Rupturing Context, Resituating Genre

Abstract

Internal institutional genres can become fertile terrain for public policy debate when what Birkland called “focusing events” or ruptures extricate these genres from their contexts and subject them to public scrutiny. This study examines consequences for the local instantiation of the police use-of-force policy genre in the wake of a controversial shooting in Denver, Colorado, and traces ways in which the formation of a multi-interest task force charged with revising the police department's policy altered the policy's conventional activity system. In doing so, the public participated in remapping the local policy instantiation's relationship to the use-of-force policy genre and the routinized social action it performed.