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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Are Managers the Gods of the Stadium? Characterising Performance Discourse through a Study of Attitudinal Positioning Markers in the Field of Management

Résumé

This paper discusses the scope and limits of the analogy between sport and management in some English-speaking contexts, within the framework of specialised discourse analysis. More specifically, we address the issue through the concept of performance, which has become widely used in organisations since the work of Frederick W. Taylor and the advent of scientific management in the early 20th century. For example, the concept has given rise to ‘performance management’, which the American Management Society defines as the search for an optimal level of performance through the implementation of measurable indicators (Kurian 2013). In this respect, the concept of corporate performance is not entirely unlike sports performance. The similarities have various origins, starting with a certain cultural proximity between the world of sport and that of organisations, which has been built up over time and through managerial theories. For example, theories such as the ‘tournament theory’ and the ‘fair wage theory’ are based directly on observations of the sporting world (Eber 2008). Another link, which manifests itself in a great deal of metaphors, lies at the level of game analogies (e.g. managers as winners or losers), even if some studies highlight the fallacious nature of certain comparisons which may be made between the competitive world of sport and that of business (Hamington 2009). In this paper, we present the first results of an empirical analysis of performance discourse based on three types of data: (1) a corpus of scientific articles in the field of management, taken from international journals, (2) a corpus of popularisation articles, taken from the Harvard Business Review and (3) a corpus of texts emanating directly from the corporate world and presenting performance assessment tools (such as B Corp certification) and corporate results in this area (e.g. as annual reports). Our study shows that, a part from a few lexical analogies with the world of sport, corporate performance frequently manifests itself in discourse through a set of attitudinal positioning markers (Martin and White 2005) that highlight expected values, particularly in terms of behaviour and ethics, and that managers mobilise as they deal with organisational facts and objectives.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04601036 , version 1 (04-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04601036 , version 1

Citer

Philippe Millot. Are Managers the Gods of the Stadium? Characterising Performance Discourse through a Study of Attitudinal Positioning Markers in the Field of Management. Communicating in and about sports, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, May 2024, Saint - Denis, France. ⟨hal-04601036⟩
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