“I hope that I can convince readers of…”: the construction of professional identity in marketing research articles

In institutional settings, identity has been favourably examined from a CA (Conversation Analysis) perspective and in its association with the “binary and asymmetrical roles” attributed to the institutional representative who is invested with authority, and the addressee who must obey institutional norms (Drew and Heritage, 1992; Gunnarsson et al., 1998; Benwell and Stokoe, 2006). Thus, the enactment of institutional identity has received growing consideration whereas professional identity has been less thoroughly examined. This paper will focus on a corpus of business and marketing research articles (RAs) and it will investigate writers’ self-positioning as experts (Dyer and Keller-Cohen, 2000; van De Mieroop, 2004 and 2005). The study will both quantitatively and qualitatively delve into a range of lexico-grammatical and metadiscursive strategies which are commonly used to build a strong and coherent professional identity (e.g. the use of technical terminology, the presentation of the self as both agentive and epistemic, and the co-occurrence of personal pronouns with cognitive verbs such as believe, conclude, consider, regard…). Analysis reveals how academics pervasively deploy these resources to parade an ethos of competence and expertise.