A decent writer: professional environmental communication among environmental managers

Abstract

The study explores a set of genre-hybrid reviews, 1999-2001, characterised by a standpoint of ecological rationality, and produced by a professional writer for a professional environmental management organisation. The interaction between such managers has not been studied before in terms of professional communication and was delineated as a new field of enquiry. The issues of tact and Face were important for this organisational community, which shared characteristics of contact communities and Communities of Practice. Methods used derive from studies of text in context, and organisational communication. The assembly of theoretical material is one outcome of the study, which tackled three questions: 1 To assess in what way the reviews made a contribution to the organisation, Weick's equivoque and the notion of the Fractal were combined to explain the text as an active organ for collaborative organisational learning and knowledge management. Thereby the texts are presumed to have contributed to the organisation's goal to enhance knowledge and practice in environmental management among managers drawn from diverse intellectual backgrounds. 2 To address the question of the technical characteristics of the reviews, narrative polyphony concepts provided suspension dialogia, which complemented the notion of translation suspension. 3 To address how the reviewer had managed to reproduce organisational patterns despite his inconsistent moral standpoint, the search for a theoretical position travelled through code-switching, pragmatics and translation, emerging with a concept similar to intersemiosis, labelled 'codehandling'. The combination of questions produced complex answers. Translation constructs, such as dynamic equivalence, increasingly emerged as productive and suitable to complement emerging endogenous approaches in environmental management literature. The genre-hybrid is argued to have altered the social function of the review. In prioritising interaction, it put at risk the organisation's strategic tact 10 structure. Nevertheless, the reviewer managed the risk within acceptable limits and produced popular and successful reviews.