Exploring Popular Management Discourse

This title provides a global overview of management as a discipline and profession in part constructed through management literature. 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. Corpus linguistics provides the methodology to extract meaning from discourse.
Taking as its starting point the fact that language is not a mirror of reality but lets us share what we know, believe and think about reality, it focuses on language as a social phenomenon, and makes visible the attitudes and beliefs expressed by the members of a discourse community. Consisting of both spoken and written language, discourse always has historical, social, functional, and regional dimensions. Discourse can be monolingual or multilingual, interconnected by translations. Discourse is where language and social studies meet. "The Corpus and Discourse" series consists of two strands. The first, "Research in Corpus and Discourse", features innovative contributions to various aspects of corpus linguistics and a wide range of applications, from language technology via the teaching of a second language to a history of mentalities. The second strand, "Studies in Corpus and Discourse", is comprised of key texts bridging the gap between social studies and linguistics. Although equally academically rigorous, this strand will be aimed at a wider audience of academics and postgraduate students working in both disciplines.