1 research outputs found
Language Management in a Japanese Multinational Company: A Data-Driven Approach
Globalization poses a challenge for businesses with linguistically diverse staff,
prompting the choice of English as the default corporate language. In Japan,
research on the use of English in business contexts from both corporate and
employees' perspectives is very limited, let alone studies adopting a data-driven
approach. This study focuses on Rakuten, a Japanese multinational corporation
(MNC), with the aim of illustrating the key challenges the company faces when
it adopts English as its official language. The research is interdisciplinary
and is positioned at the intersection of business communication, computational
sociolinguistics, and language management. The first article, "Content analysis
of language-sensitive recruitment influenced by corporate language policy using
topic modeling", explores the match (or mismatch) between language-sensitive
recruitment (English, Japanese, or bilingual) and corporate language policy.
The second article, "It is all about TOEIC: discovering topics and trends m
employee perceptions of corporate language policy", examines the barriers m
multinational companies that have adopted a foreign language and analyzes
employees' attitudes. The third and final article, "Analyzing cultural expatriates'
attitude toward 'Englishnization' using dynamic topic modeling", investigates
changes in employee' perceptions of Japanese work practices and values over
time. The results of my study have implications for the implementation of
language-sensitive recruitment in a multilingual corporate context. Furthermore,
the thesis also highlights the evolutionary nature of corporate language policy topics
by exploring and categorizing large amounts of text. Overall, the results presented
in the three articles expand the understanding of the challenges associated with the
use of English in a Japanese busines