The writing of business case reports is a common requirement for students on academicbusiness programmes and presents significant challenges for both native and non-nativespeaker students. In order to support the development of pedagogical practice in theteaching of case report writing, this paper reports a genre-based study of a corpus of 53marketing and marketing management case reports (BCR-1) written by NS and NNSpostgraduate students at a UK university. Results from this localised study of academicbusiness case reports are supplemented by comparison with sixteen business case reportsfrom the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE), originating from marketing,project management and management accounting courses. The study identifies severalfeatures common to these case reports including the presence of explicit structure,impersonal style and business specialism-dependent lexis. Through the prism of Swalesiangenre analysis, three obligatory broad rhetorical moves are identified (orientation, analysisand advisory moves), and five optional moves (methodology, options and alternatives,summary and consolidation, supplementary supporting information and reflection). Thesebroad rhetorical moves are realised through diverse structural sub-components. Thedeployment of optional moves was found to be dependent on a range of factors, inparticular business specialism, suggesting the value of specialism based pedagogy.