exploring legitimation strategies in language policy and employee attitudes towards English as an organisational
language
By Ivan Olav Vulchanov
The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement No. 765355
(GLOMO, “Global Mobility of Employees”, https://glomo.eu/).
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Abstract:
The English language has become an established lingua franca in international business. In order to unpack the commonly taken for granted role of English in international organisational contexts, the present study examines the underlying individual and collective legitimation of English as an organisational language. While sociolinguistic research has highlighted language ideology as a factor behind language norms in organisations, and organisation studies have examined discursive legitimation, fewer studies have combined the two concepts to investigate the micro-discursive practices of ideological language legitimation. On the basis of a critical realist qualitative case study, this paper analyses the generative mechanism involving language ideology and normalising, rationalising and moralising legitimation. The findings indicate that, in the Danish/German side of a recently merged international corporation, agency through legitimation, and structure through language ideology form an interdependent generative relationship which produces and reproduces the role of English as the organisational language.
Furthermore, this relationship is enabled by the dynamic post-merger context, where the role of English perseveres in the Danish/German context, despite being embedded in a highly multilingual wider organisational context.
Keywords: Language ideology, language legitimation, qualitative single-case study, critical realism
1. Introduction
In a global economy, corporate international expansion, cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and increased international recruitment intensify the multilingual nature of multinational corporations (MNC) (Fredriksson, Barner-Rasmussen and Piekkari, 2006; Janssens and Steyaert, 2014). Given its global role in business, English often functions as a corporate language, both officially and unofficially (Tietze, 2004). While competing languages or other contextual factors challenge this role, English remains a functional lingua franca in a wide range of workplaces (Luo and Shenkar, 2006). Therefore, knowledge about how we perceive
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the role of English and explain its legitimacy in international workplace settings is crucial for theorising the mechanisms behind English use in international business (IB).
However, research of language in organisations, business and management is yet to fully explore the relationships which generate the role of English in organisations. The present study develops this line of inquiry by investigating the legitimating micro-discursive practices (Vaara, Tienari and Laurila, 2006) in language policy and employee attitudes to English. Since the implementation of English as a common language is not a neutral act, but rests on ideology (Cogo and Yanaprasart, 2018; Phillipson, 2017), the present study applies language ideology theory to examine the interactive relationship between language legitimation and ideology. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2005) of legitimation is here used as a framework for the study of the practical operationalisation of language ideology. Semi-structured interviews and corporate documents form the empirical basis for the single-case study of the Danish/German context in a recently merged MNC.
Although the implications of language policies and corporate language management in multilingual organisational environments have been studied over the past two decades (e.g. Vaara, Tienari, Piekkari and Sänti, 2005; Neeley and Dumas, 2016), there has been less focus on cases where policy is absent or informal.
Empirical studies have found English to function as an informal corporate language, where organisational members use the language de facto without any formal policy backing (Sanden and Lønsmann, 2018; Sanden and Kankaanranta, 2018). This study contributes to the investigation of informal language policy, by examining how language ideologies motivate English legitimation in the absence of a clear policy for internal organisational language use. Furthermore, the interactive relationship is theorised to support English as an organisational language in a dynamic post-merger environment, with a newly formed and diverse linguistic
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composition. Post-merger contexts are particularly suitable for illustrating the adaptive and contextual nature of the organisational role of English (Kroon, Cornelissen and Vaara, 2015).
A primary contribution of this study is the extension of Vaara et al.’s (2006) framework for discursive legitimation, where a critical realist analysis outlines a bi-directional interdependent relationship between legitimation and ideology. While positioning this contribution in the language-sensitive international business and management literature (Karhunen, Kankaanranta, Louhiala-Salminen and Piekkari, 2018; Tenzer, Terjesen and Harzing, 2017), theoretical perspectives from organisation studies and sociolinguistics are leveraged and combined. Discursive legitimation theory (Vaara et al., 2006) reveals details concerning the practical functioning of language ideologies, while language ideology theory (Kroskrity, 2004; Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994) is suitable for conceptualising the content and format of discursive legitimation. Sociolinguistic perspectives give insight to language ideologies as underlying factors in language use in organisations (Lønsmann, 2015; Lønsmann and Mortensen, 2018).
