The linguistic construction of business reasoning: Towards a language-based model of decision-making in undergraduate business

Abstract

This thesis reports on research whose aim is to arrive at a linguistically theorised understanding of the process of decision-making in undergraduate business studies. The use of ‘real-life’ tasks such as country reports – the major assessment task of the interdisciplinary unit Business in the Global Environment at a metropolitan Australian university – is intended to prepare students for the skills of ‘problem-solving’, ‘decision-making’ and professional report writing in international business environments. However, as indicated by the large number of students failing this task, few students possess the sophisticated linguistic resources necessary to build the generic complexity and persuasive rhetoric this high-stakes task demands. This study is concerned with identifying the linguistic demands of demonstrating decision-making in country reports. Current modelling of ‘big texts’ in SFL (Martin, 1994, 1995) is insufficient for understanding longer texts stretching across the many pages tertiary students are generally required to write. This thesis will show through fine-grained linguistic analyses of High Distinction student assignments that not all ‘big texts’ are macrogenres made up of elemental genre complexes and illustrate that embedded genres play a fundamental role in enabling texts of the length of business country reports to grow bigger than a page. Drawing on discourse semantics (Martin, 1992; Martin & Rose, 2007; Martin & White, 2005), this thesis also will also show how business reasoning is construed in undergraduate business reports through different types of grammatical structures and how successful student writers construct cause-effect relations and three major types of rhetorical moves in these texts. By making visible the academically valued meanings by which skillful writers demonstrate the process of decision-making in undergraduate business country reports, this research has pedagogical implications for academic literacy interventions aimed at making explicit the basis of achievement in business studies. It is hoped that this study will open up future research directions for the continued study of knowledge-building in undergraduate business studies.