Abstract
Governments the world over require scientific knowledge to inform policy makers’ decision-making processes. The recontextualization of this information for nonscientific audiences has received much attention, though it has primarily focused on publicly available texts. Little is known about the discursive nature of how science is transformed and repurposed and the confidential writing performed by boundary organizations that are working between science and policy. This ethnographic study explores the collaborative discursive activity involved in efforts by a boundary organization—the Council of Canadian Academies—to recontextualize science for policy makers. The analysis opens the discursive black box of the genre system and intermediary genre sets involved in one project, which led to the publication and distribution of the boundary object of an advisory report, Older Canadians on the Move. I claim that the discursive boundary work involves a complex genre system containing several sequential genred activities through which science is transformed and a boundary object created.
Keywords
In an era of exponentially complicated societal problems, government policy makers rely on scientific knowledge (Gluckman, 2014). Doing so often requires transforming and repurposing scientific knowledge for policy activities, a task described as a particular kind of “boundary work”—in this case, a discursive activity aimed at bridging the communicative gap between the conceptual worlds of science and policy (Guston, 2001). To bridge this communicative gap, scientists often share scientific knowledge—claims produced through experimental research conducted using the scientific method (Bazerman, 1988)—via “knowledge exchange” techniques. Knowledge exchange involves a multidirectional sharing of information and ideas between knowledge producers and users using one-way, solicited, network, or participatory approaches to persuade policy makers (Kapoor et al., 2023; Nguyen et al., 2021; Westwood et al., 2023). One aspect of policy-oriented knowledge exchange focuses on the role of scientists in providing “science advice” (Gluckman, 2014). As a form of boundary work, providing science advice involves different approaches used by different governments (Bröstrom & McKelvey, 2018). National academies of science are one type of “boundary organization” (Guston, 2001)—an organization that performs boundary work—mandated to interpret scientific knowledge and communicate the relevant meaning to policy makers.
The discursive activity of producing advisory reports is an area of great interest to writing and professional communications scholars. Much like the National Research Council (in the United States), the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) provides science-based advice to Canadian government departments in the form of written advisory reports, a kind of “boundary object” (Star & Gruesemer, 1989)—an artifact that crosses the boundary of science or policy and is useable in either domain without becoming something entirely new. The CCA takes scientific knowledge from its original context, often a scientific journal article, and transforms and repurposes the knowledge as it moves into the domain of government policy making. Such boundary work can be viewed as a discursive “black box” (Latour, 1987) or a series of “many elements that are made to act as one” (p. 131). In the case of a boundary organization, the black box is the opaque discursive activity through which science is recontextualized for policy makers.
One way that writing researchers have sought to understand the relationship between science and policy is through analyzing scientists’ discourse—that is, a social group’s meaning-making practices shaped by shared ways of thinking, acting, knowing, and doing (Hajer, 2006). Some research related to the transformation of expert knowledge in one discursive domain has shown how specialized knowledge is “recontextualized” (Linell, 1998)—that is, transformed and repurposed—as a new form of knowledge as it moves into another domain (Luzón, 2013; Rachul, 2019). Researchers have explored the rhetorical aspects of transforming science for nonexpert audiences (Fahnestock, 2004; Smart & Falconer, 2021). Others have explored how science communication practices of nonexperts recontextualize scientific knowledge for other nonexpert audiences (Bray, 2019; Smart & Falconer, 2019). Still others have expanded what is known about the uses of science for policy (Feuer & Maranto, 2010; Martello, 2008), such as through the discourse surrounding the use of scientific knowledge for advocacy purposes (Lindeman, 2013) or the rhetorical work of scientists collaborating across disciplines in a science think tank (Baake, 2003).
Writing researchers have mapped the theoretical interconnections between boundary work and genre theory via uptake between scientific and nonscientific genres (Cooke, 2021). This mapping has explored several aspects of the science-policy interface, including the ways that federal policy anticipates the need for recontextualized science in the context of the American Environmental Impact Assessment (Bazerman et al., 2003), how representations of recontextualized scientific data are rhetorically used in science advisory reports (Falconer, 2023), and how “expert opinion reports”—a term that echoes the type of advisory reports produced by the CCA—produced by the European health agency communicate scientific knowledge to nonexpert audiences through X (formerly Twitter) (Orpin, 2019). These, however, focus on public discourses via published texts. To my knowledge, no research has investigated the way scientific knowledge is discursively recontextualized within a boundary organization, like the CCA, to support the work of government policy makers. Such boundary work remains obscured, and the genres “occluded” (Swales, 1996) as they remain hidden from writing and professional communication scholars.
The purpose of this study is to open this discursive black box of how a boundary organization recontextualizes science for policy makers. To do so, I answer the following questions: What is the nature of the Council of Canadian Academies’ (CCA’s) collaborative discursive boundary work involved in recontextualizing science for policy makers? What, if any, genred activities enable such discursive boundary work? In addressing the questions, I suggest that the CCA’s discursive boundary work is guided by an organizational discursive savvy-ness that involves a complex “assessment genre system” (defined below) made up of multiple, sequentially interconnected genred activities through which scientific knowledge is taken up and transformed as it is repurposed for policy work. Such discursive boundary work features a unique series of “intermediary genre sets,” (introduced and defined below) that enable the CCA to produce the boundary object of an advisory report, known in the CCA as an “expert panel report.”
Discursive Boundary Work
One helpful way to conceptualize the discursive activities performed by those exchanging knowledge between science and policy is the concept of boundary work (Leith & Vanclay, 2015; Turnhout et al., 2013). Gieryn (1983) originally conceived boundary work as scientists setting boundaries between scientific and nonscientific domains. More recently, researchers have used this concept to look specifically at science-policy knowledge exchange (Guston, 2001). Boundary work facilitates knowledge exchange between producers and users of knowledge in both the scientific and policy domains (Nguyen et al., 2021; Westwood et al., 2023). Such mediation typically involves the creation of a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989)—any artifact, such as an academic journal article or government report—that sits between two independent domains, such as science and policy, and may be used in either domain (Star, 2010). As we will see, the CCA performs such discursive boundary work through internal genred activities dedicated to creating a boundary object.
