Abstract
Discursive and social practices in professional settings have been a key issue in the study of discourse and communication, and more research is needed to unpack how interaction is constructed and mediated and to develop our understanding of the rhetorical strategies of individuals and corporations in professional communication. The two volumes, Jan-Ola Östman and Anna Solin’s (2016) Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings and Vijay Bhatia’s (2016) Critical Genre Analysis, bring important contributions to this line of research by investigating the discursive construal of responsibility, a central theme in organizational contexts. The combination of theoretical exploration and real-world cases in both books is a welcome addition to the body of knowledge about discursive practice in professional settings.
There has been a proliferation of discourse studies on or related to professional responsibility in recent years, either investigating public communication by corporate social responsibility reports (e.g. Rajandran, 2018) or exploring local practices such as in-house consultants’ codes of conduct (Ghadiri et al., 2015). However, the analytical perspectives and methodologies of such studies are usually constrained by the ‘multiple and conflicting meanings’ of responsibility (Harmon, 1995: 5). To address this issue, Solin and Östman in their edited volume propose three different levels of responsibility operating in professional settings: (1) sociocultural responsibility concerning ‘societal and group ideologies and the values and practices of the culture and community’ (p. 7), (2) interpersonal responsibility, which is related to ‘one’s co-participants in a communicative setting’ and (3) responsibility to self, which deals with ‘one’s “internalised,” subconscious values and attitudes’ (p. 7). The three levels place different types of constraints on the understanding of how responsibility is discursively constructed in relation to cultural coherence, interactive restraints or personal positioning. This echoes what Bhatia argues for in his monograph, that the recontextualization of discourse is an appropriate or prototypical practice in a particular situation.
The three frames of responsibility are introduced in Chapter 1 (Introduction), providing a theoretical grounding for understanding responsibility in professional discourse. In Chapter 2, Lakoff discusses how responsibility is manifested at lexical and discourse levels and raises important questions as to whether responsibility can be attributed to anyone apart from the speaker and how language is used to deny or mitigate a speaker’s responsibility for what they say. Taking a role-relational perspective on responsibility, Sarangi in Chapter 3 stresses the importance of the changing and emerging roles that interactants have and take during the interaction. This dynamic view sees responsibility and the role it entangles with as initiated, contested and mediated in the discourse rather than as a stable quality of individuals or organizations. This entails criticality in genre analysis. As Bhatia contends in his book, it is important to take context into consideration when we explore the multi-perspective nature of professional practices in real-world situations, and as we can see, the critical dimension also shapes the case studies in health care, social work and media presented in the rest of Östman and Solin’s volume.
In Chapter 4, Thomassen, Sarangi and Skolbekken analyse counselling sessions held at a Norwegian hospital and focus on how responsibility is framed by the parents of cancer-affected children and how genetic counsellors respond to them. They found that while parents often expressed parental responsibility by emphasizing potential risks to their children, counsellors did not necessarily address such concerns but redirected the focus to risks affecting the parents themselves. The situation whereby responsibility is contested and negotiated also appears in social work settings. Jolanki, in Chapter 5, examines the distribution of responsibility between different stakeholders in the care of senior citizens in Finland. Her interview with professional and family caregivers shows that professionals, compared with family caregivers, were attributed multiple roles from allies to adversaries, while the professionals relied on quite different language resources to construct these different responsibilities. In Chapter 6, Matarese looks at the interactions between a social worker and her homeless clients in a New York City shelter. She demonstrates how the social worker constructed the relations of responsibility in her talk that affect her position. Bulcaen, in Chapter 7, turns to the self-reflexivity of practitioners, especially the way in which counsellors of refugee homes topicalize the institutional responsibility in the position that they take towards clients and colleagues.
