“A case in point”: signals of narrative development in business and economics"

The chapter analyses signals of narrative development in research articles in closely related disciplinary fields: business and economics, showing that cross-disciplinary variation can be seen at work even when focusing on neighbouring discourses.Using both a discourse and a corpus perspective, the paper explores the variety of languages and of approaches which characterise the two sub-disciplines: the demonstrative logic of mathematical economics and the factual reasoning of business studies. These are seen at work both at the level of generic structures and of lexical signals. At the level of generic structure, business studies show a preference for empirical research and for a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodological procedures, often combined, whereas economics proves to be more often characterized by theoretical, model-based research rooted in formal analysis. The feature is further explored at the level of the narrative moves more often associated with qualitative research, thus showing the importance of the interplay between narration and evaluation in these moves. The focus on the interplay between narration and evaluation is carried on to lexical analysis, with reference to labelling nouns referring to the narrative structures of discourse ("case"). Potentially narrative signals are related to greater use of reflexive narrativity in business discourse and greater use of scenario reasoning in economics: narrative inserts are usually meant for model-testing in economics, while they are more often seen as tools for model-developing in business.The chapter also shows that corpus and discourse perspectives can be fruitfully brought into dialogue, in a research process that is at the same time originated and supported by both points of view, interactively producing a clearer picture.