Recontextualizing Knowledge
The notion of the discursive recontextualization of knowledge (Linell, 1998) is particularly useful for understanding the discursive boundary work of transforming scientific knowledge for policy makers. In this view, scientific knowledge is reconstructed as a new form of knowledge as it is taken from one discursive domain and moved into a separate domain as a two-step semiotic process whereby knowledge is identified/accessed and then transformed as it is repurposed in the new activity (Smart & Falconer, 2021). Rhetorical boundary work performed by different social actors mediates such recontextualization (Luzón, 2013; Myers, 2003). In this view, knowledge moves from the technical domain into another arena where the information serves a different purpose, often through written texts (Ravotas & Berkenkotter, 1998; Sarangi, 2001). These views of written texts leave out the intricacies of how writing and genred activities are used to recontextualize knowledge, including the many collaborative activities carried out by those recontextualizing scientific knowledge for policy.
Genred Knowledge
Genre researchers use theories of rhetoric to explore the use of language and other symbol systems to recognize and accomplish particular goals (Bazerman, 1988). Building on Miller (1984), genre researchers see nonliterary genres as a rhetorical response to recurring social situations where texts often serve as residual artifacts coming from participants’ collaborative work. In this view, genres function as artifacts embodying discipline-specific knowledge that different actors can access and use in their own activities (Bazerman, 2021). How actors access such genred knowledge is interpreted differently. Some use the notion of “intermediary genres” (Tachino, 2012) to explore the transitional texts that facilitate the “uptake” of knowledge from another genre (Bray, 2019; Cooke, 2021). Uptake here refers to one text anticipating a response in a separate text (Freadman, 2002). It also involves both ideas and parts of a text from one genre—an uptake artifact, like the boundary-oriented advisory reports produced by the CCA—being used in another genre (Dryer, 2016).
Genre sets in genre systems
Through uptake, it is possible to identify a series of interconnected texts or a “genre set” (Devitt, 1991). Genre sets are smaller-scale constellations of interconnected texts that enable social actors to accomplish specific tasks or goals. There are situations where researchers have found complex webs of interrelated texts or “genre systems” (Bazerman, 1994). For example, the interrelated and often obscured texts produced through the many activities carried out in publishing an academic article (Swales, 1996) or the writing involved in funding academic research (Tardy, 2003), both make up a genre system. Genre systems often entail multiple genre sets that allow for individuals working collaboratively over time to follow an often predetermined genred trajectory that accomplishes a specific social action, such as the discursive boundary work of providing science advice. As we will see in the CCA, this involves specific types of genred activities involved in recontextualizing science for policy.
Meta-Genre
In some cases, a community’s genred activities may be governed by still other genres that provide context-specific language about language use. These “meta-genres” (Giltrow, 2002) provide background knowledge and guidance to those working in specific contexts on how to respond to the perceived recurring social situation. Recent scholarship investigating meta-genres have identified the ways they can be both explicitly recorded and tacitly understood in practice (Doody, 2021). Meta-genres can provide access to “norms, expectations, and practices” (McNely, 2017, p. 450) that are visible through forms of writing within an activity. They can be layered on by different individuals participating in the same activity over time according to their experiences and understanding (McNely, 2017; Wickman, 2023). In the context of the CCA’s discursive boundary work, meta-genres embody the rhetorical norms, expectations, and practices for recontextualizing science and producing the boundary object of an advisory report.
Theoretical Framework
Taken together, theories from the above-surveyed research help understand the specific nature the boundary work involved in recontextualizing science for policy makers. As a boundary organization (Guston, 2001), the CCA creates the boundary object of an advisory report, which contains transformed knowledge from the scientific domain that is a new form of policy-oriented scientific knowledge. I use “discursive boundary work” to refer to the CCA’s—a social group—ideas, concepts, and categories through which a social group—the CCA—makes meaning and transforms knowledge between two or more separate domains—science and policy in this case—through language and other symbol systems encompassing shared ways of knowing, acting, doing, and thinking. I adopt the view of recontextualization as a two-step semiotic process (Smart & Falconer, 2021) to explore the CCA’s discursive boundary work of accessing/taking up scientific knowledge and transforming/repurposing it for policy makers.
To help explore written aspects of the CCA’s discursive boundary work, I borrow relevant concepts from genre theory that enable an analysis sensitive to written discursive work. More specifically, I consider the written actions of those involved in the CCA’s recontextualization of science for policy makers by exploring the recurring text types used within the CCA to facilitate the uptake and transformation of knowledge in the creation of a boundary object. I combine the complementary concepts of genre system (Bazerman, 1994), meta-genre (Giltrow, 2002), genre set (Devitt, 1991), and intermediary genres (Tachino, 2012) to explore how knowledge contained within genres or genred knowledge, as we will see in the CCA, function in the recontextualization of science.
I introduce the notion of an “intermediary genre set” to combine insights from Tachino (2012) and Devitt (1991) to explain the interconnected, sequentially linear intermediary genres produced by the CCA through its “recursive recontextualization cycle,” defined below. As we will see, the discursive boundary work of the CCA features at least two identifiable intermediary genre sets. These are used to first generate recontextualized knowledge and then to prepare simplified, accessible genres for sharing the recontextualized knowledge with various audiences.
Methods
The study reported here is an ethnography-based analysis of the CCA’s discursive boundary work through the genre system it uses to produce the boundary object of an expert panel report. All research took place undera research agreement between the CCA and me and was reviewed and approved by my university’s Research Ethics Board (#105296) as part of a 5-year discourse-oriented interpretive ethnography (Falconer, 2019), which followed an emergent design (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2008).
Research Site
I conducted research in the CCA office (180 Elgin Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) between 2013 and 2018. Funded by the Canadian government since 2005, the CCA works at an arm’s length from government in that “the sponsor [or client] does not participate in conducting the assessment, review drafts of the report, or propose any changes to the report before its release” (CCA, 2023a, p. 15) in the course of providing policy-oriented advice for different government departments on complex scientific topics of public interest. The CCA’s organizational structure includes a Board of Directors, a Scientific Advisory Committee, and a staff secretariat of approximately 30 employees. The staff secretariat, consisting of an executive group along with research, communications, and administrative teams, plays the most significant role in the recontextualization of science for policy makers. The CCA’s clients or “sponsors,” as staff refer to clients, are often policy makers working in departments of the Canadian federal government.