However, studies are yet to utilise the combined potential of these perspectives when studying the specific strategies members of organisations apply when explaining the organisational role of English. In order to bridge these perspectives and capitalise on the combined theoretical insight, the present study shifts the focus from attitudes to language and language use as consequences of language policy, to address both attitudes and policy as manifestations of language ideology. Perspectives from language-sensitive IB and management research, sociolinguistics and organisation studies frame the theorisation of a generative mechanism, where English language legitimation both reflects and maintains language ideology, while upholding the organisational role of English.
In critical realism, generative mechanisms are viewed as relationships between entities on the real layer of reality and are particularly powerful in
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explaining factors behind structures and events which can be registered empirically (Bygstad, Munkvoll and Volkoff, 2016; Sayer, 2000). The following research questions are posed in order to empirically study and theorise the generative mechanism behind the organisational role of English: How is English legitimated as an organisational language in the Danish/German context of a post-merger multinational corporation and what is the generative relationship between language ideology and English language legitimation? More specifically, the study explores different legitimation strategies in language policy and employee attitudes towards English as an organisational language.
2. Theoretical concepts: English language ideology and legitimation strategies
Language ideology has numerous conceptual definitions depending on the field and approach at hand. Silverstein’s (1979) definition rooted in linguistic anthropology provides a foundation for the conceptual understanding applied here, where language ideologies are “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationali[s]ation or justification of perceived language structure and use”. Agency is thus attributed to the language users who articulate, rationalise and justify – a primary focus in the methodology of this study. In turn, this process may reproduce and reconstruct beliefs about language. Alternative conceptualisations with a different emphasis define language ideology as “self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds concerning roles of language” (Heath, 1977) and “shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world” (Rumsey, 1990).
‘Self-evident’ and ‘commonsense’ in the latter two definitions highlight that ideologies are assumptions taken for granted, which the users of a language/s perceive as inherently natural. As the words ‘group’ and ‘shared’ imply that language ideologies are collective phenomena, the current study also examines the collective legitimation of English. From a critical perspective, language ideology
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has been argued to lack neutrality (Kroskrity, 2004). Although the articulation of language ideology may often have an underlying agenda in a power relationship, the emphasis of this study is on how, as a way of explaining language use, ideology forms the basis for the legitimation of English.
English language ideology is a specific type of language ideology, where English is portrayed as the ‘language of globalisation’ and the most suitable language for international settings (Lønsmann, 2015; Woolard and Shieffelin, 1994). Framing attitudes to English as ideology seeks to go beyond common accounts of English as the natural product of the historical geographic and cultural expansion of English-speaking nations (Crystal, 2003), to uncover underlying assumptions of why English use is legitimate in the speakers’ current environments.
English language ideologies have also been characterised as hegemonic in a world linguistic order, where speakers of other languages are expected to accommodate to the dominance of English (Haberland, 2009). In an organisational context, English corporate language policies have been found to be based on English language ideologies, even when there is a conflict with a parallel local language ideology (Lønsmann, 2015).
In sociological theory, legitimacy is closely related to ideology, where discourse may be seen as the production and reproduction of ideas with ideological content (Vaara et al., 2006; Van Dijk, 1998). While language ideology as a concept effectively outlines the content of ideological thinking related to language, legitimation strategies are suitable theoretical concepts to capture the processes of their articulation. Legitimation may be seen as a response to institutional pressures, which emanate from the organisational environment (Boxenbaum and Jonsson, 2008; Bromley and Powell, 2012; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In the context of this study and in accordance with English language ideology research, English language ideologies, as outlined above, are analysed as the embodiment of institutional pressures. Legitimacy has been defined as the perception of certain actions or
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practices as appropriate within a certain context. Legitimation strategies are thus the actions undertaken by individual members or the organisation as a whole to legitimate other actions or practices (Vaara et al., 2006; Van Dijk, 1998). Based on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of media legitimation of global industrial restructuring in Finland, Vaara et al., (2006) outline five forms of legitimation strategy – normalisation, authorisation, rationalisation, moralisation and narrativisation. In proposing a framework to capture micro-level meaning-making of organisational phenomena, they introduce a linguistic conceptualisation of legitimation (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). Within this framework, the three most salient strategies found in the present study are normalisation, rationalisation and moralisation.
