Exploring Popular Management Discourse A Corpus-Assisted Critical Approach

This book is a discourse and corpus-based examination of management bestsellers. The field of popular management literature is well-established, and has been much analyzed, although to date there is very little empirical, linguistic research. Alon Lischinksy addresses this by exploring a large corpus of bestselling books in order to identity the structural, pragmatic and cognitive patterns that characterize these texts. The main objective is to provide a global overview of the idea of management as a discipline and a profession that is constructed through these texts. Lischinksy looks at how the field interacts with social goals, how management 'gurus' build an authoritative persona and set a normative goal for other practitioners. The discursive and semiotic methods used will open up the findings of critical discourse analysis to scholars in the social and business disciplines, and this book will appeal to linguists and those interested in the theory of management.

1. Introduction / 2. Previous analyses of management literature / 3. Theoretical & methodological approaches / 4. Title writing practices / 5. Metadiscourse & management literature / 6. Narratives of personal knowledge / 7. Narratives as illustrative devices / 8. Critical issues in persuasive presupposition / 9. Conclusion: general textual properties of popular management writing / Bibliography / Index