ABSTRACT
Texts largely structure the activity of the modern world and-a fortiori-the postmodern world, with its reliance on hypertextual networks. But they do so always in contexts-often in multiple contexts. Texts are given life through activity, through use in context(s). And to study them without study ing their contexts (as has often been the case) is to separate writing from its very being. Yet the problem of theorizing context and contexts, plural-and of operationalizing the theory in empirical research-is one of the thorniest but most important in writing studies. Sociocultural theories of literacy emphasizing the role of context and contexts have been developed in the last 25 years in North American writing research and applied in a number of fields: primarily organizational (business, technical, and scientific) communication and education (Russell, 1997b; Bazerman & Russell, 2003). In this chapter I sketch out elements of a theory of multiple contexts based on a synthesis of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory (growing out of his notion of tool mediation) with a theory of genre as social action (Miller, 1984, 1994) (growing out of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology). The relationship between cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and genre as social action has been developed in various ways by several North American writing researchers to provide a principled way of analyzing written texts in their multiple contexts, such as Bazerman’s theory of genre systems (1994, 2004), Prior’s theory of laminated activity (1998, 2007), and the Canadian genre research group (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Paré, 1999). My particular contribution has been to analyze the ways writing is deployed and learned across contexts by seeing genre systems operating in both the social-psychological (subjective and intersubjective) plane and the sociological (objective and institutional) plane. I have turned to Vygotskian theories for the former and Schutzian theories for the latter. The key to synthesizing these two, for me, has been Miller’s idea of genre as social action, drawn from Schutz. I return to Schutz’s phenomenology and methodology to develop the theory of genre as social action to allow the analyst to make principled meso-level (institutional) and macro-level (ideological) generalizations based on observations of micro-level phenomena, and thus to trace the uses of writing across scales of time and level of generality.
