universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

74different perspectives on the role played by BRs in each disciplinary community. If wetake the 22,000 members of the American Economic Association who receive theJournal of Economic Literature, for example, we are considering a very large audiencethat can be affected in ways that may be underrated. In chemistry, BRs apparently servethe purpose of informing practitioners about new publications more objectively than inthe other two disciplines:[C]The purpose of a review is to inform the fellow chemists of the content and valueof the book. The reviewer’s main role is that of a good reader, giving anaccurate and critical idea about what is inside the book, pre-digesting the bookfor the readership of that specific journal.By ‘value of the book’, C means the practical value that the content of a book hasin terms of interest for the readership and not specifically the theoretical value that thereviewer thinks the book has for the disciplinary body of knowledge:[C][the role of book reviews is] to alert people to the existence of a new book; toinform about the book’s scope, level of presentation (beginners, advanced, etc.),level of the expected audience.For L, on the other hand, the role of BRs is more like a regulatory device that caninfluence the oscillatory movement of the disciplinary pendulum in favor of one or otherauthor, theory, or tendency: