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‘We don’t speak proper English ourselves’. Language problems in a multinational company
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Kim, Kyoungmi and Angouri, Jo (2017) ‘We don’t speak proper English ourselves’. Language problems in a multinational company. In: 11th GEM&L International Workshop on Management & Language, Copenhagen, Denmark, 4-5 July 2017
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Official URL: https://geml.eu/en/resources/proceedings-of-the-ge...
Abstract
MNCs are linguistically diverse and this diversity is often associated with problems assumed to arise from language barriers and variation in language competence. The position we take in this paper is that language ‘problems’ are typically ideological indexing power struggles at work. We draw on excerpts from interviews in a multinational company. We focus on how language problems are constructed in talk (i.e. interview events). We take an ethnographic approach combined with an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of our data. Our analysis shows that employees’ valuation of language competence is related to organisational activities, contingent on the (perceived) situational and institutional context. Language practices in the data become sites to negotiate power relations. We argue that talk about language problems can provide an insight into individuals’ ideological positioning and multilingual realities (Angouri and Piekkari, 2017). We close the paper with a discussion of our findings in relation to the institutional and social orders and we provide directions for further research.
| Item Type: | Conference Item (Paper) | ||||||
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| Alternative Title: | |||||||
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Applied Linguistics | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | International business enterprises -- Employees -- Language, Applied linguistics | ||||||
| Official Date: | 2017 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
| Conference Paper Type: | Paper | ||||||
| Title of Event: | 11th GEM&L International Workshop on Management & Language | ||||||
| Type of Event: | Workshop | ||||||
| Location of Event: | Copenhagen, Denmark | ||||||
| Date(s) of Event: | 4-5 July 2017 | ||||||
| Related URLs: |
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