Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre, and Technology in the World of Banking

Abstract

Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre, and Technology in the World of Banking by Graham Smart. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2006, 260 pp. Reviewed by Andrea Olinger University of California, Los Angeles A study of discourse practices at the Bank of Canada, Writing the Economy is an important contribution to our understanding of how banks use written and oral genres, as well as other technologies, to create knowledge, set policy, and communicate with the public. Graham Smart spent thirteen years working for the Bank of Canada as an in-house writing consultant and trainer, and this ethnography is the result of over two decades of research (1984-2005). His data include interviews with Bank employees up and down the hierarchy and with economists outside the Bank, presentations at in-house writing seminars and orientation sessions, reviews of internal and published documents, and field notes. Integrated throughout the book are excerpts from nearly 100 interviews. Readers with limited knowledge of banking and economics need not shy away from this book: Smart is careful to define all economic terms and concepts, and he includes an appendix that presents the Neo-Classical and Neo-Keynesian views of how economies work, critiques of each view and of mainstream economics, and a discussion of where the Bank of Canada’s ideology fits. The book’s definition of genre comes from an article Smart wrote with An- thony Pare: “[A] written genre can be seen as a broad rhetorical strategy enacted within an [organization] in order to regularize writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation of particular knowledge” (Pare & Smart, 1994, p.146, qtd. in Smart, 2006, pp. 11-12). Pare and Smart define genres as regularities not only in texts (e.g., press releases and the Bank of Canada Annual Report) but also in the production and interpretation of texts and in patterns of interaction around texts. Smart broadens the definition of genre to include oral genres such as press conferences and lunch meetings. Chapter 1 lays out the book’s theoretical background, which includes genre theory, activity theory, distributed cognition, situated learning, inscription, and theories of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, among others. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the three-part monetary-policy process that defines the Bank’s work: (1) creating knowledge about the economy (through conducting research and using existing research to analyze what is happening in the economy), (2) making policy decisions (e.g., adjusting interest rates), and (3) communicating research and policies to external groups such as the media, the government, and Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2008, Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 16 No. 1, 85-87