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Dissertation Information
| Title: | The Construction of Expert Knowledge in Popular Management Literature | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Alon Lischinsky | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://alon.lischinsky.net | |
| Institution: | Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Linguistic Sciences and Applied Linguistics | |
| Completed in: | 2008 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; | |
| Director(s): |
Teun van Dijk |
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| Abstract: | This thesis is a critically-oriented study of how knowledge and authority are legitimated in the discursive structure of popular management books. Some key textual and contextual properties of these texts are investigated in a corpus of over a hundred texts, representing a selection of highly influential works in this field according to emic criteria. Five empirical studies assess different aspects of their structure, with a special attention to their role in the construction of authorial and reader personas: the nature of management book titles, that sets the pragmatic key for the understanding of these texts; the use of metadiscourse to set and answer genre expectations, shedding light on the reciprocal expectations of authors and readers; exemplification patterns, showing how persuasive texts can be deployed without developing general arguments; the use of narratives of personal experience to establish authorial credibility; and the strategic deployment of presuppositions to mobilize readers' affects and convictions in highly-charged topics. The purpose of these studies is to provide a discursively-based account of the typical persuasive devices used by writers in popular management, illuminating the epistemic characteristics of the discipline. The analyses show the highly idiosyncratic character of popular management writing, that cannot be assimilated either to academic criteria not to popularisation genres. The positioning of writers regarding their texts, their themes and their audience is understood as an expression of their position within the field of management, where several interests and sets of practitioners coincide. Its relation to the well-established ideological character of the discipline is discussed, as is the value of textually-oriented discourse analysis for the critique of such ideologies. |
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