Over an 18- to 24-month period, the staff team and expert panel work to answer the sponsor’s questions and deliver their response in what staff refer to as an “expert panel report.” As of April 2024, the CCA has published 67 reports and with 2 more under way. Working in a Canadian context means each report is made available in both official languages—English and French. The study focuses on the collaborative work involved in producing the CCA’s 41st report, Older Canadians on the Move (CCA, 2017) (Figure 1), for Transport Canada and a few supporting departments and agencies, including the Public Health Agency of Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, the Canadian Transportation Agency, and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. Known internally as the “transport project,” the project focused on identifying ways to adapt the Canadian transportation system to meet the needs of an aging population. The transport project involved five panel meetings that took place in three Canadian cities between September 2016 and August 2017 (Table 1).
The cover of Older Canadians on the Move.
Date and Location of Each of the Five Panel Meetings.
Collecting Data
Here, I report on my positionality, field notes, interviews, and documents collected as data considered in the study of the CCA’s discursive boundary work.
Positionality
Since this study reports on specific findings from an ethnography, it is helpful to briefly note my positionality. I first adopted an active membership role (Adler & Adler, 1987) when I was employed by the CCA, first as a Research Intern from July to December 2013 (6 months) and then as a Communications Assistant from September 2015 to August 2016 (12 months). In total, I spent 18 months “in the field” as an active member of the CCA. After my time as an employee, I took on a peripheral membership role (Adler & Adler, 1987) as an outside observer. In this role, I paid close attention to major events and press releases published by the CCA and remained in contact with former colleagues.
Field notes
My field notes consist of observations recorded during my employment with the CCA. In total, there were approximately 200 pages of handwritten notes. These notes recorded the daily happenings and specific in-house terms that I encountered at the CCA. As I recorded my observations, I focused on three things: the CCA’s writing processes; staff views on the collaborative discursive activities involved in the CCA’s transformation of scientific knowledge for use by policy makers; and, finally, the events that occurred during the CCA’s work for Transport Canada.
Interviews
Interviews served as a key source of data for the study. Throughout the 5 years of investigation, I conducted interviews with members of the CCA to clarify community-specific meanings around terms like “assessment” or specific aspects of the boundary work examined through the transport project (Rapport, 2012; Skinner, 2012). In addition to the many “hall-way” conversations I had while working at the CCA, I did 25 semistructured interviews over three cycles between 2013 and 2018. 18 of these were with CCA staff members and 7 were with transport panel members. The interviews ranged in length from 23 to 80 minutes (total audio time of 1234 minutes or 20.5 hours). I personally transcribed each interview and had 556 pages of transcripts (1.5 line spacing to help with coding). In excerpts featured below, “—” indicates a pause, “. . .” indicates omitted stretches of speech. To maintain anonymity, I use the generic identifiers of “Staff ##” or “Panel ##” to refer to the participant and their role. The number following either is the participant number, meaning “Staff 05” indicates staff participant 05 and “Panel 03” indicates panel participant 03.
Documents
I gathered roughly 300 documents produced by the CCA. Table 2 describes the documents considered in the present study. Documents were either publicly available or confidential/private. The majority of these documents are publicly available texts, such as annual reports, organizational history documents, expert panel reports, news releases, newspaper articles, tweets, and web-texts from pages on the CCA website (https://www.cca-reports.ca), among others. These documents help contextualize claims about the texts produced for public consumption and organizational culture. As part of our research agreement, the CCA allowed me to collect materials and internal documents produced throughout the life cycle of the transportation project. I also gathered over 100 confidential documents that are only available internally to the CCA, the most important of which is the latest version of the CCA’s “Council Assessment Lifecycle Methodology,” the CCA’s “Style Guide,” and a variety of texts produced throughout the life cycle of a single assessment, the transportation project.
An Aggregate Accounting of the Documents Gathered for the Study by Document Type.
Note. For each, there is a description of the types of documents, an indication of whether they are publicly or privately available, and a tally of each availability type. CCA = Council of Canadian Academies.
Interpreting the Data
To consider the CCA’s discursive boundary work of recontextualizing science, I employed three strategies for analyzing and interpreting my data sources.
Longitudinal approach
One common ethnographic strategy that I used was to gather different sources of data over an extended period (5 years) and to interpret the data over time. In this sense, my field notes allowed me to document the concepts and terms used by CCA staff members and to reflect on my experiences in the CCA, a form of memo writing that proved to be very useful in later iterations of data collection and analysis. For example, I used my field notes to inform the types of questions I asked participants in the interviews, a strategy that connected my data sources throughout this iterative approach.
Categorizing and connecting data
“Categorizing and connecting” (Maxwell & Miller, 2008) data involved systematically deconstructing and reconstructing it to identify connections among its sources. I categorized interview data using qualitative coding techniques (Saldaña, 2016), including structural codes that applied content-based conceptual phrases representing a topic related to my study. There were three structural codes identified during analysis:
Descriptive codes that were used summarized the topic of a passage in a single word or short phrase, and theme-ing the data categorized the structural and descriptive codes according to themes based on the literature review (see Table 3 for details). I used NVivo (version 12) for most of the later theme-ing of my data.
Representative Sample of Themes From Literature and Descriptive Codes Used During Analysis.
Note. CALM = Council Assessment Lifecycle Methodology; CCA = Council of Canadian Academies.
Trustworthiness and triangulation
As is the case with qualitative research more broadly (Maxwell, 2013), ethnographers need to make a case for the trustworthiness of their interpretation (Smart, 2006). I have attempted to do this by triangulating theory with my approaches to data collection and analysis. I have used symbiotic theories—discourse, recontextualization, genre, and boundary work—to interpret the lived experiences I observed during my employment with the CCA as well as the lived experiences of interview participants. For data collection, I sought three sources of data represented in the discussion below: field notes, interviews, and documents/texts. Doing so ensured that I drew on different sources of information throughout the 5 years I collected data. For data analysis, I employed three strategic approaches: longitudinal interpretation via participant observation in both active and peripheral roles (Adler & Adler, 1987), coding and categorizing strategies to deconstruct and reconstruct all sources of data, and following up on new ideas with other members of the CCA.
