Genre and institutions : social processes in the workplace and school

This text examines genres as instances of social processes, enacting a range of important institutional practices, hence shaping people's subjectivities.

Genres represent purposive and staged ways of building meanings in a culture.

Using the systemic functional grammar, the book demonstrates how given genres build or enact social practices; how educational settings provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs; and how theorizing about such matters helps build a theory of social action, revealing how powerful the systemic functional analysis is in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality.The discussion is built around analysis of texts collected in a number of worksites and school settings, and also of some spoken classroom texts.