Resumen de Research reports in academic and industrial research
Many doctoral students at Swedish technical universities are so-called industridoktorander who are seconded by their companies to study for an advanceddegree while employed by the company, and typically while working on researchtopics which arise naturally out of their industrial work. They therefore haveexperience of the genres and writing processes associated with in-company researchand development as well as those of academic research. This paper reports oninterviews based on text samples in which such doctoral students describe theirwriting, its production conditions, and its audiences (and hence language choice).The aim is examine their perceptions of the differences between the two writingenvironments and the discourses which researchers use to discuss them.Broadly it is concluded that the subjects perceive themselves as belongingsimultaneously to two discourse communities with rather different values. Universityresearch reports are themselves exposed to competition for publication space and needto stand on their own, while the internal reports are embedded in a network of telephoneand email communication and are written more for the record. Therefore the academicreports need to be tightly focused, carefully written in the ‘empiricist repertoire’, andexplicitly meet the expectations of an international audience, while the company testreports are merely raw material for use in inter-company competition, and thereforemust be inclusive, to some extent truthful in a ‘contingent repertoire’ and implicitlyrefer to the shared company environment. However in-company attitudes to the written product vary according to the discipline; archival material can be very valuable in someareas and useless in other, fast changing, fields.
