Corporate Language Policy in a Globalised Era : Lingua Franca, Multilingualism or else?

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a critical review of the English mandate policy for global corporations or companies aspiring to go global.More precisely, this paper draws on relevant theoretical frameworks to critically examine the Englishnization project of Rakuten, a Japanese Internet conglomerate.Given that all employees are required to speak a single language-in most cases English in today's context-the English mandate is likely to bring both benefits and backlash.The benefits include efficiency and global coverage, whereas the backlash includes challenges and resistance from a workforce unwilling to adopt the imposed language.The existence of a local language may also pose a major challenge to the English mandate.Rakuten's Englishnization experienced mixed reception from the public.Although some praised Englishnization as an overall success, others who believe that English is not the best choice for the Japanese workforce criticised the project.Careful investigations reveal that such criticisms are based on cultural, political, and sometimes ideological beliefs.In contrast, it will turn out that Englishnization successfully diversified their workforce in terms of nationalities represented.Moreover, recent studies indicate new perspectives on bilingualism, and an English mandate such as Rakuten's can improve an organisation's overall performance if it allows employment of all multilingual resources available.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.