Exploring identity positionings in scholarly texts on management

When writers sit down to produce an academic text, they need to bear in mind that choices for authorial self-representation are not unlimited as they are made from specific sociocultural and discipline-sanctioned subject positions that determine how people order their thoughts and ideas into a meaningful argument. Within these contexts and to varying degrees, when writing we all are expected to adopt certain attitudes, values, beliefs, and employ linguistic forms typical of our discourse communities in order to communicate meaningfully. It is the writers’ understanding and use of the above rhetorical strategies that influence the way they position themselves to the propositional content and to the reader to create a credible and convincing authorial identity.

This conceptualisation indicates that textual self-representation involves a compilation of imposed, assumed and negotiable identities reflecting the fact that language itself is an ensemble of different overlapping voices, referred to by Bakhtin (1986) as ‘social languages and speech genres’ (also see Lehman, 2015). In a Bakhtinian heteroglossic view, reflective positioning, which takes place ‘within’ individuals, leads to major changes in their textual self-representation. These changes are produced by imposed, assumed, and negotiable identities – see Pavlenko's (2004) framework for identity negotiation – and are marked by internal conflicts caused by the necessity to lose some of the old aspects of identity and acquire new ones in order to develop a sense of affiliation and belonging to a new discourse community. The imposed (or non-negotiable) aspects of identity refer to those sociocultural conventions, including power relations, which individuals cannot resist or contest and which exist within particular discourse. The assumed aspects of identity, which are not negotiated, are constituted in the process of imaginative production of identity (S. Hall, 1990), and with which individuals are comfortable and view as core parts. The negotiable aspects of identity are the ones that can be and are contested and resisted in order to integrate fragmented, decentered, and shifting identities experienced by writers in their desire for a unified and coherent identity.

In the context of the above, what is critical for the successful communication of scholarly ideas is to write with clear intent and an idea of the audience in mind, as well as to word meanings in ways that are consistent with our and our audiences’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions. For me, the Chinese character ting captures this idea succinctly (see the graphic representation below).

Figure 1

Ting conceptualises the spirit of conscientious listening, thereby offering a better quality of communication. Because we bring our hearts, minds, eyes, and ears into the exchange with the speaker, we are deeply engaged in what the other person is saying; we are listening for the meaning conveyed by their words. Similarly, in writing, we need to be constantly attentive to all the elements of the ‘rhetorical situation’, which Cherry defines as involving the “representation of audience, subject matter, and other elements of context” (Cherry, 1988, p. 269). These contextual elements should include understanding writing as sounds and tunes (Dane, 2011), as dialogue (Helin, 2016), and as something that resonates (Meier & Wegener, 2017)’ (Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018, p. 266) and as “a shared research process that is emergent and unfinished and, above all, relational (Helin, 2016)” (ibid.).

Guided by such a conceptualisation of scholarly written discourse, I intend to support established ideas connected to writing differently about managerial issues, which are increasingly well known to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) community (Grey & Sinclair, 2006; Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018; Gilmore et al., 2019; Pullen et al., 2020). ‘Writing differently’ about management theory and practice will involve major shifts in our well-formed views and beliefs about how scientific knowledge should be written about and disseminated.

Considering the above, my purpose is to explore how management scholars can effectively communicate their ideas and beliefs to wide and diverse audiences and, in so doing, restore ‘meaning and purpose’ (Tourish, 2020) in their texts. Acknowledging the role of linguistic proficiency in English and the importance of networked participation in global scholarship in communicating to wide and diverse audiences, this paper discusses how writers can rhetorically navigate the challenging terrain of scholarly writing. In doing so, I aim to propose a conceptual framework which presents possibilities for writers to occupy subject positions that reveal the degree to which they include or exclude the reader in the construction of their argumentation and in this way project a specific authorial persona.

