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Exploring identity positionings in scholarly texts on management

   | 23 ago 2022

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Background and research aims

Since scholarly texts on management have been criticised as being no longer effective in communicating today's changing sociocultural, disciplinary, and practical contexts, my purpose in this paper is to conceptualise the identity options management authors can assume to communicate disciplinary knowledge and beliefs.

Theoretical perspective

The theoretical perspectives involved in this analysis include selected aspects of Harré and van Langenhove's (1999) positioning theory that I linked with my model of writer identity as a trichotomy of selves (individual self, collective self, depersonalised self), textually conveyed in the three types of voice (Lehman, 2018; Lehman and Sułkowski, 2020).

Key findings

Based on this conceptual framework, specific advice is provided as to how academics can create a reader-inclusive or authoritative writer persona in their texts. In doing so, I support the recent efforts in Critical Management Studies (CMS) to ‘write differently’ in order to address the aesthetic, moral, and political concerns of writing in the field.