Book Cover

A Central Bank's "Communications Strategy": The Interplay of Activity, Discourse Genres, and Technology in a Time of Organizational Change

Graham Smart

Department of English
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211
gsmart@uwm.edu

Abstract [1]

This chapter reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-mediated discourse practices of a professional organization in a period of major transition. Employing theories of genre and activity along with other theoretical constructs, the study examined how the Bank of Canada, the country's central bank, employs a "Communications Strategy" to orchestrate the organization's communicative interactions with other social groups in the Canadian public-policy sphere. After identifying a set of written and spoken genres associated with the Communications Strategy, the chapter suggests that the genre set and various mediating technologies can be usefully viewed as parts of a local sphere of organizational activity. The chapter then describes two features of the genre set: the genre knowledge within the community-of-practice associated with it and the relationship of the genre set to processes of organizational change. Next, the chapter discusses the role that the genre set plays in the activity of the Communications Strategy, focusing on three primary functions: co-coordinating the intellectual and discursive work of a large number of individuals performing a variety of professional roles; generating, shaping, and communicating the "public information" that constitutes the Bank's official public position on its monetary policy; and acting as a site for organizational learning. The chapter concludes with five theoretical claims regarding the way in which the genre set, mediated by technology, operates within the Bank, suggesting that these theoretical claims might serve as a heuristic for other researchers.

"Our thinking about our external communications these days is much more strategic than it used to be: we're concerned with how to use our communications strategically—to have an approach that supports our monetary policy objectives, and to be effective with this." (The Communications Czar)

"With this kind of access [to the Bank's Intranet], everyone is wired." (A Deputy Governor)

"I think the change here in the Bank has happened through a combination of new institutional procedures and culturally assimilated values. Yes, there have been formal efforts to provide media training, to teach people the tricks of the trade. . . . But there's still another kind of change required. And I think it's something that people have to pick up, through their work, more by osmosis than through a training course." (The Chief of the Communications Department)

Introduction

The winds of organizational change and technological innovation are at play in the world . . . and in the literature. Recent strands of research and theory focusing on collaborative knowledge-intensive work in the professions, on the social and rhetorical dimensions of information manufacture and use, on transformations in the social structures and work practices of organizations, and on the fusing of texts[2] and new digital information/communication technologies all converge at a point that opens up a conceptual space for examining the interplay of discourse and technology in times of organizational change. In this chapter, I report on a study that draws on various aspects of this scholarship as well as, in a more specific way, on theories of activity and genre to provide the theoretical underpinning for an ethnographic investigation of the shifting, technology-mediated discourse practices of one particular organization during a period of major transition.

In earlier work (e.g., Smart 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000), I employed an activity-based theory of genre[3] and an ethnographic methodology to produce accounts of how economists at the Bank of Canada, that country's central bank and monetary-policy authority (and counterpart of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board), use an internal set of written and spoken genres in combination with the technology of computer-run mathematical models to accomplish the collaborative activity of generating, negotiating, shaping, and distributing specialized knowledge about the present and expected future state of the Canadian economy—knowledge that is used by the Governor of the Bank (the counterpart of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) and his senior colleagues in directing the nation's monetary policy. In this chapter, I will be talking about something related, but different: I will look at another kind of activity, another set of written and spoken genres, and another cluster of technologies—all used by the Bank of Canada to orchestrate its external communications with other social groups in Canada's public-policy sphere, groups that include the media, the general public, government, the financial markets, the business sector, organized labor, and academia (see Diagram 1). Within the Bank, the activity of orchestrating the institution's communicative interactions with these outside groups is commonly referred to as the "Communications Strategy." Using the Communications Strategy as a point of focus, this chapter will examine the role of an evolving set of technology-mediated discourse genres during a period of significant organizational change for the Bank.

Diagram 1

Before going further, though, I will provide an overview of the chapter. I begin with the design of the study—first describing the research site, the Bank of Canada's head office in Ottawa, and then moving on to discuss the study's methodology and theoretical orientation. I next present an account of the technology-mediated set of discourse genres that animates, coordinates, and applies the intellectual and discursive work underlying the Bank's communicative interactions with other players in the arena of Canadian public policy. After identifying the various written and spoken genres associated with the Communications Strategy, I suggest that the genre set and a number of mediating technologies can be usefully conceptualized as integral parts of a local sphere of organizational activity; and then, within this context, I go on to discuss two significant features of the genre set: the genre knowledge displayed within the community-of-practice engaged in the activity of the Communications Strategy; and the relationship of the genre set to processes of organizational change. Next, I discuss the role that the genre set plays in the activity of the Communications Strategy, focusing on three of its primary functions: co-coordinating the intellectual and discursive work of a number of individuals performing a variety of professional roles; generating, shaping, and communicating the "public information" that constitutes the Bank's official public position on its monetary policy; and acting as a site for organizational learning. To conclude the chapter, I propose a set of theoretical claims regarding the way in which this set of discourse genres, in conjunction with technology, operates within the Bank to accomplish intellectual and discursive work, and I suggest that these claims might serve as a heuristic for other researchers engaged in examining the role of technology-mediated discourse in the activity of professional organizations. As well, running through the chapter is a thread of commentary on the use of existing theory and building of new theory in ethnographic research, with regard both to the present study and to ethnographic inquiry more generally.

The Study

In this section I describe the research site for the study and then outline its methodology and theoretical framework. As we shall see, both the original aim and the research questions that I initially brought to the study were quickly modified once I entered the site and began to gather data.

