The author as part of the authority

For Bourdieu (1988), homo academicus or academic scholars, as mentioned earlier, are cultural capital personified because these scholars have access to the cultural capital or valued products at home and from education, such as the ‘right’ accent, familiarity with ‘high culture’, the ‘right’ books as well as ‘formal’ qualifications. These are ‘valued’ products because they are ‘recognised’ within the social institution of symbolic power to which the cultural capital belongs. In this sense, academic scholars are ‘authorised representatives’ of the academic institution when they use the ‘authorised language’ to exercise the symbolic power of the academic institution.

To put it another way, academic scholars represent the authority of academic discourse. Regarding academic writing, Bazerman (2001) clearly articulates that academic discourse is such cultural capital for success in higher education and one’s academic career. To succeed, writers need to express themselves with a powerful voice by drawing on the cultural capital vested in them through access to academic resources so that they can be recognised as homo academicus in their writing. Moreover, their writing needs to be ‘recognised’ as a valued

product within the academic circle so that the authorship of such work can turn it into symbolic capital such as membership and reputation.

Owing to the notion of ‘symbolic capital’ as proposed by Bourdieu, it is possible to imagine academic authors as part of the authority. Therefore, ‘voice’ is an important element for academic writers to achieve authority.

Authority in academic writing through ‘voice’ involves the issues of legitimate language, accent and opinion. By extension, voice covers the style, the manner and the attitude expressed by the author. Therefore, voice is ‘embedded’ in each author and it is a personal property. Moreover, there are issues of contents and currency in academic publication. This is a matter of who discovers something important first and takes ownership of such contents through publication in the academic circle before others. The published paper will then become the author’s ‘currency’ (Becher & Trowler, 2001) which can be translated into authority. As Bourdieu argues, these reputable academic writers will become an icon, or a ‘personified’ form of authority in their field of discipline for others to recognise them as a legitimate, warrantable and authoritative voice. Presumably, the notion of ‘the man and his works’ in a capital-valued society is engendered by this concept of ‘voice’ to signal the importance of personal property and ownership.

For many EAP researchers, it is argued that academic writing and voice are inseparable (e.g., Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Richards & Miller, 2005; Thompson, 1996, 2001). However, it is often the case that novice writers perceive others’ voice to be louder and more powerful than their own voice, resulting in a tension between using one’s own quiet voice and using others’ powerful voice, thereby losing one’s own voice amidst the others’. Gerri is an example of those who were afraid to use their own voice and chose to hide themselves behind others’ voices instead (Thomson & Kamler, 2012).

To deal with such tension in academic writing, two ways seem to have been proposed. Either novice writers use their own voice throughout their whole text (Elbow, 1998) or they balance between editing the others’ voice and inserting their own (Pittam et al., 2009). These approaches have different implications for the development of authorial identity.

In the first scenario, the whole text belongs to the author although they have mentioned other sources in it. The author may paraphrase the others’ contents, retell the others’ stories and quote the authorities with a proper acknowledgement to avoid plagiarism but the integrity of voice in the whole writing is the key element. Otherwise, the author’s work is likely to be viewed as ‘patchwriting’ (Pecorari, 2003) in which the reader cannot find the author’s real voice and style because too many voices want to achieve prominence.

In the second case, it is acknowledged that different voices can be heard but the main point is that it must be clear who is speaking what at any particular moment. Good academic writers must make their readers aware between their personal voice and the others’ voice (Pittam et al., 2009). With the identification of sources through citation to make clear who is responsible for a proposition, the author can develop their own position as well as their authoritative persona in the text (Thompson, 2005). In this way, plagiarism is about appropriating the others’ voice and stance without a proper acknowledgement.

Also central to the concept of authority in academic writing is the level of voice to be heard. An obvious example of the authorial voice is the first personal pronoun in writing (‘I’), as shown in Figure 2.2. There are many occasions for ‘I’ to be used and each usage has a different value and impact, for instance, ‘I’ as the architect of the writing as in ‘I will discuss’ or ‘I’ as the opinion-holder as in ‘I think’ (Tang & John, 1999). However, it is noted that college students tend to avoid using ‘I’ in their writing whereas social science scholars use it more frequently for their argument (Hyland, 2002). Given below is the typology of ‘I’ in academic writing.

It has been noted that academic papers in certain disciplines contain only a few instances of ‘I’, or no ‘I’ at all because the authority to write in those fields is often governed by the ‘disembodied voice’ (Golden-Biddle & Locke, 2007) to reflect the inculcation of cultural capital, such as the idealism of scientific (‘positivist’) methodology. Therefore, an academic paper without ‘I’ in natural science research communities is likely to achieve the symbolic power of scientific discourse as well as to signal the authorship of rationality.

Yet, it has also been noticed that these supposedly ‘author-evacuated’ articles can occasionally contain ‘I’ to publicise their author by displaying their methodological diligence and rigour such as ‘I hoped to counteract the memory problem, but I made no impact whatsoever’ (Harwood, 2005a) or by suggesting novelty and newsworthiness of their research such as ‘Nowhere has anyone attempted … In this article I aim to do just that’ (Harwood, 2005b). Although this methodological ‘I’ does not appear to carry the tenor of original argument contributor, this ‘I’ often highlights the author’s procedural innovations in comparison to other authors; hence, it can become an implicit tool for self- promotion, authority and authorship in academic writing.

Instead of the first personal pronoun ‘I’, senior academic writers can cite their own previous works in their texts. White (2001) has analysed eight authors from information science and has noticed that as the authors’ oeuvre grows, they ‘cite themselves most frequently’ (p. 93). In other words, their ‘citation identity’— namely, a set of all names cited in their oeuvre—almost always contains their own name at the top of the frequency list, though still less than 10 percent of the total references (Cronin & Shaw, 2002). Therefore, self-citation is possibly another mark of the author’s manifestation in their work.

Still, this conception of authorial identity seems to put a greater emphasis on the author in the academic institution than the institutional practice. In the next section, I shall present another conception of authorial identity which suggests that the academic institution occupies centre stage in the author’s writing practice.