I will begin this enquiry by presenting insightful reflections of some CMS scholars on the rhetorical crisis in reporting business and management research and on what writing differently about managerial issues can mean to us as members of the academic community engaged in the exchange of disciplinary ideas and knowledge. These insights reveal that writers in business and management studies often fail to write about their research in an accessible and interesting way and hence fail to engage with readers and involve them in seeking effective responses to the issues facing business and management research today. Specifically, these critical observations focus on the following three issues: (1)

tendentious, jargon-ridden, and obscurantist language, which to the reader seems punitive rather than engaging (Grey & Sinclair, 2006; Adler et al., 2008; Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018; Gilmore et al. 2019; Pullen et al. 2020; Tourish, 2020) and which often renders business and management writing meaningless to anyone outside the field (Bridgman & Stephens, 2008);

This new approach to writing about management theory and practice allows us to look at writing as something personal: “It begins with a person and it ends with a person …”; collective: “It begins as a relationship between people and it ends as a relationship between people …”; and political: “It challenges knowledge” (Pullen et al., 2020, p. 25). The purpose is to offer writers relative freedom in developing a more reflective and interpersonal writing style and in this way to communicate management knowledge and belief claims to wide and diverse audiences. Hopefully, to “defending and nurturing our own voices in academic texts (Grafström & Jonsson, 2020, p. 119) and in view of the audience's needs and expectations, readers will not perceive managerial texts in this way: “I used to think that I was stupid if I didn’t understand papers, now I see it as at least partially a deficiency in the way they are written” (Grey, 2006, pp. 447–448). He continues this argument by pointing out that “we [CMS scholars] are writing ultimately about people's lives. What can it mean if only 20 people in the world understand what we are saying? It means that we are either so bad at writing that we can’t communicate, or so full of ourselves that we don’t want to communicate. The first possibility seems unacceptably incompetent, the second simply despicable (Grey, 2006, p. 448).

Writing is a socially situated practice which “is not a technology made up of a set of transferable cognitive skills, but a constellation of practices which differ from one social setting to another” (Ivanič, 1998, p. 65). Academic disciplines create epistemic communities whose members share common objects of enquiry and patterns of privileging sustained by the power relations that exist among them. The expression ‘patterns of privileging’ refers to the idea introduced by Wertsch, for whom ‘privileging’ is linked to “the fact that one meditational means, such as a social language, is viewed as being more appropriate and efficacious than others in a particular sociocultural setting” (1991, p. 124). This specificity is essential for the nature of the discipline's genre and will affect the degree of flexibility that exists in the sanctioned ways of what can be written in terms of content and the rhetorical style in which that content is presented. According to Hyland, “a community, then, is more than a group with shared goals, but a way of “being in the world”, a means of interacting with colleagues and creating certain values and understandings” (Hyland, 2019, p.8).

Academic disciplines communicate their ideas and beliefs predominantly through texts. Where discipline-specific academic texts were once perceived as monolithic entities, today we recognise that writing also includes the textual realisation of different aspects of authorial identity, which is linguistically encoded in authorial voice. A writer's voice, then, varies both across and within disciplinary communities and allows writers a degree of flexibility in how they present their knowledge claims. In this way, disciplinary literacies are central to both community epistemologies and personal, writer identities, which are formed and maintained through the voice that writers create in their scientific outputs.

Owing to the fact that “effectively controlling interpersonal features becomes central to building a convincing argument and creating an effective text” (Hyland, 2000, p. 364), the construction of a credible writer persona needs to involve not only the institutional and idiosyncratic preferences the writer has on how disciplinary knowledge should be written about, but also the writer's consideration of the reader's perceived knowledge and expectations.

In his later work, Hyland states that “taking on a voice associated with a particular field of study involves aligning oneself with its knowledge-making practices: the topics it believes worth talking about and how it talks about them” (Hyland, 2012, p. 15). The reader's response is therefore seen as a crucial consideration in the academic writers’ construction of their argumentation and how they position themselves towards the belief and knowledge claims they aim to communicate.

