Cross-cultural management studies and the Englishization of scholarly communication: A paradox

Abstract

As academics, we must ask the question why are we being shoehorned into a concept of scholarly production that restricts innovative, original and indeed indigenous thought?Hugh Wilmott made this clear in his 2011 essay on journal list fetishism and the way this perverts scholarship.In fact, it was in 2012 that we last visited this issue with this journal (Jackson, 2012) and quoted Wilmott (2011) as saying that a monoculture is fostered in which a preoccupation with shoehorning research into a form prized by elite, US-oriented journals overrides a concern to maintain and enrich the diversity of topics, the range of methods and the plurality of perspectives engaged in business and management research.Yet this issue with restricting our scholarship has another, connected dimension, as a recent article by Boussebaa and Tienari (2019) points out: that of the Englishization in scholarly production and the way it has perverted the nature of scholarly work, as a form of academic imperialism.We agree with these authors, partially, when they say that for many academics, writing in English requires a change in identity, and 'As such, the politics of journal rankings and knowledge production are to some extent language politics, and language politics are, in effect, identity politics' (p.2).However, as Groves (2014) points out 'Thankfully, nobody speaks academic English as a first language.The English of the university is a very particular form that has specific features and conventions'.In a way, every scholar who hopes to publish in an academic journal has to learn this dialect of English.Obviously for the non-native speaker this is an extra layer of learning on top of learning the everyday use of a foreign language.This is in a context quite often where editors are not tolerant of non-standard academic English use by non-native speakers.Of course, the emphasis on journal publication is relatively new in the modern era, and is without a doubt somewhat outmoded given 'new' technology that has been in existent for at least two decades, and perhaps should be rethought in the 'post-modern era'.As Boussebaa and Tienari (2019: 2) argue Whereas in the past, what seems to have mattered most was writing aimed at producing quality scholarship, today, writing as a means of publishing in the most highly ranked journals has become an end in itself and, indeed, a veritable obsession in some quarters.

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 — 18 citations exist upstream.

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