Clay Spinuzzi, Tracing Genres Through Organizations

Spinuzzi, Clay. Tracing Genres Through Organizations. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Spinuzzi opens his study of “the crucial subversive interactions in which workers engage as they use designed information” (27) with an anecdote that brings to mind de Certeau; Barbara, a police officer presented with a traffic accident tracking system that uses a old database and an unwieldy map, uses her own artifacts (Post-it notes) to optimize the process herself. This, he claims, presents a very different paradigm for information design — the user is not a victim waiting to be saved by good design, but an agent who refashions the system for her use.

Barbara is not waiting around to be rescued. Although the software is not set up to facilitate the particular tasks in which she is engaged, she does not wring her hands and wait for an information designer to come slay the dragon. She picks up available tools, adapts them in idiosyncratic ways, and makes do. (2)

Spinuzzi uses the phrase “the messiness of work life” (3), which makes me think of Morson and Emerson’s reading of Gregory Bateson to illustrate centrifugal forces in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics: “There are an indefinitely large number of ways in which things can be messy, but very few one would call tidy… Order needs justification, disorder does not. The natural state of things is mess” (29-30).

Genre tracing, Spinuzzi’s methodology, grows from Bakhtin’s theories, and he uses Bakhtin’s centripetal/centrifugal framework to compare fieldwork-to-formalization methods of user-centered information design (centripetal, systemic, global) to the refashioning of information processes by users themselves (centrifugal, idiosyncratic, local). Of course, this is not a simple binarism — for example, user innovations can become systematized — and systems always reflect the pressures of both forces (20-21).

Genre tracing, his alternative to fieldwork-to-formalization methods,

draws on the metaphor of dialogue to examine how people interact with complex institutions, disciplines, and communities; how they solve problems and disseminate solutions; and how their conversations and problem solving are instantiated in artifacts. (23)

It locates these interactions, solutions, conversations, and artifacts within activity theory, which categorizes:

• macroscopic activities, described as “cultural, historical, unconscious” (30)
• mesoscopic actions, “goal-directed, conscious” (30)
• microscopic operations, “habitual, unconscious” (30)

He argues that user-centered information design studies should appreciate the “coconstitutive” relationships between all three levels.

Genre in the work extends from an understanding of “mediating artifacts” (38), mediations or actuations of group activities which, in turn, change those activities… similar, I guess, to “boundary objects” as described by Wenger in Communities of Practice. Spinuzzi warns against understanding genre as simply a typology for artifacts: rather, he invokes Bakhtin via Morson and Emerson to establish genres as traditions of “producing, using, and interpreting artifacts” (41) which, in turn, generate forms:

Genres convey a worldview, not by laying out a set of explicit propositions, but by “developing concrete examples” that “allow the reader to view the world in a specific way” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 282-284). (Spinuzzi 41-42)

In practice, genre as a concept allows connections between artifacts that might not be otherwise formally associated: Spinuzzi points out the generic history that links paper form fields and online dialog boxes (42).

Genres map to the three levels of scope presented earlier. On the macroscopic level, the traditional aspect of genre is emphasized; “genre is seen as shaping and being shaped by its sociocultural milieu” (44). On the mesoscopic level, genre “is typically taken to be instantiated in an artifact — usually a text — that is used to meet an actor’s goals. When goals change, actors might choose to abandon the genre for another, more amenable one” (46). The microscopic level emphasizes the conventional aspect of genre: unconscious sets of “operationalized actions” that are used to complete “familiar, repeated tasks” (46).

Genres interact and evolve within genre ecologies: “genres are oriented to different sorts of problems and have developed relatively stable connections or coordinations with other genres… activities are mediated by an entire dynamic, shifting ecology of different genres” (48).

Genre tracing, then, analyzes genres, “their compound mediational relationships, and the destabilization that workers encounter when using them” as operative concepts across the three levels of scope. This methodology informs a model of “open system” design which “make(s) it possible for workers to consensually modify the system’s genres and add their own genres to the system” (204).

It’s interesting to play this against The Practice of Everyday Life and Henry Jenkins… it offers a methodology that might be adapted to analyze not only the reworkings of popular fictions that readers and fans make, but the evolutionary effects those reworkings have on the fictions as ongoing systems. Something to mull over…