A genre exists because producers and audiences symmetrically share encoding rules

Evidence

It means that a set of extremely tightly coded rules exist whereby stories of a certain recognizable type, content, and structure can be easily encoded within the Western form. What is more, these “rules of encoding” were so diffused, so symmetrically shared as between producer and audience, that the “message” was likely to be decoded in a manner highly symmetrical to that in which it had been encoded. This reciprocity of codes is, indeed, precisely what is entailed in the notion of stylization or “conventionalization,” and the presence of such reciprocal codes is, of course, what defines or makes possible the existence of a genre. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 790

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines genre and conventionalization precisely in terms of code reciprocity between producer and audience.
• XREF: Hegemony as shared codes of meaning — ties to the reader’s goal of reading Hall as economic/political thought; shared codes are the cultural substrate on which Gramscian hegemony operates.