Discussion
Basically, finance and banking literature falls into two classes. The first category is found in textbooks which introduces basic concepts in this field to trainees. However, textbooks do not have much to speak about profound changes transforming financial systems. The second category on the other hand tends to be discussed by a small group of financial experts.
While primarily writing for small professional elites, financial experts often use highly technical language and publish their works in relatively obscure outlets. Knowledge that makes it possible for an individual to influence others is important to changing practice (Grant, 2005, p. 37). This knowledge is, however, ignored frequently in the popular literature on change.
The common assumption is that professional knowledge that is relevant to financial professionals is directly applicable to financial practice as new ideas and skills for training and that entrenching these has no appreciable political dimension.
Even where financial professional development is expected to lead to transformational change, the practice rhetorical aspects are still largely left out of account (Goodwin, 1994, p. 75). Professional learning cannot only be regarded as a matter of knowledge transfer; rather it also has to be framed on the basis of trainee’s feedback as allowing people theorizing.
According to researchers, rhetorical activity is important on the part of those wishing to effect changes in organizational settings if they are to achieve the cooperation of others and neutralize the power of those who oppose (Halliday, 1985, p. 62). The universal work processes and policy issues prove to form knowledge that is significant to success.
This is because it offers a basis for developing a shared financial language and understanding with which to negotiate with bank managers and others acting as custodians to organizational resources. Collaborative pedagogy, in tapping into cohort as a resource, assists to maximize learning across groups about the operation of banks. (Aitchison, 1991, p.123).
Mutual exchanges in financial setting allow people to explore knowledge about work processes because the difference between their experiences opened up questions of how things were managed in different working establishments (Eggins, 1994, p. 292).
This implies that people have access to a range of case studies mediated by experts who could try and answer many of the questions that are unanswered when interrogating written texts or visiting experts (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 71).
This paper attempts to review literature related to narratives produced by bank economics as communally constructed representations of knowledge about in Canadian economy about past, present and future. Specifically, the paper tries to trace the construction and application of particular narrative that is monetary policy.
A Review of Related Literature
How does Professional Financial Discourse impact Change in Banking Culture?
Smart (2006) presents well designed ethnography of Canadian Central bankers’ intellectual duties. He gives an account about discursive ways in which economists in Canadian central bank negotiate, pass and inscribe knowledge about the country’s monetary policies. In his presentations, Smart describes a world that is “tech-savvy rife with statistics, narratives, computer models, meetings, documents and Benchmarks” (p. 98).
He provides presentations using narratives, statistics, computer models, documents, and others in a manner that benefited; the concerns of participants, the manner in which micro events required to be understood as both unique and structured, and concern for situated and dialogical character of ethnographic knowledge (Bloommaert, 2007, p. 682).
In his research project at the Bank of Canada, Smart illustrates the use of ethnographic-based genre analysis. In this project, Smart studied technology supported genre practices of economists in the Bank of Canada. He explored the work world and intellectual collaboration of the Bank’s nearly 275 economists. The study drew on qualitative data collected over more than two decades.
Two aspects of the economists’ genre practices were well explored. First, the study examined how the economists use a set of written and oral genres, combined with technology of computer run economic models, to collaborate in creating specialized knowledge about current and future developments of Canada’s economy.
It was also for the purpose of using this knowledge in directing Canadian national monetary policy (Smart, 2006, p.16)).
The narrative on Canadian monetary policy is designed in three stages, over time and across a set of written genres. Each successive version provides broad knowledge claim in the form of more comprehensive accounts of the state of Canadian economy.
In the first stage, the story appears as a cluster of what Smart calls sector stories. This means specialists’ analyses of developments in different sectors of Canadian economy. In the second stage, the story is about the economy of Canada as a whole (Smart, 2006, p. 10).
This was produced by a team of economists during a quarterly activity inscribed in a document referred to as the White Book. The final stage is an elaborate institutional story, constructed by the Bank executives from the White Book and other sources of information. A staff economist provides an overview of this process of narrative building.
The sector specialists all have their little stories that they create using satellite models. Then in the Projection Exercise, the Secretariat uses QPM to pull all these stories together and make them interact with one another to produce a larger story. And then there’s the presentation of the White Book to the executives, where they test and prod your story. And then the executives take it from there themselves (Smart, 2006, p. 16).
Smart (2006, p. 10) outlined three stages in construction of monetary policy story. He describes a model mediated collaborative process, in which financial statistical data reflected a wide range of conditions and developments in Canadian economy as interpreted linguistically and changed into narrative representations of knowledge utilized by the bank in conducting monetary policy and in communicating policy to the public.
How does Professional Financial Discourse contribute to the Social Change?
This perspective understands knowledge to be activity based and socially generated. Knowledge comes from people thinking in action as they participate together in getting things done (Coulman, 1992, p. 172).
Further, such thinking in action is seen as being shaped or even defined by means of mediation it employs to carry out a task.