The primary and most common type of legitimation is normalisation, where a phenomenon is explained as natural by the logic of exemplarity. Normalisation may occur solely by “rendering something normal” (Vaara et al., 2006: p. 798). The strategy may be retrospective and refer to the past as a point of reference, or prospective, in reference to future expectations. Rationalisation is a legitimation strategy which refers “to the utility or function of specific actions or practices”
(Ibid.: p. 800). Here, the appropriateness of the object of legitimation may be explained as an instrument to achieve certain desirable outcomes. Moralisation legitimates through reference to perceived shared values. Thus, actions may be rendered as the “right” or “moral” course of action. Vaara et al. (Ibid.) note that rationalisation always rests on moral assumptions, making it challenging to separate the category from moralisation. However, in this study, legitimation by reference to common moral values forms a distinct strategy from references to utility. Finally, although only identified once in the current study, authorisation is legitimation by reference to an authority or instance believed to have a legitimate position of decision-making. The abovementioned categories are here applied in an analysis of
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English language legitimation as the operationalisation of English language ideology.
3. Methods and methodology
A single-case qualitative case study forms the empirical foundation for the current analysis. Critical realist approaches value the single-case study for the ample room to evaluate a broad set of contextual factors in order to propose relationships and patterns, which help uncover potential underlying generative mechanisms beneath observable events (Bygstad et al., 2016; Piekkari and Welch, 2011; Welch, Piekkari, Plakoyannaki and Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2011). In aiming for a rich and contextual examination, I have triangulated (Brannen, 1996) between semi-structured interviews and official corporate documents. The case study in its entirety has also yielded data from two months of physical and virtual participant observation and meeting recordings as well. These data sources reflect employee language use in everyday interaction, and function thus as contextual support for positioning the semi-structured interviews and document analysis in the organisational linguistic context. However, the supplementary data sources have not been analysed on the same terms as the primary two sources for this article. A full overview of the collected data is presented in Table 1 (Appendix).
Although critical discourse analysis (CDA), legitimation and language ideology typically feature in constructivist research approaches, where language and discourse are conceptualised to produce social reality, this study follows Fairclough’s (2005) critical realist approach to CDA. Through this lens, legitimation captured through CDA is seen as the surface-level operationalisation of language ideology. In generative mechanisms, ideology and legitimation interact in a reproductive and reconstructive relationship. Due to the highly contextual nature of language use, considering the organisational environment is critical when analysing language policy and language ideology. Thus, multiple data sources allow
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for a multi-level study of institutional policy and individual perspectives. I do not attempt to generalise externally valid causality, as the agenda above concentrates on the specifics of potential underlying relationships in the case organisation rather than variable-oriented hypothesising (Cornelissen, 2017; Ragin, 2009).
Semi-structured interviews are the primary data source of this case study, as they provide the foundation for analysing the legitimation of English as an organisational language on an individual level through the words of employees. The interviews provide a focused insight into individual attitudes as well as ideas about language (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1994; Kvale and Brinkmann, 2015; Smith and Elger, 2014). The interviewee sample (Table 2, Appendix) consists of employees within the case organisation’s human resources (HR) and communication departments based in Denmark and Germany, as these functions are centralised and have broad interaction with other organisational locations. Thus, the displayed attitudes to English come from individuals who have experienced a post-merger matrix structure. With the help of an organisational contact and their network, I secured access to initiate the case study and conduct initial interviews in the HR department and to explore how employees in personnel management work with and talk about language. Subsequently, once in the organisation as a visiting researcher, I contacted further interviewees in the communication department to obtain the perspective of the organisational function most likely to cover the topic of language in organisational communication. I carried out 10 interviews over the 12-month duration of the case study and supplement them with extensive observation and participant observation. Most interviews in the Danish office were conducted in person during a two-day office visit, but a few were also remote audio calls with employees in other locations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the interviews, I have mainly asked the interviewees about the corporate language, general awareness and perceptions of language policy, as well as the role of English in the organisation. Although all interviews focused on these topics, the
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interview guide was adapted to the different positions which the interviewees held, especially in cases where the interviewees did not initially provide substantial responses to questions concerning the corporate language and language policy. In instances where the interviewee departed from the semi-structure, they were encouraged to continue when their responses pertained to the general theme of language use. Thus, I have attempted to balance the act of remaining on topic, but facilitating the flow and exhaustiveness of the conversation (Charmaz and Belgrave, 2012; Galletta and Cross, 2013).
