Discursively Structured Activities

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Abstract
Talk helps organize the activities it is part of; people maintain regularity of activity through the typification of talk. Similarly, the recognizable similarity among written texts (i.e., recognition of genre) helps maintain social and cognitive structure within activities producing or using those genres. Enduring written texts and systems of texts provide a conservative, reproductive force on local activities. Events are particularly held accountable with those texts that count as knowledge, and thus knowledge-bearing texts are influential in the organization of daily life. Further, disciplines concerned with the production of knowledge represented in textual form develop their structures of social and intellectual practice in dialectic with the textual forms by which knowledge is created and circulated. An examination of the discursive organization of the fields of knowledge production gives us tools for examining the roles knowledge serves within modern culture and opens up questions of how society is...

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