Research Site

I will start by describing the setting for the study, the head office of the Bank of Canada in Ottawa (see Figure 1). As a central bank, the Bank of Canada's primary role is to direct the country's monetary policy, a function that involves managing the national money supply by influencing interest rates, with the larger goal of improving the performance of the economy over time. Over the last decade the Bank has made the pursuit of price stability, or low inflation, its primary policy goal (as have central banks in other industrialized countries). Accordingly, the Bank has committed itself to guiding the Canadian economy towards a series of "inflation-control targets" running out into future years, staged in five-year periods.

Figure 1: Bank of Canada Head Office, Ottawa

Decisions on monetary policy are made by an executive group called the Governing Council that includes the Governor, the Senior Deputy Governor, and four Deputy Governors. Supporting this group of decision-makers with economic analysis are six Senior Advisors and some 170 staff economists, situated in four departments—Research; Monetary and Financial Analysis; International; and Financial Markets (known collectively as the "economics departments")—with each department headed by a Chief. In addition, five other departments, including the Communications Department, house employees who provide technical expertise in a range of areas such as corporate communications, editorial services, information technology, and library services. (See Figure 2 for a stylized organization chart of the Bank of Canada.) In addition to this staff in the Ottawa head office, the Bank has regional representatives in five cities—Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver—who provide financial and economic information and analysis from their respective parts of the country, as well as a senior person in Montreal and another in Toronto whose role is to maintain ongoing communication with key players in the financial markets. Within the Bank, the broad collaborative activity of data gathering, economic analysis, and policy-making is known as the "Monetary Policy Framework."

Figure 2: Bank of Canada Organization Chart

Overlapping with the Monetary Policy Framework is the activity that members of the Bank's staff refer to as the "Communications Strategy." The Communications Strategy is a complex, technology-mediated collaborative activity through which the Bank orchestrates its discursive interactions with the outside groups mentioned earlier—the media, the general public, government, the financial markets, the business sector, organized labor, and academia.

An important point to note here is that the Bank's approach to communicating with outside groups has shifted dramatically over the last seven or eight years. The Bank of Canada, like other central banks around the world, has moved from being an institution that veiled its decision-making processes in secrecy and maintained a reactive (some might say defensive) posture of monitoring and cautiously (some might say elliptically) responding to outside commentaries about its monetary policy, to being an institution that is committed to the principle of "transparency" (of which more later) regarding its views on the Canadian economy and its own monetary-policy goals and actions. And this fundamental shift in approach has been accompanied by significant changes in the uses of discourse and technology within the activity of the Bank's work. While the discursive, intellectual work-world of any professional organization evolves continuously, dramatic change such as that experienced by the Bank of Canada during this period makes the dynamic interplay of activity, discourse, and technology more visible to a researcher, and at one remove, to the reader of a research report.

Methodology and Theoretical Orientation

I will move on now to the research methodology and theoretical constructs employed in the study. The methodology I have used is interpretive ethnography, an approach which allows a researcher to explore a social group's repertoire of shared symbolic resources, or discourse, in order to learn something of how its members view and function within their particular, self-constructed corner of the world. As I will demonstrate below, interpretive ethnography can also enable a researcher to investigate how the members of a social group construct, characterize, and interact with outside groups, and so has offered an effective way of looking at how the Bank of Canada uses written and spoken discourse genres, in combination with a range of technologies, to enact its communicative exchanges with other groups in Canada's public-policy sphere.

Interpretive ethnography, in striving to explore and represent the shared meanings that constitute the discursive and conceptual world of a particular social group, relies heavily on the research practice of eliciting and presenting "displays of members' thoughts, theories, and world views" (Van Maanen, 1988). Thus the accounts produced by interpretive ethnographers typically have a multi-vocal, polyphonic quality, with informants' voices and perspectives given pride of place— all with the intention of achieving the "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of a group's "interworked systems of construable signs [and] structures of meaning" (pp. 6, 14, 182) that is the larger goal of interpretive ethnography. Accordingly, this chapter includes numerous insider perspectives, as conveyed in excerpts from interviews with Bank of Canada staff members, in the findings of the study presented later in the chapter. Cumulatively, this insider discourse provides a unique window onto the indigenous work-world constructed and co-inhabited by the study's informants.

In developing my account of the activity and discourse employed by the Bank of Canada in enacting its Communications Strategy, I have drawn both on an extensive amount of qualitative data that I collected in the Bank's head office in Ottawa during the fifteen years or so that I worked there as a full-time in-house writing consultant and trainer prior to my departure in 1996, and on a more focused set of data gathered from informants at the Bank over a two-day period in June 2000 and supplemented by e-mail exchanges and document gathering in the time since my visit. The data gathered in June 2000 include taped interviews, averaging an hour and a quarter in length, with nine informants: the then Governor of the Bank, three deputy Governors, a Senior Advisor, the Chief of the Bank's Communications Department, the Governor's Senior Assistant (who acts as a speech-writing facilitator, among other functions), and two members of the Bank's editorial staff. The data also include a variety of Bank documents, including both internal and published print texts, as well as material from the Bank's Web site.