The interview situation should be regarded as an interaction between the two participants, which implies that the attributes and agendas of both sides influence the product (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2015). I have aimed to use interview interactions to provoke an articulation of language ideology. Although modification and censorship of attitudes may occur in interviews, there are recurring themes and a general correspondence between the interviewees was registered without notable contradictions. While interviews may document a self-censored performative act, collectively, the interviewee articulations may be regarded as legitimating acts and indicators of underlying ideology. Their accounts are thus treated as the utterance of beliefs about language.
The selection of interviewees, formulation of questions, interviewer influence, lack of information or intentional misguiding on the account of the interviewee are among the factors which shape the interview data, making it necessary to limit the conclusion to the contexts of the interviewees (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2015). Although my characteristics as an interviewer (male, 26 years old, southern European appearance/Scandinavian background, researcher) differentiated me visually and professionally from most of the interviewees, the only passive resistance I registered was related to the validity of my research interest in the role of English. My Scandinavian origin could also have helped rapport-building on an informal level with the Danish interviewees (Ly and Onarheim
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Spjeldnæs, 2021). However, despite obtaining a contractual affiliation with the organisation as a visiting researcher through an employee, I was still an outsider.
Therefore, I have risked obtaining polished and partial interviewee accounts. It is also necessary to note the potential amplifying effect of my research interest in language, coupled with my fluency in English, on the interviewee legitimation of English. Finally, it is necessary to account for the use of English as a non-native language for both me as an interviewer and all interviewees. Marschan-Piekkari and Reis (2004) have noted that language proficiency inequality may create a linguistic advantage for the interviewer and discomfort on the side of the interviewee.
However, all interviewees responded in long and thorough replies, and no signs of discomfort were registered. My fluency in Norwegian10 and basic German skills also aided the interpretation of some ambiguous utterances in English which appeared to be direct translations from Danish and German.
In a first step of transcription, the audio files have been run through a transcription software. I corrected the initial, at times, inaccurate output, while simultaneously listening to the audio file. The final transcriptions and illustrative quotes are presented following UK standard written English conventions, which requires the researcher to introduce punctuation, providing orthographic correspondences to spoken language, filling gaps, etc. It should be taken into account that this is an interpretive process, since rendering spoken language into written form filters content through the researcher’s perspective.
I consider two corporate documents concerning organisational communication as language policy in this case study and analyse them as discourse in parallel with the interviews. The documents are considered language policy, as they indicate which elements and guidelines concerning language use have been codified in this organisation’s written policy. Furthermore, the format and wording
10 Although Norwegian and Danish are close enough for Norwegians and Danes to understand each other, I chose not to conduct the interviews in Danish/Norwegian in order to avoid misunderstandings.
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of the documents reveal in which way the organisation has endorsed the presentation of English as a corporate language. Given the lack of a clear language policy document labelled as such, the scope for which documents are considered as policy has been widened to include all official written communication available on the corporate intranet which can be argued to indicate language use norms in the organisation. Discourse analysis of documents supplements individual legitimation strategies with legitimation on an organisational level in the shape of policy. As language ideologies commonly appear as shared bodies of belief (Rumsey, 1990), organisational elements of legitimation show that institutionalised elements of language ideology co-exist with the attitudes expressed by employees. Employee awareness of the documents and their accessibility has also been evaluated, in order to examine the relationship between the policy and employee legitimation.
In the data analysis of interview transcripts and language policy documents, I have used qualitative data management software to organise the files and summarise themes and codes. Although interview transcripts and corporate documents are different in their format and origin, the articulation of language ideology may materialise in similar ways. The two data sources were analysed separately, but following the same procedure. In a first step, open codes with direct excerpts from the data have aimed to capture themes which are emphasised or are recurring. Although staying close to the data, the open codes were informed by theory and focused on the legitimation of English. In a second step, the open codes were summarised into categories. Finally, the various legitimation strategies have been applied as analytical categories to structure the themes. While these steps are inspired from grounded theory, the analysis has been abductive with an interactive relationship between theory and data (Dubois and Gadde, 2002; 2014). The final analytical categories function as items which allow for the identification of converging patters or inconsistencies between the triangulated data sources (Brannen, 1996), and are treated as indicators of a relationship, where language
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ideology and discursive legitimation strategies form an underlying generative mechanism (Bygstad et al., 2016). The underlying ideology, as a body of ideas concerning English, is conceptualised to interact, through maintenance and reproduction, with observable legitimation in the interview and language policy data.
