Regulation and Communicative Practices

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying routine or regularized discourse and its connections to the many institutions within which people act. This interest has emerged for a number of reasons, including the rapid evolution of digitally mediated communication and the upheaval of organizational structures in such realms of activity as business, government, and education. At the same time, theories of communication have become increasingly complex, beginning to account for such considerations as power, contingency, and unpredictability and their relationship to the practice of routine or regularized communication. As we observed research interests developing along these lines and attempted to understand the ideas at play in the related scholarship, it became increasingly evident to us that the moment had arrived for organizing a collection that begins to account for routine or regularized communicative practices in workplaces and professions. Scholars publishing on this issue work in diverse fields of study (e.g., rhetoric, cultural studies, and organizational communication), and often use distinctly different theoretical perspectives (e.g., genre, narrative, and ethnomethodology). Consequently, what we perceived as an important, emerging concern in communication scholarship (in the broadest sense) lacked a named, central concept that would readily cross fields of study and allow us to talk about the enterprise at large. Recognizing that any starting point for organizing talk about this as-yet unnamed concern in communication studies would necessarily be somewhat arbitrary, we decided to bring together scholars situated in varied disciplines and theoretical camps and to ask them to grapple with what we proposed to be a