Findings: Recontextualizing Science Through the Assessment Genre System
Below, I present my analysis of the CCA’s discursive boundary work of providing science advice by presenting the genre system through which the CCA produces the boundary object of an expert panel report. My analysis first presents the meta-genres that govern the CCA’s genre system and defines what a CCA “assessment” entails. Then, the analysis focuses on the discursive work carried out during the CCA’s transport project. I describe two key intermediary genre sets—the panel intermediary genre set, and the sponsor brief intermediary genre set—as they feature in the CCA’s recontextualization of science. This involves looking first at the staff assessment team and panel’s discursive work, and then the CCA’s communications unit’s role in preparing the final report and related genres used to share the main findings.
Meta-Genres in the CCA’s Discursive Boundary Work
Understanding the CCA’s discursive boundary work and their assessment genre system begins with their meta-genres (Giltrow, 2002). Here, I introduce two CCA meta-genres.
CALM as meta-genre
The CCA’s discursive boundary work involves several steps documented in the CCA methodology, known internally as the “Council Assessment Lifecycle Methodology” or “CALM” (pronounced as the word “calm”). CALM is an internally designed project management tool that guides the staff team’s work throughout an “assessment,” which is how the CCA describes the activity of producing an expert panel report. An assessment involves locating, assessing, and interpreting scientific knowledge. The CCA has a “broad definition of science” (CCA, 2023b) that includes disciplines beyond the natural sciences, including the social, behavioral, and health sciences as well as engineering and, in some cases, the humanities.
CALM details every stage of the assessment process and was in its ninth version as of July 2019. CALM comprises nine stages or “processes” that the staff teams carry out from the start of an assessment until a year after the final report is released. Figure 2 shows the processes of CALM considered in this study (Processes 1 through 7), which are those involved in the recontextualization of science. CALM documents how a small team of CCA staff pulls together literature, data, and any other relevant materials that the panel requires to write the report. Staff also produce “deliverables” before, during, and after each panel meeting. Since CALM is a meta-genre, it outlines the expected texts to be produced throughout an assessment. Within CALM, there appear to be 113 texts routinely produced during any given assessment process, 54 of which appear to be used to recontextualize science (Falconer, 2019). The CCA assessment team writes all the texts produced through the activities involved in recontextualizing science.
A chronological map of the CCA’s assessment genre system. It depicts the first seven of nine processes listed in CALM, which are the genred activities that enable the recontextualization of science. (CALM = Council Assessment Lifecycle Methodology; CCA = Council of Canadian Academies.)
Style Guide as meta-genre
A second meta-genre found in the CCA is the CCA Style Guide. Central to the CCA’s work, the Style Guide was developed by the communications unit to faciliate – to paraphrase several participants – a smooth-as-possible transition from the assessment team to the communications unit. As a meta-genre (Giltrow, 2002), it outlines conventions for the expert panel report, with specific sentence-level rules and standards for all CCA publications, including formatting the body of the text and the reference list. The communications unit performed several of the activities to finalize the transport project, including proofing, layout, translation, and production, with several external contractors with specialties in different areas that the CCA does not have in-house (e.g., translation, lay-out, printing).
CALM-Guided Genred Activities
I now turn to the analysis of the assessment genre system as a central component of the CCA’s discursive boundary work. This involves many sequential genred activities through which an assessment is initiated, and the research gets under way.
Starting the transport project
The project started with the CCA’s acceptance of a proposal prepared by Transport Canada. The first draft of this proposal was presented to the CCA in 2012 and accepted in 2016. This launched Process 1 of CALM (Figure 2), the purpose of which is to negotiate the terms of a proposal for the CCA to start a project. In this process, the department seeking a CCA assessment goes through Industry, Social and Economic Development Canada (formerly Industry Canada)—the department that has overseen the CCA’s funding agreement since 2005—to pitch a series of policy-oriented questions that they believe would benefit from external consultation. In 2015, the CCA assembled an internal committee consisting of senior CCA research staff and the Scientific Advisory Committee to review Transport Canada’s proposal, which initiated a form of solicited knowledge exchange (Westwood et al., 2023).
The proposal and charge to the panel
Transport Canada prepared a 19-page “Proposal to the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) for an Independent, Expert Panel Assessment on: The Role of Innovation and Technology in Adapting to the Transportation Needs of an Aging Population.” This proposal consisted of several sections: Background; Rationale with five subsections titled Assessment Relevance, Government Policy Agenda, Vision for the Assessment, and The Role of the CCA; Feasibility with four subsections titled Current Knowledge Base, Timeframe, Risk Management, Relevant Departments/Agencies; and a Conclusion. References (13 in total) and a Bibliography with 26 additional resources. follow, as do three appendices, details about federal roles and responsibilities for accessible transportation, a glossary, and additional reference materials.
Transport Canada’s proposal was accepted in 2016. The main question (or the “Charge to the Panel” as CCA staff refer to it), for the CCA to address was “How can technology and innovation help the Canadian transportation system (under the legislative authority of Parliament) adapt to the needs of an aging population?” (CCA, 2017, pp. 2–3). In my understanding, the Charge to the Panel was a central text that guided the entire activity of the report’s development. Accepting the proposal for an assessment triggered a series of genred activities unique to the CCA’s discursive boundary work. The proposal positioned the CCA staff and the expert panel in an uptake (Freadman, 2002) situation whereby Transport Canada’s questions anticipated a response in the CCA’s final report.
Staff assessment team
The CCA’s first activity involved creating an assessment team for the transport project composed of secretariat staff. The team consisted of a Project Director, two Research Associates (both with PhDs), a Project Coordinator, an Intern, and a liaison person from the CCA’s communications unit. The team met weekly or biweekly to discuss general tasks, such as “logistics, upcoming deadlines. . .teleconferences, meetings [which was] always very helpful for everyone to be on the same page and kind of aware of what our next deadline or goal is” (Staff 09). Team meetings occurred from the start through to the publication of Older Canadians on the Move and were very important for keeping the transport project on schedule and for coordinating the work of the staff team and panel.
Panel scoping and recruitment
Almost immediately, the staff assessment team began Process 2 of CALM (Figure 2), which involved recruiting, appointing, and approving the panel’s Chair and individual panel members. Using Transport Canada’s proposal, the staff team researched what topics needed to be included in the scope of the project and identified the different kinds of expertise and experts were required. The CCA uses the term “expert” to refer to an expert panel. As expertise relates to a panel member, one staff suggested, “[a]n expert is somebody that has proven his [sic] knowledge and utility” (Staff 13). For the CCA, experts share what content needs to be included in the report, where that content can be found, and how to use that knowledge in addressing Transport Canada’s questions.