Hence, distributed cognition theorists accord close attention to the various means of mediation; symbolic representations, technologies, and collaborative arrangements that groups use to enable particular specialized forms of reasoning and knowledge creation required to accomplish their work (Bloommaert, 2007, p. 681).
Narratives as symbolic representations are means that affect our conceptions of what, how and why we need to know. Bazerman (1991, p. 330) stressed the role of such representations in encouraging inter-subjectivity, that is, the ground of shared understandings necessary for productive intellectual collaboration.
He suggests that symbolic representations, whether linguistic, visual, or mathematical, serve to mediate between private spaces of cognition and public spaces in which inter-subjectivity is negotiated, thereby offering shared information, perception, and orientation of large many people involved in coordinated activities (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2004, 120).
The role of shared symbolic representations in orienting activity, as mentioned by Bazerman (1991, p. 332) it is particularly important in large, complex professional financial organizations. In such cases, representations play an essential part in creating the inter-subjectivity that enables a multitude of people with varied experience, roles, and expertise to collaborate intellectually in a productive manner.
In hierarchical organizations, collaborative activity of this kind typically involves the division of cognitive labor, where technical specialists engage in analytical work or surrogate thinking on behalf of more-senior decision makers (Smart, 2006, p. 75).
This perspective mediating financial function of symbolic representations indicates the role of monetary policy story constructed by bank economists in the Bank of Canada (Smart, 2006, p. 16). This narrative acts as away of organizational thought that evolves across a set of genres.
It serves to align economists’ analytic activities with the bank’s policy mandate and to consolidate the output of their work. Thus, this enables production and application of complex, specialized financial knowledge that central bank requires for conducting monetary policy (Smart, 2006, p. 75).
As the monetary policy story evolves, a set of written genres, with its inherent patterns of structured social interaction, functions as a sequence of sites for the deployment of differentiated expertise, for the synthesis of various types of economic analysis as well as for the negotiation and resolution of competing interpretations of empirical phenomena and financial statistical data.
This shows how a shared understanding of local narrative conventions and experience with accounting genres involved in construction of monetary policy story contribute to the inter-subjectivity needed for coordinated and productive intellectual collaboration (Fox, 2006, p. 115).
Second, the study looked at the utilization of a different set of technology supported discourse genres by economists to enable the Bank of Canada communicate effectively with the publics, such as; government, business sector, media, and others. These communications are deemed essential for a central bank to maintain public legitimacy as the national monetary policy authority (Smart, 2006, p. 8).
The Canadian Central Bank research offers a deep description of discursive systems used by Bank’s economists to design a conceptual world featuring a shared understanding of financial economic reality.
What is exemplified in this study is the distinction between ethnography of a social group and a case study of one or several informants or of a single event. The findings realised through the study drew on interviews with 32 Bank economists at different levels in the organizational hierarchy to depict the culture of their professional community (Smart, 2006, p. 10).
On the concern of how much time a researcher requires to spend in a site in order to produce an authentic ethnography, the study at the Bank of Canada covered 23 years; 14 years as an in-house writing consultant and trainer in which data was gathered and analyzed data continuously (Smart, 2006, p.9). In addition, the observations also covered nine years of sporadic but fruitful research.
Based on this experience and that of other ethnographers, a researcher using the Geertzian approach to ethnographic based discourse analysis requires some time, ideally a year or more, regularly observing in a site in order to produce a thick description of a social group’s life world (Geertz, 1973, p. 10).
On the relationship between ethnography and theory, and question whether a researcher can commence a study with certain financial theories fixed in mind as conceptual tools. Smart was in agreement of this. In his case, he studied the Bank’s economists already working under the influence of theoretical concepts of epistemic rhetoric, genre and inscription.
He then ventured to the theoretical well along the way to draw on concepts of modelling, activity, distributed cognition; situated learning, inter-textual, multimodality, organizational change and social production of information to assist interpret financial data.
This implies that an ethnographic account is inevitably distinctive in nature. It is specific to a specific financial research financial personal repertoire of perspectives (Smart, 2006, p. 16).
On the challenge of whether the accounts designed by ethnographers can assist in theory building in their disciplines, the questioner provides a thick description, ethnographic account of a particular community’s discursively designed life world, can be assumed to hold for other social groups in other settings (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2004, p. 123).
Legitimately, a researcher cannot move from producing an account of a single professional organization, for instance, to claiming that the grounding theory derived from this account will necessary apply to other organizations (Halliday, 1985, p. 9).
However, researchers contends that account of banks can act as heuristic for researchers intending to examine the discourse practices and intellectual collaboration of other professional groups (Brown, 2000, p. 106).
Given the similarity in roles and culture of central banks around the world, and the Bank of Canada’s continual interactions with other national and international organizations, aspects of ethnographic account produced from this study applies likely to other professional organizations thus encouraging social change.
The reason for this is that in many ways the account accords with ethnographic research by other scholars on discourse practices of professionals in variety of other organizational sites.
The aspects of these accounts are likely to be applicable to other professional organizations, such as; Bank of Canada, other central banks, other economic policy organizations, other public policy organizations, and other professional organizations (Smart, 2006, p. 10).
