set: the genre knowledge within the community-of-practice associated with it and the relationship of the genre set to processes of organizational change. Next, the chapter discusses the role that the genre set plays in the activity of the Communications Strategy, focusing on three primary functions: co-coordinating the intellectual and discursive work of a large number of individuals performing a variety of professional roles; generating, shaping, and communicating the “public information” that constitutes the Bank’s official public position on its monetary policy; and acting as a site for organizational learning. The chapter concludes with five theoretical claims regarding the way in which the genre set, mediated by technology, operates within the Bank, suggesting that these theoretical claims might serve as a heuristic for other researchers. 2 Structure and Agency in Medical Case Presentations Catherine F. Schryer, University of Waterloo, Canada; Catherine F. Schryer, Lorelei Lingard, University of Toronto, Canada; Marlee Spafford, University of Waterloo, Canada; Kim Garwood, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. This study investigated the role that medical case presentations play in the renegotiation or reconstruction of agency that occurs between medical students and physicians. Medical case presentations perform a dual function in teaching hospitals. They constitute formalized ways that physicians convey complex information about patients, and they are educational vehicles which medical students use to demonstrate their medical problem-solving abilities. This study observed and transcribed 16 oral case presentations performed by third-year medical students in a children’s hospital. As part of an interview protocol, two transcripts, one from a less and one from a more expert student, were turned into scripts, dramatized and videotaped. Ten faculty and 11 students were interviewed and asked to identify the differences between a more or less expert student performance. Data were analyzed using modified grounded theory and statistical strategies. Using a combination of dialectical social theories—specifically structuration theories (Giddens and Bourdieu) and activity theory (Vygotsky and Engestrom)-- as well as rhetorical theories of genre (Bazerman, Russell and Schryer), this study concludes that genres such as case presentations function as mediating tools that allow participants to negotiate agency across generations and across levels of Writing Selves/Writing Societies, Bazerman & Russell Published February 1, 2003 http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/ Copyright © 2003 by the Authors & EditorsAbstracts Page 516 expertise as sets of strategic choices. This renegotiation or reconstruction of agency, however, is not unproblematic. Genres have ideological consequences, and, through medical case presentations, medical students are learning to classify in quite specific ways, behaviors that could negatively affect communication with their patients. • Palm™ Technologies: An Activity-Theoretic Analysis of the Rapid Emergence of a New Writing Tool Cheryl Geisler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Palm Technologies, a group of personal digital assistants or PDAs developed in the early 90s, have rapidly embedded themselves into the daily lives of users. The aim of this chapter is to provide an activity theoretic account of PDAs as technologies of text. Three questions are pursued: Out of what cultural history did Palm Technologies emerge? What motivated users to adopt Palm Technologies? How did Palm Technologies become incorporated into the activity patterns of everyday life? The evidence presented suggests that Palm Technologies work by moving systematic management techniques originally developed for organizations into the personal sphere. When systematic management becomes personal, task management separates from the task itself, leading to a fragmentation of motive that may challenge some of the basic assumptions of activity theory. This fragmentation is mediated through the space-time affordances of textualization and concurrent linearization of time. Like the systematic management of organizations before it, such textual affordances may become subject to surveillance and manipulation--by ourselves if not by others. All of this suggests that some interesting issues will arise as PDA technologies attempt to move outside of their managerial base and into the domestic sphere, in effect databasing our lives. • Compound Mediation in Software Development: Using Genre Ecologies to Study Textual Artifacts Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas, Austin Traditionally, technical communicators have seen the texts that they produce--manuals, references, and instructions--as "bridging" or mediating between a worker and her tool. But field studies of workers indicate that the mediational relationship is much more complicated: Workers often draw simultaneously upon many different textual artifacts to mediate their work, including not only the official genres produced by technical communicators manuals but also ad hoc notes, comments, and improvisational drawings produced by the workers themselves. In this chapter, I theorize these instances of compound mediation by drawing on activity theory and genre theory. I describe an analytical framework, that of genre ecologies, that can be used to systematically investigate compound