As a side-note here, I want to mention that when I visited the Bank of Canada in Ottawa in June 2000 to observe in the work environment, gather documents, and interview members of the Bank's staff, the research took a significantly different turn from what I had foreseen. I was expecting to explore the organization's traditional reactive posture of monitoring and cautiously responding to outside commentaries about its monetary policy (a posture shared by central banks around the world). And indeed this assumption was instantiated in the lists of questions I had sent to the interviewees ahead of time.[4] However, the morning I began the interviews I quickly realized that since I had left the Bank as an employee in 1996, a dramatic change had taken place in the organization's approach to communicating with outside groups, and I immediately decided to reorient my inquiry to focus on the new Communications Strategy. As the two days I spent at the Bank observing, conducting interviews, and gathering documents progressed, and I began to get a sense of the nature and degree of the change that had occurred, I proceeded to explore different facets of this activity.

To orient my inquiry at the Bank of Canada and to help me interpret the data I gathered there, I have drawn on a number of theoretical constructs from the literature. The first construct to mention is a social theory of genre, and the second, a theory of activity. As we know, contemporary theorizing, building on Carolyn Miller's (1984) ground-breaking work, has recast genre as a form of socio-rhetorical action that, in many professional organizations, plays a central role in the genesis, shaping, distribution, and use of the specialized types of knowledge an organization needs to accomplish its work (Bazerman, 1988; Beaufort, 1999; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Freedman & Smart, 1997; Schryer, 1993; Smart, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000; Winsor, 2001).

For professional organizations, it is the discursive recurrence and stability associated with genres—their capacity for regularizing rhetorical acts and writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation and use of particular types of knowledge—that make them essential sites for rendering the intellectual and discursive efforts of various individuals mutually visible and comprehensible and, on a collective level, for connecting, co-coordinating, and harnessing this work (Paré & Smart, 1994). While this characterization accentuates the communal and conventionalized aspects of genre, theorists have also drawn on Anthony Giddens's (1984) concept of the "duality of structure" to show that organizational genres are not only sites of discursive recurrence and stability, but also sites of individual agency and collective innovation (Bazerman, 1994a; Miller, 1994; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). This dual character allows genres to function, simultaneously, as both vehicles of continuity and instruments for change. In a similar vein, Bakhtin (1981) points to a tension between "centripetal" and "centrifugal" tendencies in discourse—"official" discursive energies that would impose uniformity and order on the world versus "unofficial" energies tending towards heterogeneity and disorder—that we might expect to see reflected in organizational genres.

Researchers working with a social theory of genre have also come to recognize that genres used within organizations typically function together in sets, with each genre set operating as an integrated rhetorical/epistemic site (Bazerman, 1994b; Berkenkotter, 2001; Devitt, 1991; Yates & Orlikowski, 2002). Reflecting the structural duality of individual genres, genre sets provide an organization with discursive continuity and stability, while at the same time displaying a marked plasticity and potential for self-reinvention. Moving beyond the scope of a single organization, Charles Bazerman (1994b) conceptualizes an inter-organizational level of discourse—a "genre system" encompassing the full range of discourse genres used by two or more social groups to interact with one another in pursuing a joint endeavor of some kind.

The concept of a genre system encompassing a variety of genres produced by a number of organizations suggests a further aspect of genre theory that will prove relevant later in the chapter: Anne Freadman's (1994) notion of "uptake," a tennis metaphor, where a text in one genre—a shot served over the net, as it were—will frequently elicit, in the natural course of social events, a response in the form of another text. In the context of a genre system, we might think of a pair of genres, each originating in a different social group, that exist "in some sort of dialogical relation" (p. 48), to quote Freadman—so that the appearance of a text in one genre invites a responding text in the second genre.

A final aspect of genre theory pertinent to my study at the Bank of Canada concerns the concept of "genre knowledge"—that is, participants' rhetorical awareness of the ways in which a genre set functions (Beaufort, 1999; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Giltrow, 2002; Giltrow & Valiquette, 1994; Orlikowsky & Yates, 1994; Paré, 2000). In my study, the knowledge displayed by members of the Bank staff who are users of an internal genre set regarding who is responsible for doing what, and when, in the collective accomplishment of the rhetorical work of the genre set turns out to be particularly significant.

In addition to social conceptions of genre, a number of researchers examining discourse in professional organizations have been drawing on North American and Scandinavian extensions of Soviet cultural-historical theory known, collectively, as activity theory. From this theoretical perspective, a set of workplace genres can be viewed as one part of an "activity system" (Cole & Engeström, 1993): a local, historically and culturally situated sphere of collaborative endeavor, in which thinking, knowing, and learning are distributed across a number of people and their work practices and, at the same time, mediated by an array of culturally constructed tools—all with the larger aim of accomplishing a set of communally defined goals. Or to put it more simply, an organizational activity system is (and here I draw on the language of Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger [1991] and James Wertsch [1991]: people collaborating—over time—within an organizational community-of-practice—in goal-directed activity—using culturally constructed tools to think and act with. While Lave and Wenger's concept of the "community-of-practice" originated as part of their theory of "situated learning," it has been adapted more broadly to refer to the group of collaborating individuals who participate in an activity system (see, for example, Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999).

As well as defining the concept of the activity system, I want to note three key characteristics of organizational activity systems that are relevant to the study reported in this chapter:[5]

Together, theories of genre and activity offer a powerful conceptual schema for exploring and representing the ways in which professional organizations employ technology-mediated genre sets to prompt, display, coordinate, and deploy the goal-directed intellectual and discursive work of their members.

