Abstract
The functional understanding of language points to three major meta-functions of language in the construction of social realities: ideational, interpersonal and textual. While the central position of ideational function is indisputably acknowledged, discourse analysts have largely paid attention to the interpersonal and textual dimensions of discursive constructions. Such negligence of ideation has recently been corrected as an increasing number of discourse researchers hold that ideation is no more than various sets of ideas/knowledge to which a particular cultural community attributes the property of being real. Different communities may construct different types of knowledge related to the same outside world, according to their specific ideologies and culture values. The demystifying of how privileged groups create and diffuse knowledge in the public sphere may reveal whether publicly accepted knowledge is the true understanding of social processes and how it has silenced alternative voices to acquire its current dominance. Salvi and Bowker’s volume is a timely contribution to the emerging critical study of knowledge management practices.
This volume consists of seven chapters. The editors’ opening chapter highlights some overarching theoretical issues of the volume. First, as the public gains easier access to information sources, enabled by ‘the ongoing process of democratization of knowledge’ (p. 1), professional communication with the public ceases to be a straightforward top-down process of popularization where the public is only a passive recipient. Professionals need to actively promote their knowledge by reformulating texts according to the abilities and expectations of lay public communities. Second, knowledge production is now a complicated industry covering a variety of fields, including psychology, politics, economics and many others, and knowledge sharing turns into a delicate process involving the use of multiple modes of communication, for example written, oral, audial or pictorial. So, the study of knowledge production and knowledge sharing requires an innovative methodological hybridity. Third, researchers share a dialectic understanding of the relationship between language and society. They mostly take the examination of textual patterns as ‘a spring board for wider consideration of the diverse and complex nature of the interactions between language use, discourse and knowledge creation and dissemination’ (p. 9).
Chapters 2–7 present empirical studies in six professional domains: law, environment, academic, public health, e-communication and corporation. Rita Salvi tracks how authoritative legal texts are rewritten for companies’ purpose of publicizing corporate profiles. She finds that the absolute authorial authority of legal texts is considerably mitigated in strategic business texts, which are apparently more reader centered. Ersilia Incell examines how environmental knowledge is appropriated discursively in contrasting manners by the opposing parties in the global water debate. The collected corpus includes professional texts created by various business, government and non-governmental organization (NGO) institutions. Renzo Mocini investigates the discursive construction of medical knowledge in research journal articles, particularly by looking at how evidentiality is linguistically realized. Chiara Prosperi Porta reports a comparative study of two types of public health text issued by European and British national health agencies. The discursive construction of the evidence-based repository of knowledge manifests notable differences. The European texts boost authority and de-personalization as they are circulated intra-professionally, addressing epidemiologists, scientists and policy makers. In contrast, the British texts incorporate many instances of metaphor and figurative language in order to cater to the needs of a complex readership, covering government, specialists and the general public. Judith Turnbull’s study explores how European central banks reformulate financial knowledge in their public education texts. She is interested in the multimodal strategies of conveying abstract concepts to less financially literate younger recipients. Janet Bowker, in the final chapter, traces linguistic markers of knowledge-sharing practices within internal company communications. She identifies two primary framing strategies (directive and storytelling) company members employ to distribute knowledge among their co-workers.
This volume contributes much to the growing discussion of the dialectics among knowledge, power and discourse, but it does have some limitations. First, a theoretical review of the function of discourse in the building of knowledge is needed in the ‘Introduction’ chapter, not only for a solid contextualization of the reported studies but also for readers’ better understanding of knowledge as social constructs and language as post-modern ecological systems (Barron et al., 2002). Second, the methodological hybridity advocated is indeed necessary for a more reliable reconstruction of the complex mutual shaping process between knowledge and discourse, but readers may find that some analytical concepts deserve more in-depth introduction, for example concordances and collations (p. 22), rationalization (p. 62) and proximity (p. 115). Third, the volume does not have a concluding chapter to supply an evaluative summary and to position the volume in the wider field of language and communication studies.
Despite these minor shortcomings, the volume is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in professional communication in the public sphere. It is traditionally assumed that the spreading of knowledge is meant to challenge the public’s thinking and keep them informed. Professionals need to bear this responsibility, partly because of the elite position they enjoy as privileged knowledge-holders. Nevertheless, the actual process of knowledge sharing has generated more strategic texts than informative ones. In addition to the supply of simplified reformulations, the authoring professionals employ various linguistic and semiotic resources to construct public texts in such a way as to realize their own private ends. The proposed critical approach to knowledge and discourse may help to unravel this strategic tendency, and to enhance the democratization of knowledge between professionals and the less literate public. The volume may interest advanced post-graduates as well as novice and experienced researchers in areas of rhetoric, genre analysis, applied linguistics and critical discourse studies.