ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the discursive dimension of the 'magazine' as a semiotic object, where discourse is defined as the textualisation of 'a rhetorical and semiotic situation' in a socio-historic context. It then proposes a socio-semiotic perspective on generic text types, extended to accommodate a cognitive dimension which is seen as accounting for the process of choice-making at the level of discourse. This process underlines the verbal construction of the personae of the human resources/personnel professionals to which both reader and writer contribute by drawing from their experiential baggage, thus making the act of interpretation not only historically and socially situated, but also 'possible' in the first place. The discourse analytic approach adopted here, based on the principle of 'cooperative interpretation', relies on a framework for rhetorical analysis that focuses on pragmalinguistic features. Within a semiotic perspective of genre, human resource management (HRM) magazines are analysed as dynamic and interactionally shaped tokens of management discourse and practice.
