English in Business and Commerce

Tamah Sherman, Jiri Nekvapil, Tamah Sherman, Jiri Nekvapil

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501506758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This volume fills an important gap in exploring English in the domains of business and commerce through the prism of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, as opposed to analyzing business genres or taking a linguodidactic approach. It expands the regional coverage of English in Europe, with several studies based in Central Europe, and also considers contexts which interact with Europe even though they are physically outside of it (Asia, Africa). It addresses English as just one of several languages at play in the ecology of the countries. It focuses not only on the position of languages as declared in documents of various organizations, that is, language policy, but also everyday linguistic practices as observed in business contexts, that is, interactions. The studies are divided into three thematic areas: ideologies and discourses on English in the business sphere, the management of English in business and organizational contexts, and English and other languages on local and international labor markets. It will be of interest to readers concerned with multilingualism in the economic sphere and the workplace and the interplay between macro and micro levels during the management of communication in organizations.

Part I:Ideologies and discourses on English in the business sphere

Andrew Linn, Guro Refsum Sanden and Rebecca Piekkari

Language standardization in sociolinguistics and international business: Theory and practice across the table

Abstract: This chapter addresses the issue of language standardization from two perspectives, bringing together a theoretical perspective offered by the discipline of sociolinguistics with a practical example from international business. We introduce the broad concept of standardization and embed the study of language standardization in the wider discussion of standards as a means of control across society. We analyze the language policy and practice of the Danish multinational, Grundfos, and use it as a “sociolinguistic laboratory” to “test” the theory of language standardization initially elaborated by Einar Haugen to explain the history of modern Norwegian. The table is then turned and a model from international business by Piekkari, Welch and Welch is used to illuminate recent Norwegian language planning. It is found that the Grundfos case works well with the Haugen model, and the international business model provides a valuable practical lesson for national language planners, both showing that a “comparative standardology” is a valuable undertaking. More voices “at the table” will allow both theory and practice to be further refined and for the role of standards across society to be better understood.

Keywords: Language standardization, language standards, corporate language, language policy and planning, Scandinavia

1Introduction

1.1Aims and objectives

Writing in 2011, Linn (2011: 800) noted that “linguists have tended to set aside parallels with other systems and treat […] standardization as a peculiarly linguistic problem” and called for “more interdisciplinary thinking” (801). There is not much evidence that this has happened yet, and this chapter attempts to move that thinking forward in two principal ways.

Firstly, we seek to compare the practice of language standardization in two contrasting contexts: (a) the corporate context in international business (IB); and (b) the national context. In so doing we investigate what the IB experience can tell us about the nature of language standardization more broadly and also how theory developed to explain national-level cases can illuminate those from international business. Despite our apparently very different contexts for investigating language standardization (historical v. contemporary, national v. international, sociopolitical v. economic, etc.), we contest that they are mutually illuminating in theoretically interesting and practically useful ways.

Secondly, we situate both language cases in the wider standards context and thus view standardization as not just “a peculiarly linguistic problem”. Standards and standardization processes are not limited to the management of language practices but are the “omnipresent conduits of a modernizing and globalizing world” (Timmermans and Epstein 2010: 71). Timmermans and Epstein (2010) make a compelling case for the interdisciplinary study of standards, and it is our objective to contribute to this endeavor by “talking across the table” between sociolinguistics and international business research.

1.2“Talking across the table”

In pursuing our aims and objectives we address a more general methodological question arising from “talking across the table”. This is a question at the heart of an interdisciplinary undertaking such as ours. Are the two examples of “standardization” really comparable? Are we talking about the same thing? Interdisciplinarity, which aims to achieve “synthesis or integration” (Golde and Gallagher 1999: 281) is a seductive world in which the disciplines involved can remain separated by deceptively common language (Bracken and Oughton 2006). The challenges of operating across disciplines have been discussed from a range of disciplinary perspectives (e.g. conservation (Campbell 2005); aging studies (Smith 2003); and (closer to home) international business studies (Cheng et al. 2009)). Researchers have investigated the issues from both philosophical and practical perspectives (for more extensive discussions, see, e.g. Frodeman et al 2010; Salter and Hearn 1996). Some of the specific issues facing the authors of the present chapter were as follows: The internal practices of a nation state do not on the face of it seem relevant to the sort of “transient multilingual communities” (Mortensen 2013: 37) exemplified by internationalizing companies. Who are the key actors and authorities involved in language standardization in international firms? Can IB inform national language agencies about language standardization and vice versa, or should they remain on their own sides of that language table?

