The discourse of research and practice in marketing journals

Abstract

Articles in marketing journals reveal diverse perspectives on market activity through a discourse that foregrounds research-related issues and/or product performance and decision-making processes in firms. The distinct discourses in turn reflect a perceived relationship between author and reader. This paper addresses the question of how linguistic choices are used for the construction of a view of marketing activity that corresponds to the expectations of a particular readership. The paper examines ways of presenting market activity and compares the rhetorical resources used for building texts. Three types of journals were distinguished by readership and by editorial emphasis on either practice or research. Articles in three journals were analyzed with a grammatical model of sentence subjects which reveals abstraction and concreteness in texts. Citations were also analyzed to see how authors present research and researchers and what the reporting verb choices indicate about authors’ commitment to propositions. An examination of non-linguistic text led to identification of variable uses of devices for reader engagement with text. Results indicate separate discourses in terms of conceptuality and concreteness in grammatical subjects but suggest less clearly defined patterns of citation.