The archaeology of a new genre: Vision and values texts of public authorities in Sweden

In the ‘vision and values’ genre the core values of an organisation are presented. Since the early 21th century this genre has become salient at Swedish public authorities – an unprecedented change in the historically stable repertoire of genres of such authorities. These texts aim to influence the attitudes and behaviour of employees rather than to regulate the core activities of the authorities. This is achieved through an elaborate use of language, but significantly also by employing visual resources. The project aims at developing a critical understanding of the ‘vision and values’ genre through a large-scale analysis of texts, employing techniques from ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA). The archaeology of the genre and its intertextual relations to other genres and texts in the public and private sector will be analysed. The project will contribute to fill a substantial gap in research on the history of texts from public authorities, not the least in terms of their increasing visualisation. The research questions are: 1) How can the ‘vision and values’ genre be understood in relation to other genres and in relation to economic and political changes, including changes in public management, in Sweden? 2) How can the systematic use of visual resources be understood from a critical perspective? 3) Which are the methodological tools that need to be developed in order to analyse historical, intertextual and multimodal genre change?