In Brazil, enrollment in Business programs is higher than in any other university program. At the same time, ever since the first schools appeared, prospective manager s' education has received sharp criticism even from academics. These criticisms refer both to the allegedly excessive commercialization of educational praxis, and to likely impacts - on students and on practitioners - from so-called pop management culture that appears to have been emerging for some time now. The particular issue to be investigated here is related to how difficult it might be for Business undergraduates to distinguish between excerpts of books on esoteric themes, self-help or texts popularizing managerial subjects. The consequences of these difficulties are also discussed. Data have been collected from a survey applied to a convenience sample of undergraduate students in a public university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Both the nature and size of the sample indicate that nonparametric statistics should be preferred when analyzing empirical figures. Findings have shown that respondents have mostly not been able to distinguish between the three genres in the short texts they have read. These results should serve as an additional warning to anyone involved in Business education in Brazil.
reading skills among undergraduate students; business education; pop-management literature; nonparametric statistics
