“This paper is not in the conference template”: The discourse of conference gatekeeping

Paper in proceeding, 2011

This paper is a call for research in a neglected area of construction management, namely the quality assessment of submitted papers aka the review process. Using a text analytical lens, we examine two interrelated gatekeeping genres: the instruction to reviewers and reviewer comments in the ARCOM chain of genres. All the reviewer comments from one ARCOM conference have been collected and analysed. The findings of this study will provide some insights into the review process. Gatekeeping genres play a major role in the shaping of a discipline’s epistemology, it is therefore important that they too be subjected to scrutiny. Since many of these texts are occluded they remain under-researched. This in turn limits possibilities for disciplinary reflexivity, which is where we see this paper’s contribution.