Audience Complexities in Administrative Law: An Historical Case Study of an Environmental Policy
Karen Sue Fish Griggs
- School: Purdue University (0183)
- Degree: Ph.D.
- Date: 1994; pp: 343
- Advisor: Porter, James E.
- Source: DAI-A 55/12, p. 3984, Jun 1995
- Subjects: Political Science, Public Administration (0617); Law (0398); Language, General (0679)
- ProQuest Document Number:
- ISBN:
- UMI Number: AAT 9512979
Abstract:
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This study of non-academic writing of an environmental public policy examines the rhetoric
of public sector communications to show how a state water quality standards administrative
law was a social construction. Two aspects of social construction focus the study: (1) discourse
community and audience theory and (2) collaboration. Although rhetoric and composition research
into business, government, legal and non-profit organizational writing has described certain
business and technical writing practices and situations, no scholars in rhetoric and
composition, especially those specializing in professional writing, have investigated
how public sector writing of administrative laws takes place. In this case study, the
water quality standards law was collaboratively written by members of a legal discourse
community over two cycles of writing. Writing was done by government employees and lay
members of the audience and Water Pollution Control Board members. The historical case
study was conducted using a special unit of analysis, the social marker, to identify
social interactions in an archive created for the purpose of the study. Conclusions about
discourse community and audience are: (1) The Complex Audience in this case study was
large, heterogeneous, and multiple. (2) Writers and readers in the rulemaking reversed
roles in several instances. (3) A legal discourse community produced the law. (4) The
legal discourse community was text-centered, and both attorneys and non-attorneys produced
the text. (5) The dynamic discourse community as it forms was glimpsed through communicative
social interactions in two cycles of writing. (6) Reciprocal relations between the
social and political context and the rulemaking delayed rulemaking of the water quality
standards law in the public sector. Conclusions about collaboration are: (1) Collaborative
writers interacted at hearings and meetings, but participation was constrained. (2) Government
employees and non-employees wrote collaboratively during negotiations. (3) Statutory law
required certain recursive external review cycles. (4) Collaborative conflict can be productive.
(5) External review affected revisions and the rulemaking process. (6) Regulatory negotiations,
one of five types of collaborative writing, took place in public policy rulemaking.
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