Forum: The Case for Reflexive Writing Practices in Management Communication and Organization Studies (original) (raw)
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A growing movement in management and organization studies (MOS) seeks to break out of the constraints of scientific writing in order to better develop insights and understanding about management and the world of work, and how to communicate those ideas. 'Scientific writing' is understood to put restrictions on the possibilities for thinking, discussing and learning, for maintaining a dysfunctional status quo through quashing the possibilities of even thinking differently. This has direct implications for management learning: if 'writing differently' were to assist in developing new ways of understanding of managerial research and its implications, would it prove a distraction that 'dis-educates' and prevents learning? The strengths of the arguments against dominant forms of academic writing suggest not. Indeed, they lead to the question: what forms can 'writing differently' take that will challenge dominant conceptions of management that, arguably, inhibit understanding and induct students and practitioners into maintaining, rather than challenging, neo-liberalist control regimes? This special issue will therefore explore some of the different forms that our academic writing might take and how these new ways of writing could change the boundaries of thought within schools of business and management. Its focus is on articulating ways of thinking about management learning differently, both by challenging the performative work of dominant modes of writing, thinking, reading and learning about management, and by offering alternatives.
Negotiating tensions around new forms of academic writing
Discourse, Context and Media (2018), 2018
Almost every aspect of an academic’s role involves specialised forms of writing, and the range of digital platforms used to produce this has increased. Core genres such as the journal article and monograph remain central, but the ways they are now commonly produced via file-sharing software and online submission systems are changing them. Digital media also allows academics to stay up to date with their field, connect with others, and share research with wider audiences. Furthermore, academics are increasingly expected to maintain online identities via academic networking sites, and to create and disseminate knowledge via hybrid genres such as tweets and blogs. However, these platforms also represent a potential threat to academics’ values and sense of identity. This paper reports on an [name of funder] research project investigating the writing practices of academics across different disciplines at three English universities. Through academics’ accounts of their experience with and feelings about the role of digital media in their professional writing, this paper explores the factors that complicate their engagement with new genres of writing. The findings reveal a tension between the values of social media, which see knowledge as user-generated and decentralised, and the forms of knowledge creation that are rewarded in academia.
Writing Differently about Scholarly Issues: Defending Our Voices and Inviting the Reader
Discourses on Culture
This paper addresses an ethical issue which comes into play when a scholar sits down to write an article. It concerns rhetorical strategies traditionally employed in top-tier academic journals, specifically in business and management, which efface a unique authorial voice and are reader exclusive. To reclaim authorial voice and embrace the reader’s presence in text construction, we propose approaching scholarly writing as a dialogue between the writer and the reader, an emotional engagement which includes aspects of the notion of ‘tenderness’ coined by Olga Tokarczuk (2019, 2020). Writing with tenderness enables authors to engage with readers in a way that helps them unite fragments of text into a single coherent design. Because in our digitalised and globalised world, there is a lack of universal values the writer could draw on to craft arguments convincing for the reader, we need to search for new ways to narrate our lives. Our approach involves the inclusion of what Tokarczuk (20...
Academic communication: writing research papers as a culturally conditioned activity
ESP Across Cultures, 2016
Lately there has been growing pressure on modern academics to be a part of the globalized community. As a result, in all genres of communication, international academia has adopted Anglo-Saxon patterns of research presentation, both written and oral. The first aim of this paper is to describe the differences in how scholars present their findings in research articles (RA) in international journals in English and in local journals in Russian. The second aim is to present the reasons for these differences, seeking explanations from the sociocultural contexts in which these RAs were written, as well as to provide advice to local authors as to how to make their RAs more competitive at the international level.To achieve this aim, this study examines six RAs in English and six RAs in Russian, published in peer-reviewed international and local journals. The analysis draws upon the theory of contrastive rhetoric (Kaplan 1966; Connor 1996), which stresses the necessity of studying texts in the contexts of society and thus views academic writing as a culturally conditioned activity. The methodology used to unveil discursive conventions of RAs relies on a contrastive approach, which facilitates the identification of the structural differences and linguistic features of RAs in both English and Russian. The conclusion is made that the RAs differ in terms of writer/reader responsibility, form/content orientation, and reader engagement level. These differences are a result of sociocultural environments that affect the process of identity construction in academic discourse.
Paradigmatic Plurality or Citation Market? A Longue Durée Perspective of Management Writing
Journal of Management History, 2011
This essay focuses on the long term emergence of management research journals, and highlights the social, cultural, technological and financial factors that facilitate or constrain such modes of writing. Drawing on historical material and direct observations, two future scenarios can be projected. The first is based on a vast and entirely electronic (co)citation market, in which a writer"s "e-reputation" is of central importance. In this context, incentives are purely individual; paradigmatic dimensions have disappeared. The second scenario involves a plurality of paradigms, and consists of diverse communities that employ relatively compatible modes of writing and evaluation. The implications of both scenarios are discussed.
