This article aims to contribute to the study of professional discourse by focusing on the role of written texts in complex communication processes. It also aims to contribute to the field of social semiotics by problematizing the concept of grammatical metaphor, framing it multimodally and interactionally. The case in focus is a risk analysis meeting which is characterized by explicit definitions of goals and methods: the objective of risk analysis is to identify and evaluate potential risks that might threaten a project. However, the activity also has other goals, such as finding common ground and developing a joint perspective in the project group. Managing these divergent agendas is possible given the technique developed and the tools used-small pieces of paper, pens, a whiteboard, whiteboard markers, and oral conversation. In the choice of resources for different purposes, materiality is crucial. Because of the affordances of the small notes and the thick ink marker, the individual risks are thingified at an early, stage, while oral conversation is used for problematization and negotiation. In the minutes, the construal of risks as things is preserved and contributes to the reification and thus technification of similar meanings in the social practice of the organization.
In the research project Literacy Practices in Working Life, the role played by reading and writing in common nonacademic occupations in Sweden was investigated. The results highlight not only some typical ways of using writing to frame units of work but also differences reflecting the main focus of work ("people" or "things") and overall organizing principles. This article deals with patterns in the use of writing, which may be related to modern ways of organizing work (efficiency and flexibility, personal responsibility, identification with the company, etc.). Case studies show a range of literacy practices-running from extensive and rather complicated uses of writing connected with individual responsibility to very restricted and dependent uses of reading and writing governed by a top-down organization. Examples illustrate how emerging ways of governing work through written discourse, related to the new, knowledge-based work order, create very different roles for workers.
In this thesis, the phenomenon of personal homepages on the Internet is explored. While the general purpose of the study is to provide a description of the personal homepage and its use, the more specific aim is to characterise it as a product of literacy. Theoretically, the homepage is viewed as a multimodal text product situated within two layers of context: the context of situation, where homepage use can be described in terms of literacy practices and textual norms, and the context of culture, where the conceptual dichotomy between new and old visual literacy can be seen to constitute the overall frame for the investigation. The main material consists of 26 personal homepages assembled in 1998. The owners of these pages form the major part of an informant group involved throughout the study.
The methods combine text analysis on different levels with online field work and experimental interviews. As one result of these analyses, a typology of homepage sections is established and each page category is given a description which reveals what may be called a prototypic structure. Based on the established page categories, the homepage as a format is characterised as a heterogeneous collection of pages with different textual structures and different functions. Another result is a set of literacy practices, generalised on the basis of the informants’ utterances about activities around the homepages. Of these judging and being judged, promoting the page and socialising with friends are practices that are especially dependent on writing, whereas practices such as looking for inspiration and making plans and producing, where the page is more in focus, are more genuinely multimodal. A third kind of results emanates from the text analyses. The semiotic components, i.e. the visual elements, of different page types are identified and analysed, different principles of textual relations between visual elements are explored and the cohesion of a genuinely multimodal page is described. By means of this analysis, certain specialised uses of the two different modalities, language and the non-linguistic visual resource, can be pointed out. In sum, the personal homepage is characterised as highly heterogeneous, relating to both traditional language-based literacy and a less established multimodal text culture.