The relationship between writer identity, or identity aspects, and voice has been investigated in a handful of studies, including pedagogy-focussed (Castelló et al., 2012; Liang, 2013; Dressen-Hammouda, 2014) and reader-focussed research (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009; Tardy, 2012; Morton & Storch, 2019). Other studies have also explored voice as a textual realisation of social identities (Prior, 2001) and the effect of identity positionings (Ivanič & Camps, 2001).

In contrast to the meagre body of research into the interplay between writer identity and voice construction, the notion of ‘voice’ as a single subject of research has long been explored from a variety of perspectives, including scientific genres as well as textual and extra-textual features of writing. Studies on voice encompass the concept of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2004, 2008); self-referential pronouns (Matsuda, 2001); modality, lexis, nominalisation and the use of the ‘I’ pronoun (Tang & John, 1999), ideological and thematic revelations (Pavlenko, 2004), textual and extra-textual aspects of identity (Ivanič, 1998), and reader perceptions of voice (Morton & Storch, 2019).

Although voice is regarded as elemental to successful writing, there is a problem with the conceptual slipperiness of the construct. Traditionally, voice is seen as an expression of the writer's individuality, their real, authentic self, which is the product of one's unique cognition and personality. From this perspective, voice as a linguistic realisation of writer identity cannot be perceived as a tangible aspect of text production because each person has a distinct identity, unique to themselves.

The opposite conception is the social-constructionist orientation, a sociological concept which focuses on functional relationships between language use and socially sanctioned communication goals in academic writing and avoids legitimisation of individual voice, which is considered to be a source of distraction. Voice, in this view, is achieved by the acquisition of the dominant discourse conventions within a single genre.

The orientation that bridges these two approaches is termed social-constructivism, a psychological concept that describes the process of taking socially available artefacts and making meaning with them (Vygotsky, 1978). Unlike the social-constructionist approach, social-constructivism focuses not only on the constitution and appropriation of social norms, but also on how individuals construct form and meaning drawing on socially available resources. As Matsuda accurately observes, “the social-constructivist perspective is concerned with how the social conventions are appropriated by individual writers as they respond to the particular rhetorical situation in the process of writing, while at the same time influencing the evolving conventions” (Matsuda, 2015, p.149).

These differences in the conceptions of voice lead to different views on writer agency: the subjective, individualist perspective assigns value to a writer's individuality and agency, while the objective, social-constructionist perspective denies agency for the writer. For Matsuda, “the personal orientation […] tends to locate voice in the writer; social constructionist orientation tends to seek voice in the text; and the social-constructionist theories of voice seek voice in the perceived reality that results from the text-mediated interaction between the writer and the reader” (Matsuda, 2015, p. 149). It must be noted, however, that these three perspectives on voice tend to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

My approach to voice is influenced by social-constructivist views, which makes it possible to find space between social-constructionist and personal orientations by recognising how they are mutually constitutive and inevitable. Consequently, the social-constructivist perspective enables us to analyse how individual writers contribute to the creation of social conventions and how social conventions help individual writers create meaning; in other words, how academic authors are challenged to create a voice which is both appropriate to them as writers and also appropriate to a given audience and genre.

Academic writers employ a multiplicity of voices in their literacy outputs which manifest their discursive and relational identities (Ivanič, 1998). Following this view, I highlight the importance of voice in the theoretical discussions of writer identity (see Lehman, 2018; Lehman and Sułkowski, 2020). The inextricable link between writer identity and voice has been succinctly explained by Flowerdew and Wang for whom “voice is a means for people to articulate social identities prescribed through social labels such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers” (2015, p. 85). This is an essential aspect in the process of text creation as “academic writers do not simply produce texts that discuss social or natural realities but use language to acknowledge, construct and negotiate social relations” (Hyland, 2005, p. 364). Such an understanding of the interdependent relationship between writer identity and voice formation enables us to see how an academic text reveals both the author's position to the propositional content and her awareness of readers’ responses (see also Hyland & Tse, 2004; Hyland, 2005).

