Book Chapters in academia –Authorship in Methods (re-)Presentation

Constellation and colony are among the most quoted metaphors to describe the sets of existing academic genres (Swales 2004); Book Chapters (BCs) are included in this hierarchy, but their typology has not been analysed so extensively as the Research Article or Abstract moves. Yet, when Evaluation in text types is the focus of interest, BCs are a rich and significant territory of study. In the present research, we investigated how in BCs relevant notions such as agency, saliency, authorial disclosure and, also, the authorship/power relationship are construed and conveyed through discursive practices and strategies (Hunston & Thompson 2000; Martin & White 2005; Bednarek & Martin 2010; Bednarek 2010). On the one hand, generic expectations consistently influence the construction of individual texts type, according to community shared text internal/external characteristics (Bhatia 2004 ), so as to engage the specialized audience by meeting their habitus of acquiring/disseminating information. On the other, both in the text and in the research construction there is scope not only for commonality but also for individuality (Gotti 2009). In particular, the present paper focuses on the ways authors choose to (re)present, support and argue for their research methods among alternative/competing models; such argumentations are not confined to the Method Sections but pervade the whole texts. In spite of the assumption of objectivity of scientific research, in the choice of methods authorial agency and engagement strategies are in the foreground. In this study both qualitative and quantitative data from a corpus of 80 BCs were analysed from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective (Fairclough et al. 2007, 2010) with a ‘delicacy of focus’ on authorial (re)presentation/justification of methods, considering both the pragmatic and the lexico-grammar aspects at stake, including collocations.