Academic Writing in different Contexts: Writing to negotiate, writing to report
This paper concerns with the characteristic distinction found in two undergraduate dissertations written by an English-speaking and an Indonesian-speaking student writers. It reports on a research project investigating the way these undergraduate student writers coming from different linguistic background and contexts construct and negotiate interpersonal meaning in their academic texts. The research draws on resources within the APPRAISAL theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics to explain how the two writers select interpersonal linguistic choices to establish discipline related meanings, engage with others and assume authority. The data comprises linguistic resources in the discourse semantic level which are analyzed through the systems of ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION. The results show that the English-speaking student writer tends to mutually engage with readers throughout her writing in particular ways. The complex negotiation with external academic sources includes “bringing them in”, tactically evaluating them, and thoughtfully integrating them in the argument as it develops. In contrast, the Indonesian student writer is likely to report what she has done in her research and pay little attention to the readers’ presence. She tends to employ external academic sources to merely support her argument without evaluating them and ignore some which are not in line with hers. Pedagogically, the findings suggest that the Indonesian student writers need to be explicitly exposed to and taught the ways to engage with outside sources as well as the readers and deploy linguistic resources accordingly.
Review of: Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2009
The research literature in EAP contains many in-depth linguistic analyses of written texts of both graduate and professional writers in different genres, but the body of published work that focuses on novice and undergraduate writers is much smaller. The editors of this volume contribute strongly to filling this gap, bringing together substantial pieces of research by experienced and extensively published EAP practitioner-researchers on novice and undergraduate academic writing. The book draws on a wide range of international contexts including the UK, US, Europe, South Africa, Asia and Australasia, and while focusing on English, also includes research based in other languages: German and Chinese. Overall, this volume provides EAP practitioners with rich theoretical insights as well as practical ideas that could be implemented to help novice academic writers achieve their goals. The major premise of the book is that any understanding of academic writing must be grounded in an understanding of the context in which it is produced. Accordingly, the researchers draw explicitly or implicitly on principles of ethnography and/or social constructivism, and all of the close textual analyses are grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (e.g. Halliday, 1994; Martin, 1992). Systemic Functional Linguistics has been extensively applied in EAP, immigrant, and school education in Australasia, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, for at least twenty years, and as this book demonstrates, provides many new insights and useful tools for analyzing and teaching academic writing. The book consists of fourteen chapters, which after the introduction, are roughly divided into three key areas that address interpersonal, textual, and pedagogical concerns. The expression of interpersonal stance in academic writing is taken up in Ken Hyland's 'Patterns of engagement: dialogic features and l2 undergraduate writing'. Hyland problematizes teachers' longstanding advice to students in EAP to avoid using first and second person pronouns in their academic writing. His analyses of usage by undergraduates across a number of fields, compared with usage by professionals in those fields show significant differences. He finds considerable variation in usage by both professionals and students across ''soft and hard disciplines''. He argues that although students generally seem aware of the status differences involved in writing primarily for assessment, they have difficulty engaging appropriately with their audience; they could benefit from more explicit instruction in negotiating the linguistic choices available. Susan Hood also explores the interpersonal dimension in 'Managing attitude in undergraduate academic writing: a focus on the introductions to research reports', comparing how novices and professionals convey their attitude and evaluative position vis a vis their material. Hood uses the systemic functional tool of APPRAISAL to examine how attitude is developed, synoptically through the choice of evaluative language overall, and dynamically, as the argument unfolds in the ongoing text. Institutions of higher learning are embracing an increasingly wide range of disciplines, including many that have not been recognized more generally as ''academic''. This shift places novel demands on students, and teachers can be at a loss to know how to direct them. For example, there is relatively little research into the conflicts students face in shuttling between the demands of writing for academia and the professional world (but see Gollin, 1998, for a discussion). There is even less about this issue with respect to languages other than English. In Helmut Gruber's SF analysis, 'Scholar or consultant? Author-roles of student writers in German business writing' the author examines the way advanced Austrian students writing in German use modality, alternating between their perception that as students they need to mitigate their knowledge claims, and their awareness that as business consultants their role is to advise others on what they should do. In a very different context, Sue Starfield's 'Word power: negotiating success in a firstyear sociology essay' outlines an ethnographic case study of the way a mature-aged black South African student successfully negotiated issues of identity in first year writing. Starfield's argument is that anonymity enabled her