In addition to these two bodies of theory, the study described in this chapter also draws on theoretical perspectives on the nature of change in professional organizations, as it involves social structures, work practices, and technology, on the social and rhetorical aspects of the manufacture and use of information, and on the fusing of texts and new digital technologies. Wanda Orlikowski (2001) identifies three models of organizational change that have been prevalent in the literature: planned change, in which managers, responding to perceived shifts in the internal or external environments, rationally plan and implement changes they believe will improve the organization's performance; technological imperative, where a newly introduced technology drives change in and of itself; and punctuated equilibrium, where change occurs sporadically and dramatically, triggered by internal or external forces. Orlikowsky, finding these models only partial in their explanatory power, would see them subsumed in another, more comprehensive model that she refers to as situated change. From a situated change perspective—and this view is consonant with the practice orientation of activity theory, as described above[8]—change occurs as individuals perceive and, in ad hoc ways, respond to unfolding events in their work-world: "[O]rganizational transformation is grounded in the ongoing practices of organizational actors and emerges out of their (tacit and not so tacit) accommodations to and experiments with the everyday contingencies, breakdowns, exceptions, opportunities, and unintended consequences that they encounter" (p. 226). Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day (1999) offer a complementary theoretical perspective on organizational change in their concept of the "information ecology"—a variation on the "activity system"—in which individual and collective agency, technology-in-use, and continuous change are foregrounded.

Scholarship theorizing the social and rhetorical dimensions of information manufacture and use has also contributed conceptually to my study. Charles Bazerman (2001) writes, "Information is a human creation for human purposes [and thus] is neither disembodied nor neutral. Information is rhetorical. It is created and deployed in particular historical circumstances for the use of particular individuals and groups." In describing the construction by anti-nuclear activists of "public information" on the consequences of nuclear testing during the 1950s, Bazerman points to the "the intentional design of particular forms of information in particular historical circumstances [for the purpose of] influence[ing] individual and group action," highlighting the "recontextualization of knowledge and utterance from one site to another" (p. 261) as a frequent key aspect of this process. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (2000) point to the collaborative professional practices that typically underlie the production and deployment of such information.

And finally, I have also drawn on scholarship examining the ways in which texts are merged with new digital technologies (Engeström & Middleton, 1998; Geisler, 2001; Geisler et al., 2001; Haas, 1995; Henderson, 1999; Luff, Hindmarsh, & Heath, 2000). Geisler et al. (2001) coin the term "IText" to refer to the fusing and reciprocal mediation of texts and technology seen in "information technologies with texts at their core" (p. 270) and introduce the IText into theorizing of organizational genres and knowledge-making activity (pp. 291, 293-294). Barbara Carlson (2001) discusses the growing impact of a specific type of IText technology, the Intranet, a web-based system for sharing information internally within an organization that has become the "fastest growing" digital technology in the professional world. Carlson cites the claim that "Intranets leverage a company's intelligence by allowing users easily to create, access, and distribute company knowledge" (p. 84).

To borrow from Lucille McCarthy and Stephen Fishman (2001), I have used the theoretical constructs outlined above to "help [me] name, explore, and explain what [I was] seeing" in the data I gathered at the Bank of Canada. Taken together, these constructs constitute a conceptual framework that has helped me to recognize and describe how written and spoken genres, in combination with technology, are used to engender, render visible, coordinate, and apply a complex configuration of intellectual and discursive work within the activity of the Bank's Communications Strategy. In turn, I hope to complete the theory-data-theory cycle by making a contribution to theory in this chapter, in three ways. First, my analysis of the data will provide further empirical instances to strengthen existing theory. Second, the analysis also aims to add texture and elaboration to existing theory. And finally, I hope to build some new theory. In any event, this is my intention as we move now into an account of the findings from the study—we shall see how it turns out.

The Communications Strategy and Its Genre Set

This section first identifies the set of 33 discourse genres associated with the Bank's Communications Strategy as well as the various digital technologies and built environments mediating the use of the genre set.[9] I go on to suggest that this internal genre set can be viewed as part of a larger inter-organizational genre system that also includes a constellation of external genres monitored by members of the Bank's staff for the purpose of gleaning information and perspectives from outside groups relevant to the Bank. Next, the genre set and the built environments and digital technologies associated with it are conceptualized as integral parts of a local sphere of organizational activity. I then discuss four significant features of the genre set.

I will begin by identifying the various written and spoken genres that come into play within the activity of the Communications Strategy. (The symbol *** following a genre indicates either that the genre is new, having emerged with the Communications Strategy over the last seven or eight years, or that it preceded the Communications Strategy but has changed significantly in form and function in recent years. The letters "www.T" beside a written genre indicate that texts in the genre are currently available on the Bank's Web site, http://www.bank-banque-canada.ca/en/index.htm; and for spoken genres, "www.A" indicates the availability on the Web site of an audio file of the communication event, and "www.T" indicates the availability on the Web site of the written text on which the spoken performance was based.) First we will look at a group of 13 published written genres (with the symbol ▲indicating the 11 genres that Bank insiders refer to as the main "communication vehicles" for the Communications Strategy, that is, the genres regularly used to convey the Bank's "key messages"), as well as at ten spoken genres that also play a part in the activity of the "Communications Strategy"—spoken genres that involve outsiders and so are visible to public view. I view the written genres as similar Bakhtin's (1986) "secondary speech genres" and the spoken genres as analogous to his "primary speech genres."

