Situated analysis of the business plan in Spanish and Portuguese: Entrepreneurs, faculty and students’ perspectives

Abstract

The business plan has been widely included in the curricula of economics degrees and is key to business practice worldwide. However, it has not been studied as a genre yet, possibly due to restrictions in its social, spatial, and temporal circulation, neither are there accounts of the genre in Spanish and Portuguese, despite its relevance to cooperation and productive development in the MERCOSUR region. Based on qualitative analysis of textbooks and interviews with writers from Argentina and Brazil, I aim to provide a preliminary description of the genre. I draw from applied linguistics genre theory and rhetorical genre studies. Results indicate that the genre’s goal is to present the method or strategy to conduct certain business in a period of time. A chain of four phases is associated to a continuum of social settings organized through entrepreneurial/corporate and expert/training variables. Its rhetorical structure includes describing the present/potential situation of the company, market and business model, and describing future processes of strategic actions regarding marketing, production, and fi nance. The contrast between countries shows that the Brazilian rhetoric structure of the genre includes typically academic, non-business steps. This article offers methodological innovations to account for occluded genres, encourages the contrastive study of the business plan in different cultural and linguistic environments, assists business teachers and students with a situated picture of the genre, and collaborates with the developing fi eld of professional discourse analysis in Ibero-America.

Keywords: professional discourse analysis, genre analysis, business writing.