In this scoping part of their work, the staff team drafted a text known internally as the “compositional guidelines”—a key text composed by CCA staff members in an assessment—for selecting panel members. Created by the staff team, the compositional guidelines frame all the genred activities that follow. Writing the compositional guidelines involved many different activities for the staff team after receiving the Charge to the Panel. The compositional guidelines are presented as a table or “grid,” as the staff often refer to it, including various disciplinary and sectoral bodies of knowledge, and the country, province, or region in which the prospective panel-candidate lives. As I experienced, CCA staff also do their best to identify male and female candidates and strive to achieve an equal representation of gender on its panels. The compositional guidelines were also used later in the assessment process for finding peer reviewers as discussed below.
The Panel Intermediary Genre Set
Between September 2016 and August 2017, the CCA used the panel intermediary genre set to produce the boundary object of Older Canadians on the Move. The panel intermediary genre set consists of four sequentially connected genred activities: creating panel briefing materials, holding panel meetings, writing panel meeting summaries, and doing further research and/or writing. As shown in Figure 3, the panel intermediary genre set features a recurring uptake cycle of writing, sharing, discussing, capturing, and revising drafts of the report—the recursive recontextualization cycle—as the science is recontextualized for policy makers. The recursive recontextualization cycle is initiated after a proposal is accepted, staff team is assembled, and panel compositional guidelines are prepared. The cycle happens through five iterations of producing the panel intermediary genre set throughout Processes 2 through 6 of CALM (Figure 2). As the fifth cycle ends in Process 6, the staff assessment team finishes the recontextualization of science and the communications unit initiates its work of preparing the final boundary object.
A depiction of the CCA’s recursive recontextualization cycle through the CCA’s panel intermediary genre set (the center circle). There are five iterations of the cycle. Each cycle sees new drafts that are brought to the panel meetings and further developed through the panel intermediary genre set.
Panel briefing materials
Panel briefing materials are the most critical texts in the panel intermediary genre set in the CCA’s recontextualization cycle. The panel briefing materials were produced by the staff team before each meeting and served multiple purposes from logistical to analytical. For the transport project, these briefing materials ranged in length from 65 to 125 pages. Several common features appeared in the five sets of panel briefing materials: a table of contents, an agenda for the panel meeting, a statement outlining the purpose and objective of the meeting, the assessment questions, and draft materials of the developing report. In Panel Meeting 1, the briefing materials were accompanied by a slide deck that summarized the preliminary research and scoping activities undertaken by the staff leading up to the meeting. The slide deck accompanied the briefing materials throughout the assessment process. The slides became less specific through each subsequent panel meeting as the panel’s conversation focused on the draft and the panel’s feedback. For example, the first panel meeting’s slides were the most detailed. They contain all preliminary research done by CCA staff and the presentation is given to the panel as a means of thinking through the proposal, getting all panel members on the same page, and beginning the whole conversation. The fourth panel meeting’s slides were largely empty with headings for the chapters and related content. At this point, the slides served to guide the conversation. Finally, the panel briefing materials for the fifth panel meeting were more detailed; they focused on the important activity of peer review as described later.
In producing the panel briefing materials, staff team members played a central role in recontextualizing the scientific knowledge embedded in the final transport report. Researchers on the staff team developed content in the five sets of panel briefing materials, with input from the Project Director and Project Coordinator. Both were involved in reviewing content, although the Project Director managed higher-level details and oversaw the development of each item (e.g., agenda, purpose, and materials) in the texts, and the Project Coordinator edited the text in terms of format, grammar, and spelling. The panel received the panel briefing materials a couple of weeks before each panel meeting. As the transport project progressed, these briefing materials became the first and second drafts of Older Canadians on the Move used during the third and fourth panel meetings (Figure 2). This means that it was in the briefing materials that staff presented the data they had collected, and panel members would approve the interpretation of the evidence.
Panel Meetings
As a genred activity, a panel meeting is where the discussion of panel briefing materials—the scientific knowledge being taken up and transformed (Smart & Falconer, 2021)—between panel members and the staff assessment team takes place. Each of the five panel meetings lasted between 1½ to 2 days, and each took place in different Canadian cities (Table 1). Each meeting intended to accomplish a particular set of objectives, as indicated in CALM. This was when the staff team was able to get input from panel members on the developing response to Transport Canada’s proposal.
Getting panel input
Getting panel input during panel meetings was an essential task for the staff assessment team throughout the recursive recontextualization cycle. One staff member described how the panel members provided this feedback: “There was higher-level comments outside the meetings from certain panel members. . . Some provided detailed feedback on. . . the whole report. . . and some just provided guidance on certain sections. Some only spoke up at the meeting” (Staff 04). The panel provided both written and oral feedback. Oral comments were the most prominent feedback that the staff received. As one panel member put it, “basically at each meeting [there was] a lot of feedback, discussion about topics, where the gaps are. And that’s where most of the work happened” (Panel 06). The staff were critically aware that they needed to maximize the panel’s expertise during the panel meetings.
As a meta-genre (Giltrow, 2002), CALM has one strategy built into it for developing the agenda for the panel meeting. This involved deciding on the sequence of topics to discuss. The staff team prepared the materials and agenda for each meeting. The Chair, who reviewed the agenda, played an active role in running the meeting to ensure discussion of all material. As one staff member reflected, “[the Chair] would chair the meeting and run it, we would have opportunities to present what we did and hopefully also guide discussions [with] checking-in etcetera” (Staff 10). This meant that the staff members were able to discuss specific points with panel members, whose expertise related to specific sections of the draft of the final report-in-progress. During panel meetings, staff documented which panel member had agreed to do what in terms of identifying resources or reviewing specific sections of the report. These notes were used to create panel meeting summaries, described below.
Beyond CALM, the staff team used at least two ad hoc strategies to engage panel members between meetings. The first was simply a matter of “just reach[ing] out as needed” to specific panel members “in between the meetings” (Staff 08). The staff reached out by email or phone about papers or data sets. The second strategy was identifying “chapter champions.” As one staff member explained, “[This] is one of the CCA strategies for engaging panel members [where] a panel member volunteers for a specific chapter. . . during the panel meeting, that panel member will do a very brief. . . overview of that chapter. . . and kind of spear-head the discussion on it” (Staff 09). These champions orchestrated the discussion by leading the panel through what the staff team had prepared on a particular chapter in the panel briefing materials.