Responsibility is not only intrinsic to social work discourse, but also prevalent in the media. As shown in Chapters 8 to 12, responsibility is present both in well-established genres such as TV debates and the print news story, as well as in journalists’ talks. In Chapter 8, based on a sociopragmatic and conversation analysis of a political interview, Fetzer finds that responsibility is anchored not only to the communicative action of an interviewer and their interviewee, but also to the specific and layered context in which their activity takes place. Limsjö (Chapter 9) investigates the allocation of responsibility to different participants in a Swedish topical debate television programme. She shows that while responsibility is seemingly discursively distributed in the ongoing interaction, it is heavily affected by the programme format. Stenvall, in Chapter 10, examines news reporting in terms of the attribution of responsibility in journalism. It is found that the responsibility is often blurred by journalists when they obscure the sources of claims by using general references such as Iraq (as in ‘Iraq says …’) or unnamed ones (as in ‘it is said …’). In Chapter 11, focusing on the construction of social responsibility in a British Catholic weekly, Tusting explores the attribution of responsibility in dealing with social issues. Her study shows that responsibility is assigned primarily to institutions and powerful individuals and seldom to the general public, and she relates this to the tendency for administrative decision-making rights to be increasingly assumed by expert groups. The final chapter in the volume (Chapter 12) by Solin examines how British environmental journalists describe their professional ideals when reporting environmental risks. Journalistic ideals such as accuracy are central to journalism, yet they are constantly being compromised under editorial pressure. As a result, in risk reporting, the responsibilities of journalists to their sources, audiences and editors are usually conflicted.
Solin and Östman’s volume demonstrates that the discourse perspective sheds light on how responsibility is conceptualized as construed and dynamic. Responsible selves, identities and relations do not pre-exist but are discursively construed and negotiated in interaction and professional practices. In addition, it is also important to note that in these chapters, particular individuals or groups explicitly take on or deny the role of a responsible person or an agent capable of acting on social issues, or they opt to make the role obscured through unclear attribution practices. Therefore, an informed analysis of professional discourse entails the examination of both detailed language uses and contexts. This informed analysis is particularly crucial to the corporate social responsibility involved in professional genres, revealing interdiscursivity by drawing on discourses from other domains to promote organizations as agents of positive social change (Rajandran, 2018). The interdiscursive practice in professional discourse is essentially the target of what Bhatia (2008, 2012) refers to as critical genre analysis. His new monograph, Critical Genre Analysis (2016), represents Bhatia’s cumulative research endeavours in his studies of professional discourses over the decades, and underscores his conviction that ‘communication is not simply a matter of putting words together in a grammatically correct and rhetorically coherent textual form, … it is a matter of understanding why members of a specific disciplinary community communicate the way they do’ (p. 4). This critical perspective emphasizes the crucial role of context in analysing professional discourse as shown throughout the book.
Bhatia begins the book in Part I with a critical review of the developments of genre theory, pointing out that conventional genre analysis focuses largely on textual resources and pays little attention to ‘the ultimate outcomes of the genre-based discursive activities, which centrally contribute to academic, institutional, organizational, and professional activities or practices that are invariably non-discursive’ (p. 21). He attaches importance to the interdiscursive embedding of discursive and professional practices, and considers both text-internal and text-external factors in his critical genre analysis framework. Text-internal factors concern intertextuality, referring to the interaction between and across texts, whereas text-external factors are related to interdiscursivity, which he sees as ‘more innovative attempts to create various forms of hybrid and relatively novel constructs by appropriating or exploiting established conventions or resources associated with other genres and professional practices’ (p. 35). A critical investigation of professional genres is informed by a full consideration of these text-external resources. It is important to emphasize that criticality in Bhatia’s critical genre analysis refers to ‘a rigorous intellectual analysis to demystify social and institutional actions’ (p. 23), rather than the ideological deconstruction and critique typically used in critical discourse analysis (CDA).
