genre as social action (1984), revisited 30 years later (2014)

The article “Genre as Social Action” was published 30 years ago and has been taken up in numerous conversations about genre in the time since then. This paper reviews the main ideas in that article, the ways those ideas were taken up in North American Rhetorical Genre Studies, and the ways that genre theory and research have been extended since then, particularly with the advent of the new digital media. Central issues in current research are identified: the relationship between stability and change and the ways in which genres are or are not regulated. The adaptation to digital media has expanded genre theory to become a multidimensional concept, with genre as a structurational nexus mediating not only intention and exigence, form and substance, but also action and structure, medium and product, the material and the symbolic.