Panel meeting summary
Another important text in the panel intermediary genre set produced throughout the recursive recontextualization cycle was the “panel meeting summary.” Up to 50 pages in length, this summary comes out of the panel meeting and features hand-written or typed notes that served as a record of the points made by panel members about specific topics or parts of the report, such as ideas, messages, additional sources, suggested wording, and clarifying disciplinary meaning. A staff member commented that the panel meeting summary was “a way of making sure that the panel agrees on the next step we’re going to take and the workload before the next meeting” (Staff 11). Panel meeting summaries served to move the group towards an understanding of what the key points in the report would be. This included the next stage in the recontextualization cycle of further research and/or writing for all except the fifth panel meeting. Once the staff team produced the panel meeting summaries, they would send it to the panel to approve or “sign off” on them.
Further research and/or writing
Preparing initial drafts and new versions throughout the transport project meant researching and writing new intermediary genres throughout the recursive recontextualization cycle. As the project evolved, so too did the genred activities carried out by the staff team to address panel feedback from panel meetings and recorded in the panel meeting summaries. Two types of activities featured the actual revision process of the next iteration of the panel briefing materials: incorporating panel feedback, and seeking external feedback through peer review.
Incorporating panel feedback
Staff incorporated the panel’s feedback on each draft in a way that reflected the panel’s corrections to the draft. As one CCA staff member reflected, panel members might critique a draft presentation as insufficiently attentive to the “whole journey,” which the staff would interpret as a directive to ‘go back to the drawing board and try to find another way to present this because we don’t get what you’re trying to say here and it doesn’t seem right.’ And we did, we . . .started talking about the ‘stages of the journey’ and . . .that worked for them. ‘I can see this now, I can understand.’ And they were able to comment on more individual sections. . . . It was them saying basically ‘we don’t get why this is here, we don’t get how this fits in.’ And it was a key piece, right, to have technology and innovation related to ‘why this is important?’. . .the onus was on us to figure out a way to tell the story. And we did. (Staff 04)
Such strategies enabled staff members to move the panel toward “signing off” on the summary document for each panel meeting. The panel’s feedback focused on specific issues that prevented the draft from working. The staff team did not, however, receive much feedback on points that the panel accepted. The staff team appeared to work through the issues that arose over the course of the five panel meetings. The staff team’s weekly meetings were central to the drafting process. The team worked collaboratively both among themselves and with the panel in taking the panel’s feedback and revising drafts.
Getting external feedback through peer review
One aspect of the CCA’s discursive boundary work involves ensuring the credibility of the final report within the discursive domain of science. To do this, the CCA uses its peer-review process—a process valued by scientists. As guided in the meta-genre (Giltrow, 2002) of CALM, the CCA’s peer-review process starts between the second and fifth panel meetings. The staff get help from the CCA’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which appoints a member to oversee or “monitor” the peer review of a final expert panel report. The staff recruit members to the peer-review committee to carry out another form of solicited and network knowledge exchange (Westwood et al., 2023).
After the third panel meeting, the CCA staff began identifying and recruiting individuals to review the transport report. Once assembled, the 10-member peer-review committee, which remained anonymous until publication of the report, reviewed the content between the fourth and fifth panel meetings. The CCA staff compiled all peer-reviewer comments into a “peer review comment grid,” which is a list that arranges all comments in a long table by chapter and page number. As one staff member explains, We code the comments as a team in green, yellow, or red. Green being very minor things that we generally suggest the panel ignore during the panel meeting because they’re generally minor type of—or grammatical things, or quickly adjusting citation. . . . Yellows are things that may require discussion from the panel if they want to kind of change the focus of a section or something a bit more nuance. And then red are kind of major show-stoppers of maybe an expert completely disagrees with what the panel has written in that section or it’s something equally egregious. (Staff 09)
According to the same staff member, the transport report had no major concerns. The CCA staff sent the peer-review comment grid to all panel members before the fifth panel meeting to ensure effective use of time during the in-person meeting.
Once all peer-review comments were addressed by the panel, the staff finalized the draft and prepared for another important activity in the assessment process, a teleconference to have panel members “sign off” for publication. Panel “sign off” is something sought throughout the entire panel process; however, it comes down to each individual panel member agreeing with what has been written in the report as a response to Transport Canada’s questions. The CCA publishes the expert panel report after all panel members had signed off to indicate that they supported the CCA’s publication of the report as a summary of the panel’s collective “interpretation of the evidence,” to use the CCA’s phrasing. Once they do so, it signifies that the CCA’s recontextualization cycle is complete and the communications unit begins packaging the recontextualized science for different audiences.
The Sponsor Brief Intermediary Genre Set and Release Day Genre Set
In the CCA’s discursive boundary work, the communications unit performed the genred activities involved with delivering the report to Transport Canada through the “sponsor brief intermediary genre set” and the “release day genre set” (Figure 4). Both are produced through Process 7 of CALM.
The communications unit’s genred activities within the CCA’s assessment genre system involving the sponsor brief intermediary genre set (white boxes) and the final release day genre set (report cover and black boxes to the right). As depicted above, the sponsor brief intermediary genre set serves as the precursor to the final release day genre set.
The Sponsor Brief Intermediary Genre Set
According to CCA staff participants, one of the most important discursive activities that the CCA always undertakes before releasing a report is referred to as the “sponsor brief,” a face-to-face meeting with the client held in the CCA’s office in Ottawa 1 week before release day. During the sponsor brief, members of the panel and the staff team summarize high-level findings, key messages, conclusions, main takeaways, implications for policy. The sponsor brief is an important meeting because “in the CCA process the sponsor is not involved during the panel meeting process. They don’t know the proceedings, they don’t see any drafts of the report. Their first view of the report is at our sponsor brief” (Staff 09). The goal of this meeting was for the CCA to give Transport Canada a chance to learn directly from the Chair and members of the panel what their response to the original Charge to the Panel had been before being publicly available.
