Not everything in textbooks is true: teaching discourse analysis to undergraduate business students

Coventry University adopted the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Management in 2007 and the Business School has taken up the challenge to embed these important principles throughout their course offerings in order to provide the very best education for future business leaders. ‘Managing Business Responsibly’ is a final-year, undergraduate module which grew partly out of some of the author's teaching. The module poses a series of critical challenges to students and in the first few weeks many find it uncomfortable as the theories drawn upon are not those generally found within a business course. Within the module students are invited to think of themselves as agents of change in the broadest sense and to carefully consider those aspects of their future organisations that they might be able to influence. The module team have to work extremely hard to manage student anxiety around the coursework and have to repeatedly stress that discourse analysis is an invaluable critical thinking tool.