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This special issue of JALPP focuses on responsibility in professional settings and in particular on how responsibility is manifested, expressed, attributed, negotiated and contested in the discourses of professional settings. The studies in this collection thereby also show the importance of analysing discourse from the point of view of discourse participants’ agency, accountability and responsibility, and they thus add an important dimension to existing strands of research in discourse studies and applied linguistics.

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The article analyses a genre used in academic recruitment, the teaching portfolio. The analysis focuses on norm conflicts in the way different genre users evaluate what is acceptable in the genre. The data includes teaching portfolios produced by applicants for university posts, interviews with these applicants and interviews with administrative staff at a large university in Finland. The data points to conflicts for example between a factual orientation (typical of traditional recruitment genres such as the CV) and promotional and reflective orientations suggested in institutional guidelines. The study illustrates the sometimes unpredictable outcomes of adopting a new genre in a complex organisation, where different genre users may have varying normative expectations regarding what kind of writing is acceptable and functional in the new genre.