One hundred years of managerial expertise in the business case studies

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, in which 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-driven 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.