Nordic Perspectives on the Discourse of Things

Book excerpt: This open access book deals with the role of written texts in an increasingly diverse and dynamic society, bringing together a series of studies anchored in the Scandinavian research tradition of sakprosa, which roughly translates as subject-oriented prose or professional communication. The authors examine the written texts capacity to transcend contextual boundaries, as a crucial factor in the importance of capturing and maintaining content as a manageable entity. The chapters each deal with a text type that manages complex content in a specialized way, including genre shifting in CSR reports, discourse networks in modern digital culture, digital and social media crisis communication, and epistemic positions in non-fiction. This book is relevant to fields such as text research, professional/digital communication, discourse analysis and literacy studies, and may also be of interest to disciplines such as history, rhetoric, organization studies, media studies/journalism, and linguistics. Catharina Nystrm Hg is Professor of Swedish at the Department for Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include plain language, genre and discourse analysis, organizational discourse, stylistics and text linguistics. Henrik Rahm is Associate Professor in Scandinavian Languages at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. Examples of previous research are diachronic journalistic discourse, legitimation strategies of registered nurses and clear language. His latest research includes language use in working life, discourses of state-owned enterprises, language of accounting and ritualization of corporate annual meetings. Gril Thomassen Hammerstad is Professor in Applied Linguistics and Head of the Centre for Academic and Professional Communication at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include language and communication across a variety of professional practices.