This chapter came about as a result of Andrew Linn and Rebecca Piekkari meeting at the March 2014 conference on English in Business and Commerce, held at Charles University, Prague, as part of the English in Europe: Opportunity or Threat? project. Funding generously provided by the UK Leverhulme Trust allowed them to meet again in collaboration with Guro Refsum Sanden to explore the fact that they were using the term standardization to describe apparently rather different language planning processes. This collaboration links two relatively young academic enterprises: historical sociolinguistics (cf. Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2012) and the study of language in international business and management or what might be styled the “sociolinguistics of business”.

There is widespread recognition in the broader social sciences literature that standards and standardization are a “matter of central importance” and that “a proper understanding of standardization is a prerequisite for understanding the way modern society functions” (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000: 17, 15). Language policy has never been more important in an age of mass global movement and activity (Coupland 2010). Moreover, the need to standardize is everywhere – the authors of this paper even had to agree on a standard way to spell standard-ize/-ise!

1.3Structure of the chapter

In the next section (section 2) we will discuss standards and standardization in some more detail, from the broader perspective of a “sociology of standards” as well as the specific standpoints of our respective disciplines. In section 3 we will focus on international business and explore how IB practices can be described in terms of a model of language standardization drawn from sociolinguistics. This will help us answer the question posed above of whether we are discussing the same phenomenon or not. Our focus in this chapter is on IB, and in the following section we will consider what national language planners and policy makers can learn from an IB model. In the final section (section 5) we will present our conclusions and suggestions for further research in this important field to help rectify the fact that “the study of standardization remains an underappreciated framework for the analysis of many core aspects of modernity” (Timmermans and Epstein 2010: 70).

2Standards and standardization

2.1What is standardization?

The IB literature has become increasingly concerned with the issue of language use and (often implicit) language policies, turning the “forgotten factor” (Marschan, Welch, and Welch 1997), the “surprisingly neglected subject” (Piekkari, Welch, and Welch 2014: 9) of international business language research into an “emerging interest” (Piekkari and Tietze 2011: 267), and “a separate area of study” (Zander, Mockaitis, and Harzing 2011: 297). The importance of language and communication in IB is now so widely recognized that we have started to talk about a language-sensitive research agenda (Piekkari and Tietze 2011: 267; Tenzer, Pudelko and Harzing 2013: 510). Language standardization, defined as “efforts by top management to instill a common corporate language and harmonize internal and external communications through general rules and policies” (Piekkari and Tietze 2011: 267), has been one of the central topics for analysis and debate. However, this debate has tended to see language standardization as a bipolar issue caught in a dialectical tension between multilingualism on the one side and a lingua franca on the other. As argued by Janssens and Steyaert (2014: 637), research on language standardization has tended to point to either one of these solutions – multilingualism or standardization – as a black and white question with no room for colors in between.

Standardization in the history of national languages has been defined as “the construction – and subsequent dissemination – of a uniform supradialectal normative variety” (Ferguson 2006: 21). Research on this side of “the table” has also tended to be somewhat linear or “teleological”, presenting unstructured spoken language variation and a written standard variety as two ends of a completed process (Deumert and Vandenbussche 2003a: 11; McLelland and Linn 2002: vii). Janssens and Steyaert (2014) do note that standardization practices in the IB context are much more varied and nuanced than such a bipolar view would imply, so this begs the question of whether language standardization is best characterized simply as a series of context-specific practices or whether it can be characterized by an over-arching model.

We share Linn’s (2013: 373) view that a standard language, along with many other standards of behavior, does not hold the same appeal in society as it did several generations ago. So a further question we ask is then: what role does standardization play in an era which in many respects is characterized by destandardization? (see the papers in Koch and Fritz 2013; Vítečková and Chaloupková 2014). Language standardization in IB is in effect the adoption of a norm in an age where norms are often shunned and local variation is championed.2 The sociolinguistic literature generally accepts that language behavior constitutes a series of individually negotiated acts of communication rather than the adoption of a single discrete language (e.g. Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Meierkord 2012; Pennycook 2010), which would appear to go against a desire for increased standardization.

In addressing these questions we accept that language standardization is not a “once and for all” act but an on-going process. The adoption of a common corporate language (CCL), as an example of standardization in international firms, is not “the endpoint of a language policy” (Steyaert, Ostendorp, and Gaibrois 2011: 271). By the same token the idea of a national standard is the product of its time and place and susceptible to change.

Standardization is clearly not a straightforward thing either in theory or in practice. All th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Sociolinguistic perspectives on English in business and commerce
• Part I: Ideologies and discourses on English in the business sphere
• Part II: The management of English in business and organizational contexts
• Part III: The position of English and other languages on local and international labor markets, implications for language and education policy
• Index