“How Do We Replace Concrete?”

• Merja Koskela ^[1] ; Liisa Kääntä ^[1] ; Eveliina Salmela ^[1] ; Henna Syrjälä ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Vaasa

     University of Vaasa

     Vaasa, Finlandia

     
• Localización: HERMES: Journal of Language and Communication in Business is an open access online international, ISSN 0904-1699, ISSN-e 1903-1785, Nº. 65, 2025, págs. 63-80
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The aim of the article is to explore how housing and construction field experts give advice concerning climate-wise housing in a professional magazine, and what types of potential knowledge asymmetries are connected with the advice. By potential knowledge asymmetries we refer to situations in which experts writing to other experts in a professional magazine indicate differences in the depth, scope, or type of knowledge possessed about a topic by offering advice to the readers. By offering advice, the authors position themselves as having epistemic authority on the topics they address. Based on argumentative, editorial-type texts in a Finnish building and construction field magazine, a pragmatic discourse analysis combined with qualitative content analysis of ways of advice-giving and sources of potential knowledge asymmetries in the context of climate-wise housing was conducted. The findings reveal that (1) all combinations of explicit-implicit and targeted-not-targeted advice-giving are present in the data, but explicit and not-targeted advice are most prevalent; (2) there are five main sources of potential knowledge asymmetries concerning system-level phenomena: technical, legal-regulatory, political, economic, and expertise-related. The paper concludes by discussing the potential and limitations of advice-giving in written expert-to-expert contexts in contributing to advancing climate-wise housing.