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Article published In: Register and Professional Discourse
Edited by Shelley Staples and Gavin Brookes
[Register Studies 7:1] 2025
► pp. 75–98

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One hundred years of managerial expertise in the business case studies

A diachronic analysis of engagement features on experts’ responses

ORCiD logo with link | Université Lumière Lyon 2
Published online: 8 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.25006.mil
Abstract
This diachronic study analyzes engagement features — epistemic positioning and interactivity in particular — in the business case studies published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) over the last century (1922–2023). Our study is based on a small, specialized corpus of HBR case studies, covering three periods (1922–1929, 1961–1979 and 2008–2023) in which we compare the frequency of epistemic and interactivity features. After reviewing the literature on the expression of positioning and stance in specialized contexts, we conceptualize business case studies as a register, and we identify a set of features by adopting a corpus-based approach thanks to a semantic tagger. Our corpus-driven, quantitative analysis highlights sharp differences in the frequency patterns as well in the functions they fulfill in the discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Managerial discourse
      • 2.1.1The scientific roots of managerial discourse
      • 2.1.2Managerial discourse analysis
      • 2.1.3Conceptualizing case studies as a register
    • 2.2Engaging with business situations and readers: Epistemic stance, writer’s and reader’s presence
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Description of the observed data
    • 3.2Features and how they were retrieved
      • 3.2.1Epistemic positioning
      • 3.2.2Explicit writers’ and readers’ presence
  • 4.Diachronic aspects of the register of business case studies
    • 4.1The evolution of some epistemic positioning features
    • 4.2The evolution of interactivity features
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
References (65)
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