Business plan: A preliminary approach toan unknown genre

摘要

The business plan has been widely included in the curricula of economicsdegrees and is key to business practice worldwide, but has not been studied froma socio-discursive perspective yet due to restrictions in its social, spatial, andtemporal circulation. Based on interviews and a qualitative analysis of a corpusof 38 texts written in Spanish, I aim to provide a preliminary description of thegenre. Results indicate that a chain of four phases is associated to a continuumof social settings organized through entrepreneurial/corporate andexpert/training variables; its rhetorical structure includes “describingpresent/potential situation of the company and market” and “describing futureprocesses of strategic actions regarding the marketing, production, and financialplans”. This analysis offers methodological innovations to account for occludedgenres, encourages the contrastive study of the business plan in different culturaland linguistic environments, and assists business teachers with a situated pictureof the genre.