Assessing genre as rhetorical performance in software design

Abstract

When organizations outsource, seeking expert help from external companies or consultants, often those in consulting roles will introduce new texts in order to help manage workflows and transform known work processes, all with the intention of improving work practices. Such scenarios challenge a key claim in rhetorical genre studies which perceives genres as actions that respond to situations that recur. As much as genre studies' notion of recurrence helps us understand texts' ability to facilitate communication in recurring workplace processes, it offers little insight into theoretical or methodological approaches for professional or technical communicators who may want to address, in theory, research, or practice, how workers use texts that have been imposed upon them with the purpose of creating situations entirely new to them and with the expectation that the new situation will stabilize and recur over time (as what often happens when companies merge or outsource). This kind of abrupt introduction of texts into the workplace marks phenomena called "genre dumping." In this paper, rhetorical genre theory and its application to genre dumping in technical communication has been examined, which have two aims: (a) to discuss how genre studies gives shape to what we know about how texts work in professional settings where technical work happens; and (b) to assess issues that genre dumping presents to rhetorical genre theory.