In recent years the economic policies of major financial institutions
such as the European Union Central Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve and
other countries' central banks, and the International Monetary Fund have
received growing media attention, reflecting increased public awareness
of the impact of these institutions on the global economy and, more
immediately, on the material conditions of our everyday lives. Writing
the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking
takes readers into one such site, the Bank of Canada, that country's
central bank and monetary-policy authority. Drawing on qualitative data
gathered over two decades (1984-2005) and employing theories of
activity, genre, narrative, and situated learning, the book provides an
ethnographic account of the role of technology-mediated discourse in the
Bank's knowledge-building, policy-making, and public communication.
The first part of the book describes how the Bank's economists employ a
set of written and oral discourse genres in combination with
computer-run economic models to create specialized knowledge about the
Canadian economy that is applied by the organization's senior
decision-makers in directing national monetary policy. The book then
examines the economists' use of another set of technology-mediated
discourse genres to orchestrate the Bank's external communications with
government, the media, the business sector, financial markets, labour,
and academia. The book also explores the way in which the economists'
discourse practices facilitate individual and organizational learning
and includes extended commentaries on the author's use of the
methodology of interpretive ethnography.
In a foreword, Charles Bazerman describes the book's contribution to our
understanding of organizational discourse and knowledge-making,
situating this contribution in the study of economic rhetoric and the
social formation of economy.
