A major contribution of research in workplace literacy has been to explore the part that writing plays in the knowledge-making practices of various professional groups. While such enquiry has revealed that writing is essential to the creation and use of specialized knowledge in the professions, it also points to the need to see writing as part of a larger network of symbolic activity. Researchers have shown that practitioners in certain professions---for example, engineering and architecture---do not produce knowledge solely through the social negotiations of language; rather, acts of writing and reading merge with other symbol-based practices in larger processes of knowledge-making. / A promising area for further research in this regard is the field of economics, where knowledge is constituted through a discourse combining language, mathematics, and visual forms such as graphs. The study reported here examines a particular site of such knowledge-making: the Ottawa head office of the Bank of Canada. Employing an ethnographic methodology that included interviews, informal conversations, on-site observations, reading protocols, tape-recorded meetings, and text analysis, the study examines an ongoing, writing-intensive activity known in the Bank as the "monetary policy process," in which the institution's economists generate knowledge about Present and probable future conditions in the Canadian economy and use this knowledge in formulating and implementing policy. / The central question guiding the study is this: what is the nature of the intellectual collaboration that enables the Bank's economists to transform large amounts of statistical data into focused written knowledge about the Canadian economy and then use this knowledge in making decisions about monetary policy? The study shows that the "monetary policy process" can be viewed as a communal activity in which the economists employ a set of written genres in combination with mathematical models---most importantly, the computer-run Quarterly Projection Model---to carry out their work. The joint, intermeshed use of writing and modelling gives rise to a distinctive pattern of social interaction and a style of collective thinking that allow the economists to produce specialized knowledge about the economy and apply this knowledge to decision-making.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35619 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Smart, Graham. |
| Contributors | Dias, Patrick (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001615167, proquestno: NQ44590, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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