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176 Disciplinary Discourses elements in new ways, and thereby cumulatively restructuring institutional hegemonies (Fairclough, 1993: ch. 7). In academic settings we have noted an increasingly competitive professional environment, dominated by the need to publish, to get claims accepted, to secure funding and promotion, and to gain a reputation among one's peers. This is a very different picture to earlier academic values and practices. For several centuries academic communities were loose collections of individuals who tended to lack a wholly shared intellectual purpose or recognisable career structure. Science, for example, did not become a professional activity oriented towards original discovery until the late nineteenth century, and it is only in this century that scientists have been able to speak as professional experts (e.g. Gibbons, 1985; Rothblatt, 1985). The structure and roles of industry, business, government and education have changed dramatically over the last 100 years. This has fostered an increasing mutual dependence of state and academy which has increased the extent to which academics are enmeshed in the dominant value systems of the secular world. Put succinctly, and no doubt oversimply, the increasing market for knowledge of all kinds has had a direct influence on the increasing marketisation of the discourses of its producers. The overwhelmingly intrusive nature of promotional discourses, which are insinuating themselves into every corner of our lives, are clearly making inroads into the published genres of the academy (see, for example, Chapters 4 and 5 above). My analyses have shown the importance that academics attach to highlighting novelty, foregrounding relevance, and demonstrating credibility, thereby indicating the extent to which promotional elements are helping to construct discourses often considered non-promotional (Fairclough, 1995). The purposes of writers, the ways they negotiate knowledge, and the social relations between members of disciplinary communities, are not immune from societal ideological and political trends. Tendencies towards the competitive, self-motivating, 'entrepreneurial ' self in political life are reflected in the interactional features of published academic texts shown in earlier chapters. Clearly the actual impact of these broad social changes will be variable, affecting different disciplines, individuals, and genres in different ways on different occasions. However, they are pervasive. Over time, the conventions of disciplinary discursive practices become naturalised and taken-for-granted along with the ideological assumptions they carry, constantly shifting in response to changes in the dominant socio-cultural forces in society. ENDWORDS I would like to close this book by making a few brief remarks on some of the main points that have been raised. Principally I have tried to elucidate the view that it is through the ways that writers promote their ideas and stake Power, authority and discourse change 177 their claims that they sustain their communities and define themselves as members of those communities. I believe an understanding of how this membership is accomplished is important not only for the practical pay-offs it may have for training outsiders and newcomers in the skills of writing and reading specialist texts, but also because of the importance of the social, political and economic centrality of academic discourses in most advanced industrialised societies. Disciplinary discourses can have a local and a more societal relevance, and the former is often produced and understood in terms of the latter. We live in a world substantially influenced by the privileged discourses of the academy, and it is important for an understanding of this world that we are able to reconstruct the social contexts within which such discourses are produced and which they largely conceal. At the local level I hope my analyses have shown that disciplinary texts form relatively tightly-knit intertextual sets, drawing on each other to address similar problems about a similarly conceived external world. Their unity of purpose and themes, their adoption of similar approaches and questions, their preferences for particular argument forms, lexical choices and discourse structures, all display their writer's professional competence in discipline-legitimated discursive practices. My main point has been that it is these practices, and not abstract and disengaged beliefs and theories, that manifest disciplines and construct their realities, authorise particular beliefs and social relations and, gradually, lead to social and discursive change. The decisions writers make at different points of composing - to employ dialogical resources to minimise or foreground claims, to appeal to community knowledge or spell out assumptions, to point to writer inferences or let facts speak for themselves - are all strategic choices. They are part of a repertoire of preferred practices among members which help to constmct knowledge and...

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