Lexical metadiscursive stance markers in research article abstracts: a study of management subfields

Abstract Research on authorial stance has addressed various aspects, with disciplinary explorations of stance making up a significant portion of those studies. However, the examination of the differences in the use of stance markers across branches of scientific fields of study in general, and those of the management field in particular, has gone unattended. To bridge this gap, the study at hand set out to investigate the differences in the use of lexical metadiscursive stance markers suggested by Hyland (2005b. Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing . Continuum) across three management subfields, namely business, knowledge, and tourism management, based on 576 research articles abstracts from six journals. The normalized frequencies of stance markers were extracted using LancsBox 4.5, and then the Kruskal-Wallis test and pairwise comparisons were run using SPSS 26. Results showed the existence of significant differences in the overall stance markers, boosters, self-mention markers, and attitude markers across all three subfields, where business management abstracts consistently outperformed the other two groups in the use of these stance markers. Moreover, knowledge management was found to use more stance markers (general), boosters, and self-mention markers than tourism management. The discussion of findings using soft/hard dichotomy and knower/knowledge code continuum and the implications of the study end the article.