It is acknowledged that all writing conveys representations of different aspects of writer identity (Elbow, 1994; Ivanič, 1998; Ivanič & Camps, 2001; Hyland, 2012; Matsuda, 2015) and is influenced by individual and social factors. These factors include the ways in which individuals reproduce or challenge dominant discourses and occupy subject positions made available to them in their disciplinary communities.

In this theoretically-oriented paper, I build on my previous work on theorising writer identity (see author, xxxx, xxxx). For me, the identity authors present in their text is constituted by a trichotomy of selves (individual self, collective self, depersonalised self) which are textually conveyed in three distinct authorial voices – each self/voice with a rhetorical style suited to different linguistically expressive acts.

In my conceptualisation of the concept of ‘self’ (2018), the individual self is achieved by those identity aspects which include an individual's cognition, personality, and life history and differentiate that person from other people within their sociocultural, linguistic, and disciplinary contexts. The individual self is the outcome of interpersonal comparison processes which aim to accentuate the individual's uniqueness. The voice invoked in the text conveys the writer's independent opinions and beliefs and allows for establishing authorial authority for the content of their writing.

The collective self is achieved by creating bonds of attachment with other discourse community members (authors and readers). It comprises those elements of the self-concept that the author shares with the audience and reveals the writer's position towards this relationship which is based on the ideas of commonality and equality, resulting in the creation of a reader-sensitive voice.

The depersonalised self is achieved by the writer's alignment with the rhetorical conventions of their disciplines. The impersonal tone, typically expected of scientific texts, makes writers assume a neutral academic voice which is devoid of personal or cultural bias. But this compliance with the writing standards of the author's discourse community also means that the author considers the reader's needs and expectations as to how disciplinary knowledge should be written about.

Since a writer's voice is a manifestation of their position to the propositional content and a recognition of a reader's presence and inclusion as an active discourse participant, it is not fully realised until it is ‘heard’ by a reader. The reader's perspective is critical not only in the effect it has on the way writers construct meaning and present their knowledge claims, but also in the perceived assessment of the text as a contribution to the scientific landscape of their shared academic discipline. Consequently, the decision whether an individual, collective and depersonalised voice becomes dominant in authorial self-representation depends on the rhetorical context of the text production. Therefore, writers usually move between different subject positions to choose a voice which will be best suited to a specific context, making writer identity a compound of interwoven positionings.

Harré and van Langenhove's (1999) positioning theory allows us to analyse writer identity from a theoretical perspective that emphasises the ways in which the discourses and social practices, individuals participate in, can influence their emerging identities. As mentioned previously, the choice of voice writers employ to position themselves with regards to the propositional content and the reader are determined by the discursive situation in which the communication occurs. This conscious or intentional positioning was described by Harré and van Langenhove (1999) as being of four different types: (1) deliberate self-positioning, (2) forced self-positioning, (3) deliberate positioning of others, and (4) forced self-positioning and forced positioning of others.

Deliberate self-positioning occurs in any communicative situation where an individual wants to express their personal identity and which can be done in one of these three ways: by emphasizing one's agency, by revealing one's unique points of view or by referring to events from one's bibliography. This is a type of positioning achieved in displays of agency, self-consciousness, and autobiography. Deliberate positioning of others is done in the discursive act of making space in the writer's storyline to be taken up by the reader. Forced self-positioning and forced positioning of others are the demands for positioning that usually come from institutional settings and require alignment with institutional ideology, communication patterns and relations of power inscribed in them. In taking a neutral stance, these two types of forced positionings eliminate the opportunity for any type of self-disclosure. These four types of positioning have been linked in Table 1 to my conceptualisation of identity (2018, 2020) as a trichotomy of selves which are textually realised in the three types of voice.