Written genres — published:

·        Monetary Policy Report, with 4-page summary (▲,***, www.T)

·        Update to Monetary Policy Report (▲,***, www.T)

·        Bank of Canada Annual Report (▲,***, www.T)

·        The Bank of Canada Review (▲,***, www.T)

·        Governor's presentations to Parliament (two each year to House of Commons, one to Senate) (▲, ***, www.T, www.A)

·        minutes from meetings of Board of Directors, featuring summary of Governor's presentation to Board (▲, ***, www.T)

·        lectures by Governor, to university audiences[10] (▲, www.T , www.A)

·        speeches by Governor, usually to industry, business, and labor groups (▲, www.T , www.A ); and similar speeches by other senior members of Bank staff (www.T)

·        formal presentations (usually) by Deputy Governors at major economics and public-policy conferences (▲, www.T)

·        press releases announcing changes in interest rates and other significant events (▲, www.T , www.A)

·        letters from Governor in response to letters, phone calls, and e-mail messages sent to Bank by members of public

·        Technical Reports describing finished research by Bank staff economists (www.T)

·        Working Papers describing research-in-progress by Bank staff economists (www.T)

Spoken genres — involving participants outside Bank:

·        press conferences by Governor following adjustments to interest rates and following

official release of Monetary Policy Report, Update to Monetary Policy Report, and The

Bank of Canada Review (***, www.T , www.A )

·        briefings by Deputy Governor to journalists in "lock-up" facility immediately preceding

     official release of Monetary Policy Report, Update to Monetary Policy Report, and The

      Bank of Canada Review ***

·        briefings by Deputy Governors to journalists and financial analysts following release of Monetary Policy Report and Update to Monetary Policy Report ***

·        lunch meetings at Bank of Canada between senior Bank officials and people in

government, business, financial markets, organized labor, media, and academia ***

·        meetings between Governor and other senior Bank policy-makers with editorial boards

of newspapers and news magazines

·        meetings of Governor, other senior Bank policy-makers, and staff economists with

officials in various levels of federal and provincial governments

·        informal presentations by senior Bank policy-makers, staff economists, and regional

representatives to university audiences and to various industry and business groups ***

·        meetings during visits by regional representatives to industries and businesses ***

·        interactions between Bank economists and outside economists at conferences hosted by

Bank on monetary policy and related economic issues ***

·        regular telephone conversations between (a) Bank economists and market analysts,

traders, and portfolio managers in Canadian financial institutions, and (b) senior Bank

staff and journalists

 

All together, we see 23 written and spoken genres here. Now we will look at 11 other internal written and spoken genres that also play an integral role in the activity of the Bank's Communications Strategy—these are behind-the-scenes genres that, while an essential part of the activity of the Communications Strategy, are not visible to outsiders. (The word "Intranet" after a genre indicates that texts in the genre are accessible to senior Bank staff on the organization's internal Intranet.)

Written and spoken genres – behind-the-scenes (not visible to outside world):

Written

·        Q & A's (prepared questions-and-answers material) (***, Intranet)

·        analyses of commentaries appearing in print and broadcast media following Monetary Policy Report, Updates to MPR, The Bank of Canada Review, Bank of Canada Annual Report, and lectures and speeches by Governor (***, Intranet)

·        yearly report from Communications Department analyzing effectiveness of Communications Strategy (***, Intranet)

·        yearly report from Financial Markets Department analyzing reactions of financial markets to Bank's monetary policy actions (***, Intranet)

·        weekly analyses of information provided to Research Department by regional representatives regarding actions and views of business people and politicians ***

·        reports on surveys of audiences for different types of Bank communications ***

·        on-going analyses of financial markets' reactions to Bank's monetary policy actions

·        daily "clippings" package – compendium of articles from print media mentioning the Bank of Canada or dealing with topics relevant to monetary policy

Spoken

·        meetings involving writers and editors during production processes for genres such as Monetary Policy Report, Bank of Canada Annual Report, The Bank of Canada Review, and Governor's speeches ***

·        meetings between members of Communications Department and senior Bank staff to discuss aims and effectiveness of Communications Strategy ***

·        weekly conference calls involving regional representatives and staff economists in Research Department ***

These 34 genres can be seen to function together as a single genre set, in complex chains of communicative events and rhetorical/epistemic acts (as will be discussed in some detail later in the chapter).[11] At the same time, the use of this genre set is mediated by a variety of built environments and digital technologies such as those noted below (an *** beside a built environment or digital technology indicates that it is relatively new to the Bank):

·        "lock-up" facility for journalists, with its various digital information/communication technologies ***

·        press conference facility, where Governor and senior officials meet with journalists ***

·        Bank's Intranet ***

·        Bank's Web site *** (http://www.bank-banque-canada.ca/en)

·        digital management information systems ***

·        telecommunication system linking Ottawa head office with regional offices ***

·        e-mail links via Internet to contacts outside Bank ***

·        Governing Council's dining room, site for lunches with visitors

·        networked computers used in document production that are linked to computer-run economic models and to electronic document archives and data bases

·        digital links to wire services, press agencies, etc.

