Discourse and identity in the professions explores in depth how professional identities are shaped and manifested in and through discourses produced in corporate, legal, institutional, and political contexts. The fifteen contributions included in the volume are divided into three sections: ‘Corporate citizenship’, ‘Legal citizenship’, and ‘Identity in institutional and socio-political domains’. Written by nineteen leading scholars from across the globe, this publication is an up-to-date and welcome addition to the field of discourse studies and should be of interest to graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and scholars engaged in discourse, sociolinguistic, and English for specific purposes research.
Section 1 comprises six chapters. In chapter 1, Vijay Bhatia presents four kinds of disciplinary and professional discourses and examines how they help writers construct and represent their individual professional identities. Chapter 2 by Tarja Salmi-Tolonen focuses on the advertising discourse of two food-related companies and its role in building the companies' clean identity and reputation, whereas chapter 3 by Sandra Campagna describes the process of ethical identity construction by analyzing ethical collocations in multinational companies' online promotion materials. In chapter 4, Paola Catenaccio & Chiara Degano describe the linguistic and pragma-dialectic strategies the Basel-based pharmaceutical company Novartis deploys to re-establish its reputation and social responsibility identity. In chapter 5, Miguel Ruiz-Garrido & Ma Ruiz-Madrid turn to the topic of executive weblogs. After analyzing the discourse and metadiscourse features of executive weblogs, they claim that these weblogs serve as a powerful means to construct a company's identity. In the final chapter, Paula Hickey contrasts the social identities of three successful motorcycle brands through a diachronic social-cultural analysis.
The five contributions in Section 2 originate from a research project ‘International commercial arbitration practices: A discourse analytical study’ led by Vijay Bhatia. The first two chapters by Evangelisti Allori and by Giuliana Ladomery center on international arbitration in the sports sector, while the next two chapters by Maurizio Gotti & Patrizia Anesa and by Stefania Maci examine the ‘hybridization’ characteristics of commercial arbitration practices in Italy. In the concluding chapter of this section, Michele Sala deals with the issue of professional identity as manifested in legal experts' scholarly writing for leading European and American specialized law journals.
The four chapters in Section 3 cover more diversified subjects within institutional and sociopolitical domains. Paola Vignati in the first chapter examines the linguistic and discourse features of migration legislation documents, and discusses their roles in legal and migration identity construction. The chapter by Giulia Riccio investigates how White House Press Secretaries tailor their own professional identities through the expert use of linguistic strategies. Unlike the previous chapters, the last two chapters bring up interesting cases of identity denial rather than identity building. Paolo Donadio & Antonelia Napolitano's chapter describes how linguistic strategies are deployed by the neoconservative Bush administration to deny the identity of the Unified Europe, which is often regarded as a geopolitical threat to the United States. Susan Kermas concludes the section by describing the use of the gardening metaphor in Anglo-American sociopolitical discourse as a means of identity denial.
