Writing for a difference: Why writing on management needs to address the concept of writer identity

Abstract

Since acceptance and visibility in discourse communities depends on readers’ recognition of the veracity of writers’ argumentation, my purpose in this paper is to conceptualize the identity academic authors assume to communicate disciplinary knowledge and beliefs to their readers. The theoretical perspectives involved in this analysis include Hyland’s (2008) interactive model of voice and selected aspects of Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) positioning theory, which I synthesized into a multi-aspectual model of writer identity. Based on this conceptual framework, the discourse analytic tool was designed to measure rhetorical features which signal writer stance and reader engagement, and correspond to four types of intentional positioning of writer identity (linguistically encoded in the voices). From this analysis, specific advice is provided as to how academics can create a reader-inclusive and therefore more effective authorial identity in their texts. In this way, I present a transformative vision of management writing, which has been criticised as being no longer effective in communicating today’s changing socio-cultural, disciplinary and practical contexts. In so doing, I support the recent efforts in CMS to ‘write differently’ in order to address the aesthetic, moral and political concerns of writing in the field.