For whom do we write?

Abstract

As an editor, I am sensitive to the audience for whom an author is writing. My interest in this topic stems from what I see as a systemic yet hidden problem with the way the peer review system operates, namely, that authors focus so much on making the review team happy that they may end up not writing for any other stakeholder. As a result, while the revised article may satisfy the review team s needs (and if it does not it is unlikely to be published), it is possible that it may fail to satisfy readers, author(s), and any other third parties. These thoughts piqued my curiosity about the situation, and, in my arrogance, I thought that a small scale investigation (described below) might shed some light on the situation. The notion of the intended audience is a slight variation on that of “researcher perspective,” which normatively relates to the identity of the stakeholder whose interests are privileged in the research design (Davison, 2018). As an author myself, I would like to think that I am writing a research article because I would like it to be read, appreciated, cited, and found useful in some practical or intellectual way. I hope that my research, as expressed through the articles I write, will make the world a better place (cf Walsham, 2012). Indeed, these objectives also apply to the editorials that I write for this journal. For an article to be read, it has to be readable, and for that matter consumable, by the intended audience (Robey & Markus, 1998). The audience may be composed of fellow academics or practitioners within the disciplinary area; it could also be a more general audience of scientists, people in industry or government, or the general public (cf Churchman, 1971). Naturally, the exact audience will vary from article to article, but unless we are writing in a highly specialised field or for a niche journal with a tiny circulation, it is likely that the potential audience is at least several hundred people, and perhaps many more. Google Scholar will offer you a rough proxy for how many people found your work valuable (even if not how many bothered to read it) and may induce some humility at the same time: Many of my own articles have a citation score well below 1. Reflecting further on the nature of the audience, I realised that a high‐level classification could include such groups as readers, reviewers, and oneself. Of these, readers hopefully constitute the most populous group, followed by reviewers and then oneself/oneselves. In order to validate this simple scheme, I wrote to a dozen international scholars in our field (a purposive yet diverse population of people, at all career stages, working in some seven countries and hailing from eight, all known to me personally and all likely to devote a few minutes of their time) to request a quick reaction to the following question: When you write a research article, for whom are you writing? The views of the 10 scholars who responded are openly acknowledged (with their permission) in the presentation below. It turned out that, through a very simple coding process, I was able to undertake a simple thematic classification of their responses into the three audience types (readers, reviewers, and self), with a few responses that integrated and contrasted two or all three. No other audiences were mentioned. I present below an illustrative assortment of their responses. I do not pretend to claim that this is a rigorous assessment of opinions about the nature of the audience, but I do think that this anecdotal evidence constitutes valuable food for thought. If nothing else, I wonder how often you have conversations about your audience. Towards the end of the editorial, I offer my own reflections and consider the implications for whom we write.