While no label is ever entirely neutral, the term text is intended to be as value-free as possible including all materials which might become subject to analysis. A piece of crime fiction is considered a text, as is the journal article of a criminologist. We are interested in the rules which go into the construction of any text and its relationship to other texts. The term discourse has several different meanings but for our purposes it refers to a set of texts which all follow the same rules of construction and representation. Thus criminology is a discourse as is something as specific as golden age detective stories or deterrence theories .
All discourses have formal and informal rules as to what is considered a part of that discourse.
There are usually ideological concerns tied into this process. A genre is a kind of discourse relating to a set of fiction which follows a set of patterns or rules. Like all discourses this definition is arbitrary and can be highly artificial. Most genre s have their origin in the demands of the production process and the influence of market capitalism. Like stereotypes, genres can be convenient labels to refer to a group of similar texts but this can create problems when the label is allowed to define those to which it is applied.