·        digital connections to financial markets in Canada, U.S., and abroad

·        telephone, conference-call technology, fax

When we look at the Communications Strategy's genre set, one of its striking characteristics is the interactivity of written and spoken discourse. One aspect of the relationship between these two modes of discourse involves chains of genres closely linked in their use—such as the Bank's Monetary Policy Report, the Q & A's material produced for use by the Governor in preparing for the press conference that immediately follows the official release of the MPR, and the press conference itself. Here we also see the way in which discourse and digital technologies merge into ITexts (Geisler et al., 2001): electronic copies of both the MPR and the Q & A's are placed on the Bank's Intranet for viewing by Bank staff several days before the official release of the MPR; and then following the release of the MPR, the Governor's press conference—held in a specially equipped built environment—is digitally recorded, with the spoken performance placed on the Bank's Web site as an audio file along with an electronic copy of the MPR .

If we examine the 34 genres and the various digital technologies and built environments listed earlier, we will see other similar chains of genres combining written and spoken discourse, often with specially constructed environments in play, and with ITexts as the frequent outcome. As soon becomes clear in looking at the genre set of the Communications Strategy, it comprises a discursive fabric of temporally and functionally linked written texts and spoken performances—all mediated by a complex network of digital technologies and built environments.

A related issue here is the blurred distinction between written and oral discourse within certain individual genres. How are we to categorize, for example, the Governor's speeches? In these spoken performances, the Governor reads, verbatim and in front of a live audience, a written text that has been carefully crafted through collaboration and document cycling involving a number of people over a significant period of time. Following the speech, the written text and an audio file of its spoken performance by the Governor will appear as complementary ITexts on the Bank's Web site. Should we classify the speech as a spoken genre, or as a written genre? If one applies Bakhtin's (1986) distinction between "primary speech genres," which are informal and conversational, and "secondary speech genres," which are more formal, rhetorically complex instances of written discourse, the speech would appear to be one of the latter.

In addition to the internal genre set associated with the Bank's Communications Strategy, one could also identify genres outside the Bank that members of its staff pay close attention to in order to glean relevant information and perspectives from outside groups—for example, commentaries in the print or broadcast media on the Bank's monetary policy, published reports by economists working in the financial markets, articles in academic journals and other publications on economic and public-policy topics, published exchanges occurring in the House of Commons' daily question period (reported in Hansard, the daily record of debate in the Canadian Parliament), and the texts of federal and provincial budgets. In a sense, the internal genre set associated with the Communications Strategy and the constellation of external genres monitored by Bank staff can be seen to function together in a single, complex interactive network of discourse. Together, the internal genre set and the assortment of related external genres resemble what Charles Bazerman (1994b) refers to as a "genre system"—a network of genres that extends beyond a single organization to encompass the discourse used by two or more social groups to interact with one another in accomplishing mutually significant work (although I should note here the discussion in this chapter does not cover, in any specific detail, the internal genres employed by the various external groups with which the Bank interacts communicatively).

To move ahead with my line of argument, I want to suggest that members of the Bank's staff who participate in the activity of the Communications Strategy can be viewed as what theorists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) refer to as a "community-of-practice," with some of these same individuals also participating in another community-of-practice associated with the activity of the Monetary Policy Framework—so that, conceptually, we have two overlapping activity systems with their respective and overlapping communities-of-practice. Diagram 2 provides a sense of what these relationships look like when mapped out in this way. Characterizing the Bank and its Communications Strategy in this way is useful analytically in that it suggests insights about the part that genres, mediated in their use by digital technologies and built environments, play in the Bank's discourse and intellectual work.

Diagram 2

So then, what does this depiction of the Communications Strategy as an organizational activity system with an affiliated community-of-practice allow us to see that we might not see otherwise? I would argue that the characterization can help us recognize some of the various ways in which discourse genres function, mediated by digital technologies and built environments, to prompt, shape, coordinate, and apply the processes of collective thinking, rhetorical action, and ongoing learning that enable an organization to perform complex intellectual and discursive work. At the same time, looking at the activity of the Communications Strategy in this manner provides a window onto the way in which a professional organization uses genres of discourse in communicating with the array of outside groups with which it interacts in carrying out its mandate.

As a prelude to the next major section of the chapter, where I examine the role of the genre set in the activity of the Communications Strategy, I want to look now at two particular features of the genre set: the genre knowledge displayed within the community-of-practice associated with the Communications Strategy; and the genre set's relationship to processes of organizational change. In describing the role of the genre set, I will enlist the voices of a number of the people that I interviewed at the Bank. As suggested earlier, the discourse of insiders can offer a unique window onto the indigenous work-world that they communally construct and co-inhabit.

Practitioners' Genre Knowledge

The distributed cognition that is, to use Jean Lave's (1988) phrase, "stretched over" the members of the Bank staff who comprise the community-of-practice engaged in the activity of the Communications Strategy includes a complex network of "intersubjectivities," domains of shared focus, perception, and understanding that cognitively connect individuals within the community-of-practice, with particular intersubjectivities populated according to individuals' respective professional roles. A central area of intersubjectivity is that of genre knowledge—a rhetorical awareness of the ways in which the Communication Strategy's genre set functions. Below I examine four types of genre knowledge observed in my research.

The senior members of the Bank staff involved in making monetary-policy decisions share a common understanding of the two broad, closely linked goals of the activity of the Communications Strategy and its genre set: first, to establish public understanding of and support for the Bank's monetary policy, and second, to contribute to the effectiveness of the policy by reducing public uncertainly about the Bank's thinking, goals, and intentions. According to the Governor:

At times central banks have to do difficult things, and it's much better if people outside the Bank of Canada understand monetary policy. It's particularly important that the financial markets be aware, but in the long run it's also important that governments and the public understand monetary policy as well. But it's not only a question of support for monetary policy, it's also a question of the effectiveness of policy, on an ongoing basis.

One of the Deputy Governors echoes this view of the dual goals of the Communications Strategy:

With monetary policy, there's the issue of persuasion, in that part of our communication is to try to get people to understand, and hopefully not just understand, but support our policy. In a democracy, your ability to pursue a policy is related to the public support it generates; otherwise, when things get tough, it's much harder to carry on with the policy. And for that support to be there, public understanding of the policy is essential. But the other thing, of course, is that monetary policy works better when people understand it and align their expectations and decisions accordingly. For example, if the public is convinced that we really are committed to keeping inflation under control, if they really do believe that inflation is going to be at 2%, then when it comes to wage negotiations across the country, people won't be asking for 10% increases on the assumption that there's going to be 8% inflation, and employers aren't going to give 10%. So it's a question of the efficacy of policy as well as political support.

Another of the Deputy Governors, jokingly referred to by a colleague as the Bank's "Communications Czar" because of his key role in co-coordinating the Communications Strategy, elaborates on this shared perspective:

The place I start thinking about the Communications Strategy conceptually, is—what do communications do for us? And you can cut into that several different ways. As a public-policy institution, there's one angle that says you need to be accountable, particularly in our case because, as a central bank, we've got a fair degree of independence from government. And then how do you achieve accountability? Well, you achieve it in part through transparency. And how do you become transparent?— through effective communications. The other angle in this is one of policy outcomes. And that gets into the whole issue of trying to minimize public uncertainty, in terms of what the Bank is up to with monetary policy and why—trying to influence public expectations of where we intend to go with monetary policy, whether it be [the expectations of] households, business, or financial markets, so that these expectations are in line with our goals for monetary policy. And again, you achieve that kind of policy outcome through transparency and effective communications. So communications is important to the Bank both in terms of generating support and in terms of the efficacy of monetary policy itself.

The particular aspect of genre knowledge that we see reflected in these instances of insider discourse—a shared cognizance of the goals of the Communications Strategy—can be viewed, in the context of activity theory, as distributed cognition in the form of a conscious awareness of the larger aims of the activity system. One might speculate here that in any organizational activity system, at least some of the participants will have this kind of explicit "discursive consciousness" (Giddens, 1984, cited in Giltrow & Valiquette, 1994) of its aims, an important communal resource that complements the presumably much larger measure of "practical consciousness" (Giddens, 1984) or "tacit knowledge" (Polanyi, 1966) within the community-of-practice.

A second type of genre knowledge displayed within the community-of-practice engaged in the activity of the Bank's Communications Strategy is an understanding of the division of intellectual and discursive labor involved. Practitioners' knowledge includes an awareness of who is responsible for doing what, and when, in the collective accomplishment of two key tasks: first, monitoring texts in written and spoken genres, produced by groups outside the Bank, that either comment directly on the Bank and its monetary policy or address other topics relevant to the Bank's work, such as economic research and theory, financial analyses, and broader public-policy issues; and second, composing written texts in different internal genres in order to respond to commentaries on Bank policy by outside groups. This genre knowledge is generally tacit, rather than inscribed in and communicated through formal written procedures. As a Deputy Governor responded, when asked about this: "The Communications Strategy, the approach, isn't documented anywhere, so I'm not really sure how it gets communicated to Bank staff, though it certainly gets communicated somehow."[12] (A discussion later in the chapter of how the Communications Strategy's genre set functions as a site for organizational learning will take up this theme.)

Below, a Deputy Governor conveys his sense of how various members of the Bank staff, operating in a variety of professional roles, monitor texts in written and spoken genres produced by certain of the outside groups with which the Bank interacts—a collective, but differentiated-according-to-role, work effort that allows the organization to remain attuned to external discourses pertinent to its mandate for directing monetary policy:

For watching the media, we have people in the Library who read the newspapers and wire services—and they're very good at picking up items that specifically mention monetary policy or are related to the economy more generally. And they send us a daily clippings package with the items they've selected.  . . . As for what the [financial] markets are saying, our staff in [the] Financial Markets [Department] keep up with that, in a systematic way—they talk to people in the markets on a regular basis, getting their views, and also monitor the financial and business press. . . .   And for things of interest in the academic literature, the Library circulates a daily list of relevant items that have appeared recently, and the staff in the economics departments [i.e., Research; Monetary and Financial Analysis; Financial Markets; and International] get these pieces through the Library and read them. And then sometimes there's a news report in the press about a recent academic study or report, and we'll make sure we get a copy of it through the Library. Or one of our economists comes back from a conference and says, "So and so gave a paper on such and such," and they circulate the paper. So all in all, we're very much aware of what's being said in different venues outside the Bank. Our staff are continually picking up on these things and filtering it and sending it along to us [i.e., the Bank's senior decision-makers].

Another Deputy Governor offers a similar perspective on the division of intellectual and discursive labor involved in this aspect of the Communications Strategy:

There are people out there, outside the Bank, who issue daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual commentaries on the economy—for example, the staff economists at major banks produce these, and private-sector firms as well. And then there are the [economic] forecasts produced by other people, such as the C.D. Howe Institute. . . . And the Bank looks at all of this, with different people here having different responsibilities, different areas to watch. But we need to be aware of all this.

