Writing and Genre in Higher Education and Workplaces: A Review of Studies That Use Cultural--Historical Activity Theory

Abstract

This article reviews a tradition of North American research on writing in higher education and workplaces that draws on cultural-historical activity approaches. Growing out of college composition courses, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, and technical writing courses, the research takes as its object the roles writing plays in various activities, particularly those activities in which writing most powerfully mediates work: academic disciplines, professions, and other large and powerful organizations of modern life. Genre is an important analytical category, defined not in terms of formal features hut in terms of typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent social situations. Researchers use qualitative and historical methods to trace the ways people create, appropriate, and recreate dynamic genres to mediate a wide range of social practices.