The multiple identities of the business academic

This study focuses on the speech of lecturers working in the field of business studies. The objective is to shed light on how identity is manifested in the communicative setting through the analysis of a corpus of authentic business studies lectures, with particular reference to linguistic/discursive features that encode five different dimensions of identity: academic, disciplinary, professional, cultural and individual. The analysis was based on linguistic/discursive features that were carefully elected as good reflections of these dimensions in an instructional setting. Instruction-oriented academic identity emerged from the dialogic episodes between lecturers and students that serve not only to facilitate understanding, but also to create a learning-friendly environment. Research-oriented academic identity was seen in the lecturers’ references to their own research activities that convey to students what it means to be an expert within the discourse community. Disciplinary identity surfaced through linguistic expressions of hypotheticality, representing one of the most distinctive epistemological features of business studies.