4. Case context
The current MNC constellation was formed in 2017, when two large organisations merged. The merger holds a prominent role in the current context of the case study, as it has drastically changed the original organisational environment in which language ideologies in the Danish/German context are formed and operate.
Furthermore, the pre-merger history of the two former entities reveals which languages have been present in the organisation historically, and that the current sites of the MNC may host different attitudes to English as an organisational language (Kroon et al., 2015).
The Danish side of the organisation was established in 1980, when an existing firm diversified into the current industry of the case MNC. This company expanded to serve the US market two years later, but, according to the available material, was still mainly based in Denmark. In 2004, a leading German conglomerate acquired the Danish entity. Subsequently, as a subsidiary, the capital and size of the German/Danish company grew through international expansion in 2007-13 with the establishment of production facilities in the US and China and a US training facility in 2013. International companies in Denmark have been found to host parallel English and Danish language ideologies (Lønsmann, 2015). While an English language policy may exist alongside widespread local language use in the German context as well, Fredriksson et al. (2006) found that the English proficiency and willingness to speak English in the German company Siemens did not allow English
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to practically function as the corporate language. Thus, the Germanic11 entity hosts a heterogeneous context, where the effective common language role of English may operate in parallel with local languages.
The Spanish organisation’s history started in Spain in 1976, but in a different sector. In 1993, the company collaborated with a Brazilian firm, before entering the current industry of the case organisation a year later. It is important to note that, while separate, the Spanish and German/Danish entities were in the same industry, but not direct competitors, as they concentrated on different market segments. The following ten years entailed significant expansion, where the Spanish organisation began servicing a broad set of markets across the globe, including seven European countries, North African and East Asian countries, as well as Mexico and India. In terms of operations, international expansion was significantly marked by the establishment of manufacturing facilitates in the US and China in 2004, in India in 2008, and in Brazil in 2010. The creation of a subsidiary based on a French/German joint venture in 2015 further expanded the Spanish entity’s European presence.
Thus, the Spanish entity boasts an expansion history no less international than the Germanic organisation. However, although Spanish companies operating in contexts beyond Spanish-speaking domains have been found to formally adopt English as a common language, Spanish may remain the main language for operations and information access on the backdrop of low average English proficiency rates (Sabaté i Dalmau, 2012; Wöcke, Grosse, Stacey and Brits, 2018).
2017 marks the merger between the German/Danish subsidiary and the Spanish organisation. Increased combined market share through complementing activities on different segments of the industry is presented as a key motivation behind the merger. Interview data indicates that, in preparation for the merger, the German/Danish entity was ‘carved out’ of the German conglomerate in order to
11 Germanic indicates the Danish and German case contexts, and stems from the linguistic term demarcating the Germanic language group: English, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, etc. (Harbert, 2007)
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later create a standalone enterprise. The headquarters of the case company were established in Spain, while central corporate functions, such as HR and communications remained in some of the major sites of the former entities in Spain, Germany and Denmark. The interview data also indicates that some areas within the organisation, such as the internal HR service, had to be restarted rather than build on the practices of the former separate entities. The merger has brought two linguistic contexts together, each with different degrees of English presence in their organisation. Thus, the relationship and attitudes to the English language in the Germanic context have had to face, and adapt to, the introduction of a new linguistic context with potentially different language ideologies.
While the corporate website is available in English and Spanish, a language guide document focusing on external communication declares English as the
‘corporate language’ and functions as the language policy. In this manner, the organisation technically has a language policy, but it does not define what the corporate language role entails for internal communication. Therefore, English holds a prominent role the post-merger organisational context, but the conditions of this role are implicit, practice-based and open to employee interpretation.
5. Analysis – legitimating English as the organisational language
The analysis of interview and language policy data draws on legitimation strategies to propose sub-categories of the overarching English language ideology in the Danish and German contexts. Table 3 provides an overview of the findings.