DESARROLLO SOSTENIBLE DE ZONAS COSTERAS DE PESCA PESCA

Both Swales (1990: 58) and Bhatia (1993: 13) emphasize the primacy of communicative purpose as a criterion for genre identification;

Askehave & Swales (2001), on the other hand, question its central role. Swales (1990: 46) maintains that the main criterion that identifies a collection of communicative events as a genre is some shared set of communicative purposes; in other words “genres are communicative vehicles for the achievement of goals”.

According to Swales (1990: 52), other generic properties, such as form and structure, identify the extent to which a genre exemplar is prototypical.

In his treatment of the versatility of genre-based linguistic description, Bhatia (1997a: 632) argues that, using communicative purpose associated with a specific rhetorical situation as a privileged criterion, “genre theory combines the advantages of a more general view of language use on the one hand, and its very specific realization, on the other”. Thus, genre analysis can be seen to be broad in vision and narrow in focus.

Purpose on different levels of abstraction. – Bhatia (1997a), Miller (1984), and Yates & Orlikowski (1992) argue that genres can be defined at different levels of abstraction. According to Bhatia (1997a: 633-634), communicative purpose is a multifaceted concept: it can be identified at a fairly high level of generalization but also at a very specific level; a genre may have a single purpose or it may have multiple purposes. In his later article Bhatia (2002: 281; also 2005) develops the conceptualization and suggests that genres are identified in terms of communicative purposes achieved through the rhetorical/generic values of e.g. description, explanation, evaluation, which are decontextualized, independent of any

specific situation. The generic values give shape to a genre colony (discourse colony in Bhatia 1997a), which is rather loosely grounded in broad rhetorical context where generic boundaries are overlapping. An example of a genre colony is promotional genres, including individual genres such as sales letters, job applications, book blurbs, etc., in which generic values are combined in various ways to give rise to situated use of language. Then, for example, advertisements can be specified according to the medium (print advertisements, TV commercials, etc.), the product advertised, the audience targeted at, etc. When the analysis moves from the general level of purposes down to a more specific level, so long as the purpose remains the same, the texts represent closely related genres. They become distinctive genres only at a level at which their purposes are clearly different. (Bhatia 1997a: 634.)

Miller (1984: 162) suggests that genre may be defined at different levels of abstraction in different cultures and at different times, depending on “our sense of recurrence of rhetorical situations”, while Yates & Orlikowski (1992: 303) apply the notion to organizational genres. In their view, “the business letter and the meeting might at one point be genres, whereas at another point, these types of communication might be considered too general and the recommendation letter or the personnel committee meeting might better capture the social sense of recurrent situation”. While Miller (1984) argues that genre can only be identified at one of these levels in a specific time and place, Yates

& Orlikowski (1992) favor a more flexible approach: the business letter, the recommendation letter, the meeting, and the personnel committee meeting may all be designated as genres of organizational communication if a common subject and common formal features can be identified for each recurrent situation.¹⁴

14 The relationship of genres of a different level of abstraction invokes the notion of subgenres within genres, referring to subordinate relationships. Yates & Orlikowski (1992), for example, argue that a positive recommendation letter is a subgenre of the recommendation letter, which is a subgenre of the business letter. In addition, the term subgenre can be used to refer to genres within genres, not implying any subordinate relationship (see Jameson 2000).

Louhiala-Salminen (1999a: 166), in her investigations into the possible genre status of the business fax, agrees with Yates &

Orlikowski’s (1992) views and concludes that in some circum-stances a business fax can be regarded as an overarching umbrella genre containing more specific subgenres and, in others, it can be seen as a genre in its own right.

The present study recognizes the possibility of defining genres at different levels of abstraction. For this reason, in its pursuit to explore the nature of the genre in email communication, it set out to investigate email messages as representative of one genre with general communicative purposes equivalent to those of business letter or memo genres, on the one hand, and as representative of different genres with more specific purposes, on the other.

Criticism against, and for, the primacy of purpose in business communication.– Askehave & Swales (2001: 195–196) question both the privileged role of communicative purpose as the criterion for genre membership and the reliability of insiders’ own opinions on the purposes. They argue that in spite of the fact that a number of leading proponents of genre-based approaches have privileged communicative purpose (e.g. Miller 1984: 151; Martin 1985: 250;

Swales 1990: 58; Bhatia 1993: 13), others pay little attention to this concept (e.g. Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995). Askehave & Swales (2001: 197) also claim, without giving reference to any researchers by name, that “most of the important work following the early publications in this field has, in various ways, established that the purposes, goals, or public outcomes are more evasive, multiple, layered, and complex than originally envisaged”. Yet, in busi-ness communication research the communicative purpose is widely used as an instrument of categorization (see e.g. Louhiala-Salminen 1997, Akar 1998, Akar & Louhiala-Louhiala-Salminen 1999, Nickerson 2000, Zhu 2000, Pinto dos Santos 2002, Yates &

Orlikowski 2002).

Askehave & Swales (2001) specifically question the overall communicative purpose of business messages as suggested by

Akar & Louhiala-Salminen (1999: 212–213), who write “naturally, the general all-encompassing purpose of business messages is to achieve the goals of a buying-selling negotiation”. Askehave &

Swales (2001: 206) claim that although business is premised on competition, in some instances the purpose of achieving the goals of buying-selling negotiation may “sit uncomfortably with all those business moves that are concerned with dismissing inefficient, negligent or costly suppliers and the like”.

However, it can be argued that in business, the ultimate aim of negotiations is a win-win situation. This would mean that if the other party is inefficient, negligent, or in some way costly, the requirement of a win-win situation would not be met. In such a situation, the communicative aim of a single message may, indeed, be dismissing this unwanted business partner; however, the all-encompassing purpose of business messages or business communication would still be the successful close of buying-selling negotiation, but with another business partner. In other words, the writer of a business message may use certain business or linguistic strategies to make sure that the unwanted deal with the unsuitable partner is not realized to be able to focus on more lucrative deals with other business partners.

In their article, Askehave & Swales (2001: 210) suggest that

“purpose (more exactly sets of communicative purposes) retains the status as a ‘privileged’ criterion, but in a sense different from the one originally proposed by Swales (1990). It is no longer privileged by centrality, prominence or self-evident clarity, nor indeed by the reported beliefs of users about genres, but by its status as reward or pay-off for investigators as they approximate to completing the hermeneutic circle”. This position has remained practically undisputed (Swales, personal communication, 2003).

In spite of the criticism of the primacy of communicative purpose as a genre criterion by the same theorist who originally emphasized its significance, the present study recognizes its central role in business messages. Like business itself, business communication is a goal-oriented activity; in this context Akar &

Louhiala-Salminen’s (1999: 212–213) argument is relevant. In other words, the all-encompassing purpose of all (external) business messages is achieving the goals of a buying-selling negotiation.

By the same token, another definition is needed to account for company-internal business messages. It can assumed that their all-encompassing purpose is to make this buying and selling possible in accordance with the core statements of mission, visi-on, goals, and values of the given company. In other words, the all-encompassing purpose of furthering corporate activities in service of the core statements are central in internal communication.

As is discussed in 4.2, the identification of the purposes on a lower level of abstraction in the present study was based on both the corpus-based text analysis, more specifically content analysis, and the views of the genre users themselves as well as members of a focus group consisting of international business practitioners.

Furthermore, the users’ and focus group members’ opinions about the purposes were put to test by asking another question, which probed the same phenomenon but from a different perspective:

they were asked what their reaction to a particular message was, in other words, what they did when they received it (see 2.3.2).

2.3.2 GENRES AS TYPIFIED SOCIAL ACTION