He goes on to display his understanding of the multiplicity of regular one-to-one interactions between members of the Bank staff and individuals in outside groups:

And there's also the informal contacts between people in the Bank and people outside. There's a lot of this in the economics departments. For example on the academic side—in terms of research and theory—our people talk to academics doing similar kinds of research or who are doing forecasting, and they'll often exchange drafts of work-in progress as well. And there's also the continuous contact with people on the financial side [i.e., with analysts and participants in the financial markets].

Another facet of the practitioners' genre knowledge regarding the division of intellectual and discursive labor inherent in the activity of the Communications Strategy concerns situations in which the Bank decides to respond to outside commentaries on its monetary policy decisions and actions using one of several genres in the genre set. In cases of what are perceived to be significant errors of fact in the news media, the Chief of the Communications Department will, within a day or two, make a phone call to the particular journalist or reporter in question. According to a Deputy Governor, the phone call will go something like this, "Well, you know, you got the facts somewhat wrong in that recent piece of yours. This is actually how we're operating now . . . ." He continues, pointing to another motive for this particular type of interaction, "it's also a question of educating the media, which is an ongoing effort, given the turnover of people in the media."

When it comes to interpretive critiques of the Bank's monetary policy by outside groups (as opposed to perceived errors of fact in outside commentary), the Bank may decide to respond through written discourse in one of a range of genres. The same Deputy Governor quoted above explains:

It depends on the nature of the criticism—sometimes the media people are critical and it's not unreasonable, because reasonable people can differ on things. But at other times, we may think it's not quite as reasonable. And then, depending on whether we think it's important to get our message out and in what venue, we'll decide on a way to respond. . . .   On the other hand, if it's something significant that appears in an academic forum, we'll respond in an academic forum. For example, I just got an invitation to do a piece in a book that's coming out on what's happened with the economy over the 90's, a piece on monetary policy. And at first I was thinking I'm pretty over-committed with this kind of writing at the moment. But when I saw that the book will also have a piece by [a university economist who is a well-known and professionally respected critic of the Bank's monetary policy] discussing our inflation-control targets, I thought, "Well, I don't know if I will do it myself, but it will get done by someone around the place—because I don't think having this kind of message out there, that we think is misleading, is helpful. [The critic's] view is very far from our view, so we need to respond.

The speaker goes on to reveal more of his understanding of the Bank's nuanced approach to, and motives for, responding to external critiques of its monetary policy:

When the criticism out there is about our position on things, they can take that or not as they like—it's their interpretation. But we may choose to debate their interpretation if we think it's wrong or misleading. . . . We want people to have a clear understanding of what we're thinking about and how we're approaching a particular situation. And if we feel that they're completely misinterpreting what we're trying to do, then that may call for a speech or some other way of communicating our views.

He elaborates on the thinking underlying the decision of whether the Bank will choose to respond, and if so, in what particular genre:

We take different opportunities to deal with particular kinds of issues. For example, I'll be giving a 45-minute presentation at the Western Economics Association Meetings next month, quite a long paper. I thought it would be a good opportunity to get some of our messages out, our views on certain issues that have come up recently; and it's also about rejoining the debate with [the critic of the Bank mentioned above] on the range of the inflation-control targets. Another example: the issue of whether the foreign exchange rate should be fixed or flexible—something that's been showing up in the press lately. The Governor chose to give a speech on that the other day, putting out the Bank's views. In fact, each time he gives a speech, he ponders whether it should be the regular type of speech dealing with current conditions in the economy, or whether there's some particular issue he wants to focus on. . . . So we're always very much aware of what's being said out there, but whether we feel the need to respond, and when and how, depends on the nature of the comment, who said it, how directly it relates to the Bank's business, where it was said, whether it's likely to be taken seriously, how important it is to get our side of the issue out, and so on.

This particular aspect of practitioners' genre knowledge—the sense of what constitutes an appropriate discursive response to a particular instance of external commentary on the Bank's monetary policy—reminds one of Anne Freadman's (1994) notion of "uptake," where a text in a particular genre, produced by one player, will tend, in the natural course of events, to elicit a response through a text produced in a second genre by another player. In this case, we see a text produced by another organization, in a genre within the larger genre system (Bazerman, 1994b), evoking a discursive response from the Bank through one of the genres of the Communications Strategy.

When the Bank does decide to respond to an interpretive critique of its policy from an outside group—as picked up by the Bank's communicative "radar" in an external text in the genre system—employing a particular internal genre, the composing of the text can be highly collaborative and iterative, an instance of distributed cognition that serves several functions: It elicits ideas from various individuals, enabling a collective and heuristic mode of thinking, and it contributes to organizational learning (a topic that will be taken up in some detail later in the chapter). A Deputy Governor provides his perspective on this form of collaboration:

When you give a presentation, or a speech, there's always a paper to give out to the press. . . .   And when I'm preparing a presentation that has policy implications of any kind, I'll always run the paper by the Governor, the other Deputy Governors, the Advisors, and sometimes certain other people as well. And I look very carefully at all their comments and I use them. So it's quite collegial in that sense. The MPR, the Update to the MPR, the Annual Report, the Governor's speeches—we all look at drafts of these, all the Governing Council, and other people too. It's always a collective effort, and you learn from doing it.

This quotation reflects another type of genre knowledge that is important for writers within a professional organization: who should be included in the document cycling process (Paradis, Dobrin, & Miller, 1985; Paré & Smart, 1994; Smart, 1993) for texts in any given genre within a genre set. (We will see an extended description of the collaborative drafting-r