I have framed this paper with a new vision of ‘how’ the concept of writer identity can help management scholars to write differently by presenting rhetorical options for textual realisation of the three identity aspects. This approach encompasses a range of perspectives that are critical of how field-related issues are typically written about in management journals, which have been found to be monologic, non-reader inclusive and not engaging with interests and knowledge outside the narrow confines of traditional management theory (Hambrick, 2007). I have provided the community with specific and practical discourse-based techniques for addressing and initiating the changes many management scholars feel are necessary for the effective communication of future of scientific work in management studies. In particular, this article offers insights into how one can systematically investigate the phenomenon of the textual realisation of identity, with particular emphasis on the employment of both reader inclusive and exclusive rhetorical strategies in the process of text production. The awareness of how to use these strategies will give management writers the opportunity to weigh both the risks related to ‘writing differently’, in that they challenge the discipline-sanctioned rhetorical conventions, as well as the consequences of aligning themselves with those conventions.

Linking the four types of positioning proposed by Harré and van Langenhove (1999) to the concept of identity consisting of the trichotomy of selves and linguistically encoded voice (see Table 1) enables us to further investigate and explain ‘identity work’ in managerial written discourse. Specifically, since these types of positioning are not optional extras but can be found in any single text, they are an invaluable source of knowledge about how managerial writers position themselves in order to appropriate identities that can enable them to effectively communicate with their readers. As Darics and Clifton rightfully observe, “this is because it is through positioning the (changing) identities of people, organizations, and parts of organizations in relation to each other that a sense of what is, was, or has been, going on is enacted” (Darics & Clifton, 2018, p. 5).

It is my strong conviction that at the heart of academic persuasion is the writer's interaction with the reader because “the writing we like doesn’t just tell people things in a didactic way, it opens a door for an experience to be had by the reader” (Grey & Sinclair, 2006, p. 448). This interaction involves the writer employing language to encode ideas and frame arguments, which the reader finds convincing. In this way, the writer's argumentation and knowledge claims obtain legitimacy in the mind of the reader. Kiduff et al. describe the language that is used to creat this legitimacy as “institutionalized logics of action (defined as organizing principles that shape ways of viewing the world) (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005, p. 38) [which] play a fundamental role in providing social actors with vocabularies of motive, frameworks for reasoning, and guidelines for practice” (Kilduff et al., 2011). Future research can further develop the proposed conceptual framework to critically analyse CMS writing practices. The framework offers the possibility of using evidence-based research to investigate the ways in which disciplinary knowledge and beliefs are communicated, with specific focus on whether this knowledge and beliefs are disseminated in a reader-inclusive or authoritative way. In so doing, it will allow for the creation of new pedagogies for academic writing programmes. Through such programmes, developing the critical awareness of voice as authorial self-representation will allow management writers to establish and maintain better control over the writer identity they present to their readership. They will be able to make conscious linguistic choices about how to draw on different voice facets to persuade and convince readers of the propositional content of the text, which is vital to successful communication.

The proposed approach enables identity to be viewed as a fundamental and agentive force in the writing process and highlights the need to include authorial identity and its textual realisations in considerations of what effective writing on management entails. It is my sincere hope that the above proposed model of the textual positionings of writer identity will generate interesting debate amongst CMS scholars on what rhetorical strategies are involved in the construction of authorial identity in scholarly texts on management. I believe that the uptake of this conceptual framework will enable us to identify and analyse the traditional rhetorical strategies employed in articles on management and to explore ways in which writers can appropriate alternative voices in their authorial self-representations. In this way, the current framework moves the focus away from traditional communication strategies, which are increasingly seen as no longer able to accommodate the changing global, disciplinary and practical contexts. Its adoption in academic writing programmes will be able to provide specific guidance as to how academics can create a writer identity that can more effectively disseminate new ideas and practices in scholarly exchanges in the field.