In Part II, Bhatia elaborates on the three key issues in his approach: criticality, interdiscursivity, and a multi-perspective and multi-dimensional methodology. After a distinction is drawn between critical genre analysis and CDA (Chapter 2) and another between intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Chapter 3), he discusses in Chapter 4 genre hybridization and appropriation of linguistic resources across genres, professional practices and cultures. These processes of generic appropriation create various forms of genre-mixing, genre-embedding and genre-bending. He further shows that critical genre analysis is a multi-purpose, multi-dimensional and multi-perspective methodology, which encompasses a wide range of discourse analysis methods, including register and genre analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, stylistics, mediated discourse analysis, corpus-based analysis, narrative analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and argumentation analysis.
Bhatia’s approach has been applied in analysing professional discourse, and the most influential study is perhaps the project International Commercial Arbitration Practice in which he and collaborators from 22 countries explored an interdiscursive process in which commercial arbitration is colonized by litigation practices (Bhatia et al., 2010). In this new book, he further illustrates the operational principles and methods of critical genre analysis in five different professional practices (Chapters 5–9), including corporate disclosure, arbitration, fundraising, legislation and new media.
Chapter 5 examines corporate disclosure practices such as annual reporting, showing how four different kinds of discourse (accounting, finance, public relations and law) are strategically mixed and manipulated to project a positive corporate image. Focusing on structuring moves and lexico-grammatical features, Bhatia illustrates how generic norms are bent across professional genres. Chapter 6 discusses the interdiscursive appropriation of written testimonies and witness examination in litigation and arbitration awards, exploring how interdiscursive integration helps to achieve the private intention of lawyers’ juridical persuasion in arbitration. In Chapter 7, Bhatia examines the structuring moves of fundraising genres to show how the professional practice and culture of fundraising is interdiscursively influenced by marketing culture, resulting in the compromise of its philanthropic nature. Chapter 8 focuses on two other aspects of interdiscursivity: the manipulation of interdiscursive space and the participation mechanism in legislative and new media practices. In legislative practices, the interdiscursive space is managed by legal draftsmen to simplify legislative provisions, and interdiscursivity is involved in the participant management system in legislative drafting practice. The participation mechanism is also shown in the ways in which new media such as BBC online news magazines employ participation systems for a generic hybrid of private and public discourse, which involves simultaneous participation from readers.
In the final chapter, Bhatia re-emphasizes the three key features of his approach to critical genre analysis: the interdiscursivity of genres, discourse as performance, and a multi-perspective and mixed methodology. Bhatia also illustrates the pedagogical implications for his approach and proposes English for Professional Communication as the ‘teaching and learning of English in specific contexts to legitimise participation in the affairs of specialist communities of practice both in academic and professional contexts’ (p. 198). His proposal helps to bridge the gap between what is taught in the classroom in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) context and what is expected from the professional world.
Altogether, the two volumes offer critical insights into discursive practices in professional settings, encouraging practitioners to reflect critically on the interaction they engage in and the discourses they produce. Moreover, they also provide researchers with conceptual tools and methodological approaches for studying professional discourse, especially in terms of how to analyse and interpret discursive choices in the immediate and a broader context. Responsibility is a perennial topic in the professional world. It is fluid and discursively constructed in terms of how professionals project themselves and also how they position themselves to others and society. A robust understanding of language uses in professional settings requires not only a textual reading but, also an intertextual and interdiscursive account focusing on what Bhatia refers to as criticality. The two volumes, therefore, are complementary in the sense that Östman and Solin’s illustrates how a professional issue is approached from a discourse perspective while Bhatia’s provides a methodological approach that expands the scope of genre analysis to professional contexts.
When investigating discourse and communication in professional settings, the analyst’s position is likely to be fraught with the tension resulting from different roles that researchers may take on, such as ‘befriender’, ‘assessor’ and ‘consultant’ as Solin and Östman point out (p. 14), and this may have significant influences on both the accountability of the research and the way in which its results can be interpreted. However, the multi-dimensional analytical framework and the multi-perspective approach to discourse Bhatia has developed in critical genre analysis can, to some degree, help researchers to map out their possible roles and authorial positions and reduce the reflexivity tension when analysing and making sense of discourses produced in professional contexts.