5.30 Reading Response

Texts:
Shryer & Spoel: Genre Theory Health Care

Two concepts that I found very interesting in this reading were how power and hierarchy and also unpredictability tied into identity formation. Issues of identity seem important to look at, particularly in this field, because of the hierarchies and power relationships that are inevitable and inherent in the workplace. Genres can serve as “mediating tools that simultaneously structure and constrain the possibilities for rhetorical action and afford opportunities for the strategic improvisation for agency in the process of identity formation” (271). Also, the tensions and improvisations of each genre’s performance makes the rhetorical shaping of identity unpredictable (271).

Schryer and Spoel explain that “some genres exist in a relationship of power with other genres” because they also regulate and control them in addition to contributing to internal regulated and regularized resources (250). In connection to activity theory, the tools that we use in an attempt to pursue our objectives helps to internalize the values, practices, and beliefs we associated with our social situations (254). This encasing of ideology contributes to enforcing those power relationships. Already established genres are social structures that provide both resources and constraints that shape the behavior of people in the workplace (253). The workplace seems like an obvious place for power relationships and hierarchy just because of management and different positions – just the way it is set up – but it is also interesting to think about how these genres also can contribute to this by imposing certain constraints.

The discussion of how health-care communities continually work on professional identity formation as they participate in the field’s discursive practices seems like it would also be applicable to a variety of other fields as well. I feel like all workplaces have their workers kind of work out their place as they participate – nothing ever really seems stable. Schryer and Spoel even say that “individual and group identities are not static constructs but are improvised” (258). Furthermore, not only do present situations and practices influence identity formation, but also past experiences and orientations. This past socialization and practice are embedded in genres that affect present situations but never in predictable ways (258). As symbolic structures, genres overlap and contribute to changing fields, prompting shift and change and “the actions of agents using genres are never entirely predictable (259). It seems that in the workplace, with these unspoken rules and restraints and the variety of contextual factors, identity formation could always be changing and there should exist a shifting power balance. Something would always contribute to the context and situation at hand, but how can you ever really tell or predict what that is? I have blogged about this previously – there is just so much to every situation and context, it seems impossible for us to recognize or identify anything or everything that could be influential.