Thomas Edison needed to engage with, including journalism, finances and equity markets, patents and the courts, civic regulation, industrial laboratories, commercial marketing, corporate organization and others, in order to develop a system of lighting and centralized power. The technical innovations only became possible by gaining presence, meaning and value within the communications of each of these systems. Another influence on rhetorical genre studies comes from M.M. Bakhtin's analysis of genre, based in literary criticism and non-structural dialogic linguistics. Bakhtin considers genre as responsive to social, situational context, laden with intertextual history and ideology. Bakhtin states, "Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language." His work strengthened the developing view of genre both as a semiotic structure and as a recurrent action analogous to the speech act or utterance. Translated into English from the Russian in 1986, Bakhtin's "Problem of Speech Genres" began to influence genre studies in the 1990's (for examples, in the work of Berkenkotter and Huckin, Devitt, Freedman, Journet, and Schryer. Literary conventions Conventions are usual indicators such as phrases, themes, quotations, or explanations that readers expect to find in a certain genre. They could be considered "stereotypes" of that genre. For example, Science fiction is expected to be set in the future, and have futuristic events, technological advances, and futuristic ideas. Realism is expected to contain a story about people who could pass as real, struggling through real-life situations and/or real world events, etc. Critic Paul Alpers explains that literary conventions are like meeting places where past and present writers "come together" to determine the form a convention should take in a particular literary instance (work). In practical terms, this coming together is a matter of the present writer consulting the work of predecessors, but Alpers wants to connote the sense of active negotiation and accommodation that takes place between the writer and the genre he or she is working in (a genre defined by other people). According to Alpers, a misconception persists in modern criticism that literary convention is an "arbitrary and inflexible practice, established by widespread usage and imposed from without." Convention in this sense is the "antithesis of the personal and individual"; it is "felt to constrain the [writer]." Alpers reconceptualizes literary convention as something "constitutive and enabling." For him, generic conventions are "not fixed procedures imposed by impersonal tradition;"