At the meeting, Transport Canada received “embargoed copies”—an exclusive copy of the report made available before an official release—of Older Canadians on the Move, including the Executive Summary and News Release. Transport Canada formally received the product a week before it was publicly released, and this was the first time Transport Canada saw any component of the report. While the Project Director had maintained contact with the client throughout the assessment process by providing updates on the project, the CCA ensured that there was no way for Transport Canada to influence the panel’s thinking throughout the transport project, since as explained above, the department did not participate in conducting the assessment, reviewing any drafts, or proposing any changes to the report before it was released. By presenting the report findings to Transport Canada before public release, the CCA closed the communicative loop solicited by the sponsor/client. In having the sponsor brief as an important discursive activity to end the panel process, the CCA arguably marked the transport panel’s independence from Transport Canada in a manner that fits the organizational mandate to be independent (CCA, 2023a).
Launch materials
The launch materials are prepared for and shared during the sponsor brief activity as part of the sponsor brief intermediary genre set and are then subsequently used in the release day genre set (Figure 4). The drafts of the materials are finalized after the sponsor brief and thus function as an intermediary genre set within the CCA’s discursive boundary work. The CCA used three texts for the public release of Older Canadians on the Move:
Executive summary: Written by the assessment team for “people [who] don’t have time to read, so they will read the Executive Summary and, if they find something interesting, then they will do a search into the report” (Staff 13). This bilingual text summarizes the high-level findings of Older Canadians on the Move and is included in the final report as a 10-page overview and introduction to the 140-page report. Staff indicated that the Executive Summary synthesizes the report narrative, or the main themes and claims made in the report.
News release: Written by the communications unit “to be put out there in the world so that others can pick up the news and share it with others or use it…. [It] puts us on the map in the news” (Staff 13). This bilingual text is roughly one and a half pages and introduces the report’s title and topic, contextualizes the importance of the topic and provides a summative statement from the Chair of the panel on the report’s niche and content, and a message from the CCA President on the importance of the report.
Updated web-text: Written by the communications unit, the final bilingual web-text—which was on the CCA’s website for the report Older Canadians on the Move (as of April 2024)—lists the title of the report as the web page title and details the project’s context, the main question addressed in the report, the key findings, links to the full report, the Executive Summary, the News Release, infographics used in the report, names of members of the expert panel, and CCA contact information.
Release day genre set
Older Canadians on the Move was officially released on December 14, 2017, four months after the final panel meeting. On that day, the CCA made public all final texts produced through the discursive boundary work that unfolded between spring 2016 (when the proposal was accepted) and December 2017 (release day). It was published as an English and French PDF on the transport assessment web page, where it remained as of April 2024. The CCA posted the News Release on its homepage and posted on social media to raise awareness of the report. On December 14, 2017, they also emailed a notification to everyone on their mailing list and sent the News Release to Global News Wire.
Given the work started with their Proposal/Charge to the Panel, Transport Canada was the primary audience for the final report. Based on the CCA’s distribution records, there appear to have been many additional (and bilingual) audiences for the report. One staff member explained how they identified audiences in general and for the transport report specifically: . . .we generally start with our Board and Scientific Advisory Committee, all of the panel members, all of the peer-reviewers, and our panel members identify their employer if they choose to have their employer recognize their work on the panel, we send a copy of the report to their identified employer. We also send copies of the report to [Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada] and then if there’s the sponsor of the report, in this case it was Transport Canada, we identify all of the individuals at Transport Canada who were involved with this report and we also send the report to them. Then we also send the report to provincial Ministers that are applicable. In this case, we sent the report to Transportation Ministers, Infrastructure, Seniors, or if there was anything related to aging.. . . We also send it to the House of Commons and Senate committees that are relevant.. . . And then we also send to individuals or organizations that are identified in the report. . . in this report, we had things like Age Well and. . .the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. And organizations that are mentioned, we send a report to them. And. . .research labs and organizations that focus on either transportation or aging or both. . . (Staff 09)
The CCA identified those in policy-oriented positions within different levels of Canadian government and sent the report to them. Being on the boundaries, they also sent the report to scientific researchers as well. Those who received the report or a notification of its release are the secondary audiences. Sharing all these texts in such a manner carried out a type of one-way knowledge exchange (Westwood et al., 2023).
Discussion and Conclusions
For writing and professional communications scholars, this study offers insights into the discursive nature of a boundary organization providing science advice. It describes the nature of the discursive boundary work occurring in the genred activities found in a genre system that enables the recontextualization of science for Canadian policy makers. I have claimed to open the black box of the CCA’s discursive boundary work, which features a series of discursively savvy approaches to spanning the science-policy boundaries. More specifically, the CCA recontextualizes science via its assessment genre system (Bazerman, 1994), which is guided by local meta-genres (Giltrow, 2002) and enacted through intermediary genre sets. These discursively savvy approaches enable the production of an expert panel report—a boundary object (Star & Gruesemer, 1989)—for government policy makers working, in the case presented above, for Transport Canada.
Opening this discursive black box helps us understand what helps government policy makers with the exponentially complicated societal problems we face (Gluckman, 2014). By revealing the CCA’s assessment genre system, we see the important work done behind closed doors by a trusted boundary organization to feed relevant, accurate, and credible scientific knowledge into decision-making processes. The CCA’s discursive boundary work demonstrates a well-developed method for transforming and repurposing science, and why such work takes valuable time to ensure credible science is provided to policy makers. Through the example of the CCA, we see why it matters that such recontextualized science comes from trusted boundary organizations—it is complicated work that requires sophisticated genred activities.
Figure 5 offers a holistic view of the relation between the CCA as an organization in the world and how it functions internally. The rest of the discussion refers to Figure 5 and starts with the internal genre system and recontextualization of science. It then considers the contributions of this study to ongoing meta-genre conversations, and then broader boundary work and knowledge exchange research.
The CCA’s discursive boundary work and assessment genre system. The CCA is a boundary organization situated between science and policy. It has meta-genres that inform the assessment genre system and sequentially interrelated genred activities of both the research and communications teams within the organization as it takes-up and transforms scientific knowledge and then repurposes and re-packages it for a Sponsor. (CCA = Council of Canadian Academies.)