How does Professional Financial Discourse Impact Social Literacy and Social Change?
Most recent perspectives have concentrated on epistemic functions of narrative discourse. Jarratt (1998, p. 63), for example, describes narrative as “a vehicle for the serious tasks of knowledge creation, storage, and use, while Brown (2000, p. 68). characterizes it as a medium for a “rich, distinctly valuable sort of knowledge that assumes guises ranging from the scientific to the poetic.
Fox (2004, p. 116) in pointing to the frequent use of narrative by scientists, writes of powerful heuristic value narratives have for science as an interpretive and rhetorical strategy and of the way narrative impose significance and coherence on a mass of data by using plots to select and order events. The link between financial narrative and argumentation has also been theorized (Bloommaert, 2007, p. 682).
Smart contends that in historical narrative, point of views and interpretation of evidence are implicitly forms of argument. For him, there are no objective stories different types of historical arguments are inherently lodged in different kinds of narrative.
He asserts that one of the ways historical financial narrative argues is through claims of cause and effect, observing that the device of plot carries with it the conjunction of narrative and causal analysis.
In a context particularly relevant to research at the Bank of Canada, the use of narrative in the field of economics is candidly discussed. Consequently, despite economics’ scientific posture and empirical methodologies, its knowledge making actually depends on rhetorical devices, particularly narrative and metaphor (Smart, 2006, p. 75).
The core of the narrative is significant in the analyzing policy work of Bank of Canada economists (Smart, 2006, p. 75). Recent theorizing suggests that genres in financial professions serve as structures of activity and discourse for generating and applying specialized knowledge necessary for social change.
Stable firms with structures that are well defined also get recurrent problems which requires different types of discourse and knowledge (Bloommaert, 2007, p. 681).
A written genre on finance can be seen as a broad rhetorical strategy enacted within a financial organization in order to regularize writer/reader transactions in ways that allow for the creation of particular knowledge (Cook, 1992, p. 152).
I have also argued for a conception of genre that encompasses regularities in texts, composing processes, and reading practices as well as repeated patterns in an organization’s drama of interaction, the interpersonal dynamics that surround and support certain texts. This view of genre can assist in understanding the nature of collaboration through which an organizational narrative is constructed and applied (Bazerman, 1991, p. 336).
A related theme in genre theory concerns the knowledge-making function of families of genres. Bazerman (1991, p. 336) proposes the concept of the genre system, the full range of typified professional discourse produced by a professional financial organization.
He depicts that a financial system of written genres can be interpreted as a multifaceted rhetorical structure for creating and distributing knowledge required for carrying out the work of organization.
Bazerman (1991, p. 336) extends the genre system beyond the cluster of genres enacted by practitioners within a single professional group to include other external genres that are part of the group’s interaction with the world at large (Eggins, 1994, p. 294).
He suggests substituting the term genre set for intra-professional cluster of genres and reserving the term genre system for entire network of genres enacted between an organization and other participants in a broader structured discursive field (Bazerman, 1991, p. 334).
The thought of a genre set used by practitioners within a professional group and that of a genre system extending beyond the set to include other genres in a wider discursive field is useful for understanding the dynamics of financial narrative construction.
The set of internal genres generated by the Bank of Canada economists function as analytic and rhetorical media. This is important for developing a complex narrative about the Canadian economy that is utilized in forming monetary policy decisions and in communicating policy to the outside the institution.
The broader genre system that includes both the genres produced by the bank and the bank-related discourse of government, financial markets, academia, and journalism, enacts the institution’s conversation with other participants in the world of public policy (Smart, 2006, p. 16).
A second body of financial theory that can cast light on the collaborative process of narrative construction is distributed cognition; an extension of the Soviet cultural-historical approach known as activity theory.
Departing from a tradition in Western psychology that locates intellectual functioning within the individual, removed from history and sociocultural influences, and that objectifies knowledge, distributed cognition theorists look at intelligence, reasoning, and knowledge as manifest in activity and distributed in nature (Bazerman, 1991, p. 330)).
Cognition is observed to be stretched over, that is, activity of individuals working together sharing cultural practices and artifacts to meet identical goal.
Summery
In sum, researchers may wish to consider applying the account of the role of narrative in collaborative knowledge making at the Bank of Canada as a heuristic for their own investigations into the dynamics of discourse in other professional sites (Smart, 2006, p. 10).
In particular, they may need to find out how the process of communal narrative construction may contribute to the creation and application of specialized knowledge necessary to an organization for accomplishing its mandate.
I suggest that researchers involved in such inquiry might find that bringing theories of genre and distributed cognition into play along with concepts of narrative can reveal important aspects of this process (Bazerman,1991, p. 336)
Combined together, these theoretical perspectives, with their different but complementary angles of vision, constitute a powerful conceptual frame for examining the discursive practices that enable intellectual collaboration and knowledge making within a professional organization.
The Bank of Canada Monetary Policy Report follows the schema of the fully elaborated monetary policy story more explicitly and completely than any other single published text (Smart, 2006, p. 240).
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