Introduction: genre work and the new economy

ABSTRACT

The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an analytic, and this has often focused on the performative dimensions of economic practice as the most significant dimension: the promulgation of financial models, statements of authority from bank leaders, and the power of numbers. While working within similar traditions, we aim to draw attention to the significant, but often overlooked, role that other kinds of genres and other kinds of genre work play for actors in and out of changing economic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• ethnography
• social capital
• neoliberalism
• genre

Acknowledgements

We want to dedicate this special issue to Richard Bauman, who has for decades shown our shared intellectual communities how analytically productive genres can be. The text of this introduction owes much to Cristina Collins, Kathryn Graber, Colin Halvorson and Sarah Osterhoudt who offered thoughtful suggestions. Ilana had an especially energizing conversation with Miyako Inoue at a crucial moment. The issue as a whole emerges from a workshop funded by Indiana University’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities. Conversations with many of the participants crucially influenced the special issue, we are grateful to: Purnima Bose, Keith Brown, Ron Day, Jane Goodman, Miyako Inoue, Deborah Jones, Ellen Kladky, Martha Lampland, Jean Lave, Susan Lepselter, Alex McGrath, and Ben Robinson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Genre can refer to different things in different fields. While the empirical locus of genre often differs, scholars are generally concerned with the way types operate as structures for expectations of performance, behavior, or interpretation around which different kinds of social actions become defined. In literary studies, Wendy Sharer (2003) has used the term ‘genre work’ to define ‘the strategic blending of typified and innovative textual elements’ (p. 8), capturing the ways that actors draw on class-linked text-types to invoke authority. Within the field of cultural studies, Ana Alacovska and Dave O’Brien (2021) have focused on genres as large-scale cultural industries that surround literary or media genres like soap operas, travel writing, or crime fiction. These genres can engender their own worlds and ‘shape relationships of production and genre-specific ‘suffering’ experiences of cultural labor by virtue of their classificatory power’ (p. 648). The ‘smaller’ the genre, the more it may be used in accounts of creative agency; the ‘larger’ the genre, the more it may be seen as a determinative agent itself. In this special issue, our concern is not whether actors have more or less agency vis-à-vis genres, but how actors attune to the different affordances for participation and meaning-making between or across them.

2 For additional and related work see Yates and Orlikowski (1992); Orlikowski and Yates (1994); Bazerman (1994); and Spinuzzi (2003).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Indiana University New Frontiers-New Currents Grant.

Notes on contributors

Michael M. Prentice

Michael Prentice is a lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Supercorporate: Distinction and Participation in Post-Hierarchy South Korea (Stanford 2022). His research focuses on the intersection of management culture, genres of communication, and narratives of change in South Korea.

Ilana Gershon

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Halls professor of anthropology at Indiana University. Her most recent book is on corporate hiring in the United States, Down and Out in the New Economy (Chicago 2017). Her new project is on the pandemic workplace.