Genre System, Intermediary Genre Sets, and the Recontextualization of Science
To open the black box of the discursive boundary work of providing science advice, I have traced the trajectory of one CCA assessment undertaken for Transport Canada. In doing so, I identified several stages and steps undertaken in the discursive process of accessing, interpreting, transforming, and repurposing science—that is, the two-step semiotic process of recontextualization (Smart & Falconer, 2021)—and evidence in an expert-endorsed manner. Most notably, opening the black box has revealed the assessment genre system (Bazerman, 1994) at the core of the CCA’s discursive boundary work. The assessment genre system enables the production of policy-relevant advisory reports. Guided by meta-genres (Giltrow, 2002) discussed below, the CCA’s assessment process features three central sequential stages to create the boundary object of an expert panel report: the genred activities of project scoping and panel recruitment, the genred activities embodied in the recursive recontextualization cycle, and the genred activities used to get to release day.
My analysis offers writing researchers the concept of intermediary genre sets to explain the transitory nature of interconnected genre sets. The term “intermediary genre set”—that is, an interconnected series (Devitt, 1991) of rhetorical actions that produce transitory texts that facilitate the uptake of knowledge (Tachino, 2012)—has been used to highlight the transitory nature of the genres found in the CCA’s recursive recontextualization cycle and communications work. The CCA uses five iterations of the panel intermediary genre set in the recursive cycle of panel briefing materials, panel meetings, panel meeting summaries, and further research/writing to seek, understand, and repurpose scientific knowledge. Built into the writing process are a series of steps meant to gather and incorporate expert panel members’ knowledge through panel feedback and peer review. Once the panel approves and, in a sense, validates the recontextualized science, it moves to the other side of the CCA’s discursive boundary work, the communications unit, to become the final boundary object. The communications unit does so by producing the sponsor brief intermediary genre set and release day genre set. Notably, this implies that the science is recontextualized as it is first taken up and transformed by the research staff and expert panel, and then refined as it is packaged into the boundary object of an advisory report by the communications unit. Put plainly, science is recontextualized by the whole of the CCA.
Meta-Genres and the CCA’s Discursive Savvy-ness
For researchers interested in meta-genre (Giltrow, 2002), the CCA offers a glimpse into the use of meta-genres as a form of, in my understanding, discursive savvy-ness that is embodied in its assessment genre system. As Doody (2021) highlights, meta-genres can be both explicitly recorded and tacitly understood in practice. The tacit understanding and practice of the two meta-genres found in the CCA—both CALM and, to a lesser extent, the Style Guide—suggest a discursive savvy-ness at play through the collaborative work of those in the CCA who create and maintain CALM and those who practice it. CALM is the accumulated knowledge of CCA staff who have developed and documented the lessons learned from each assessment over the history of the CCA. Wickman (2023) suggests that meta-genres layer on different perspectives and experiences of those using them. In the CCA, this layering happens through those experiences encountered by staff team members using the assessment genre system. Along with CALM, the Style Guide provides further explicit background knowledge and guidance to communications staff for the final look and feel—the rhetorical standards—of the boundary object of an advisory report.
My analysis also suggests that meta-genres embody the genred activities (Bazerman, 2021) found in the CCA. There is a kind of specialized boundary knowledge embedded in the genred activities encapsulated in the meta-genres. It is this boundary knowledge that is the CCA’s discursive savvy-ness—they have developed a tried-and-true method for providing science advice to Canadian policy makers. The Transport Project and Older Canadians on the Move serve as an example of the discursive boundary work, and how the CCA employs this savvy-ness to access, interpret, transform, and finalize a new form of recontextualized scientific knowledge for policy makers. CALM and the Style Guide embody this knowledge.
Boundary Work, Advisory Reports, and Knowledge-Exchange Activities
My study has provided boundary scholars insights from genre theory into the nature of the boundary object of an advisory report. Advisory reports are a multifaceted type of knowledge-exchange activity often used to give policy makers evidence-based advice via a report. Such advisory reports have been studied, including the ways knowledge is shared via science communication practices (Falconer, 2019, 2023; Orpin, 2019). We can now add this study to our understanding of boundary objects and advisory reports as they are developed through the discursive boundary work of an organization sitting between the domains of science and policy.
There are several types of scientific knowledge exchange activities (Westwood et al., 2023) embedded within the CCA’s discursive boundary work. These include one-way exchanges (e.g., delivering the report to Transport Canada, sending the report and launch-day texts to various actors), solicited exchange (e.g., Transport Canada seeking a CCA assessment, peer review), network exchange (e.g., staff seeking advice from internal committees on panel recruitment), and participatory exchange (e.g., the dynamic between panel members and staff). These are key, dynamic approaches to knowledge exchange that are commonly employed by the CCA in performing boundary work.
Tracking the activity types employed by the CCA provides insight into knowledge exchange as a part of the CCA’s discursive boundary work involving a dynamic, multidirectional shifting between producers (writers, researchers, scientists) and users (readers, researchers, policy makers) of recontextualized genred knowledge embodied within the advisory report. Along with Kapoor et al. (2023) and Nguyen et al. (2021), this adds another research site to contextualize discursive knowledge-exchange activities. It also challenges assumptions within science and technology studies (Bray, 2019; Myers, 2003) and suggests that there are moments where one-way exchange is a suitable approach. However, those using this approach must be conscious about when, where, and how to apply the model.
Future Research
There are several points from this study worth pursuing through further research. For those interested in genred activities, more insights are needed to flesh out the concept of an intermediary genre set developed here. More specifically, where are other such intermediary genre sets found? What functions do they serve in those settings? More insight is also needed to better understand the ways that an organization’s assumptions appear in the final boundary object produced through such discursive boundary work. Such insights may reveal the ways that a boundary organization’s discourse shapes the nature of an advisory report.
Others could explore the challenges and/or obstacles that emerge during the discursive boundary work carried out by the CCA or similar organizations. The nature of such discursive boundary work likely involves overcoming many challenges, whether in writing, collaborating, procedural, or beyond. Through these and other avenues, we may get a better understanding of the complex boundary work of recontextualizing science that is needed to address the exponentially multifaceted policy questions we face a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Graham Smart and Natasha Artemeva for years of support and mentorship. Thanks also to Christen Rachul, Joe Rowsell, Marc Saner, and Kathryn O’Hara. Thank-you to the two anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful constructive comments that helped shape the article. I am grateful to the Council of Canadian Academies for allowing my research to occur, and all the participants whose voices are represented here. The research and writing of this article occurred on ancestral Algonquin territory.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Yes, I worked in the organization while collecting data. I acknowledge this in the article, and my methodology (ethnography) requires becoming a community member to understand the phenomena under investigation.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
