Analyzing cultural expatriates' attitudes toward “Englishnization” using dynamic topic modeling

[EN] Several Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) have recently adopted an English-only policy known as “Englishnization”. This study examines the impact of this policy using computer-assisted text analysis to investigate changes in cultural expatriates’ perceptions of Japanese work practices and values over time. Cultural expatriates are a significant but underexplored outcome of globalization. Despite the recent proliferation of studies on the internationalization of Japanese MNCs, few studies have focused on cultural expatriates' perceptions of corporate language policy in social media texts. This study analyzes a corpus of 208 posts from Rakuten, a Japanese MNC, on Glassdoor from 2009 to 2020. The findings suggest that these posts can be divided into three content groups: the threat of a foreign corporate culture, embracing the Rakuten way, and perceptions of leadership and marginalized status. Further, the posts reveal how Rakuten’s corporate language policy, as an instrument of internal internationalization, impacts external internationalization. The dynamics of “Englishnization’’ reveal a pressing issue facing Rakuten: namely, how to balance multinational cohesion with monolingualism and multiculturalism. This paper aims to demonstrate that dynamic topic modeling could enhance our understanding of the manner in which cultural expatriates and the English-only policy affect the internationalization of Japanese MNCs. It contributes to the literature by examining cultural expatriates’ perceptions of Japanese work practices and values from a diachronic perspective.Zhang, Z. (2021). Analyzing cultural expatriates' attitudes toward “Englishnization” using dynamic topic modeling. Journal of Computer-Assisted Linguistic Research. 5(1):1-26. https://doi.org/10.4995/jclr.2021.15909OJS12651Alalwan, Ali Abdallah. 2018. "Investigating the Impact of Social Media Advertising Features on Customer Purchase Intention." International Journal of Information Management 42: 65-77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2018.06.001Beamish, Paul W., and Andrew C. Inkpen. 1998. "Japanese Firms and the Decline of the Japanese Expatriate." Journal of World Business 33 (1): 35-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-9516(98)80003-5Black, J., and A. Morrison. 2010. Sunset in the Land of the Rising Sun: Why Japanese Multinational Corporations Will Struggle in the Global Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Blei, David M. 2012. "Probabilistic topic models." Communications of the ACM 55(4): 77-84. https://doi.org/10.1145/2133806.2133826Blei, David M., Andrew Y. Ng, and Michael I. Jordan. 2003. "Latent Dirichlet allocation." Journal of Machine Research 3: 993-1022.Blei, David M, and John D. Lafferty. 2006. "Dynamic Topic Models." In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, 113-120. https://doi.org/10.1145/1143844.1143859Brannen, Mary Yoko, and David C. Thomas. 2010. "Bicultural Individuals in Organizations: Implications and Opportunity." International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 10(1): 5-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595809359580Brannen, Mary Yoko, Dominie Garcia, and David C. Thomas. 2009. "Biculturals as Natural Bridges for Intercultural Communication and Collaboration." In Proceedings of the 2009 International Workshop on Intercultural Collaboration, 207-210. https://doi.org/10.1145/1499224.1499257Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. "Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach." Discourse Studies 7(4-5): 585-614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407Chandelier, Marie, Agnes Steuckardt, Raphael Mathevet, Sascha Diwersy, and Olivier Gimenez. 2018. "Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Wolf Recolonization in France using Structural Topic Modeling." Biological Conservation 220: 254-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.01.029Chung, Neo Christopher, BłaŻej Miasojedow, Michał Startek, and Anna Gambin. 2019. "Jaccard/Tanimoto Similarity Test and Estimation Methods for Biological Presence-Absence Data." BMC Bioinformatics 20(15): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-019-3118-5Cogo, Alessia and Yanaprasart, Patchareerat. 2018. "English is the language of business": An exploration of language ideologies in two European corporate contexts." In English in Business and Commerce: Interactions and Policies; English in Europe, Volume 5, edited by Tamah Sherman and Jiri Nekvapil, 96-116. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501506833-005Conrad, Harald, and Hendrik Meyer-Ohle. 2019. Overcoming the Ethnocentric Firm? - Foreign Fresh University Graduate Employment in Japan as a New International Human Resource Development Method. The International Journal of Human Resource Management 30(17): 2525-2543. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2017.1330275Elangovan, Vinodh Krishnan, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2015. "You're Mr. Lebowski, I'm the Dude": Inducing Address Term Formality in Signed Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies. 1616-1626. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/N15-1185Froese, Fabian J., and Yasuyuki Kishi. 2013. "Organizational Attractiveness of Foreign Firms in Asia: Soft Power Matters." Asian Business & Management 12(3): 281-297. https://doi.org/10.1057/abm.2013.3Gaibrois, Claudine. 2015. "Power at Work: the Discursive Construction of Power Relations in Multilingual Organizations." Thesis. Bamberg: Difo-Druck.Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Hong, Liangjie, and Brian D. Davison. 2010. "Empirical Study of Topic Modeling in Twitter." In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics - SOMA '10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1964858.1964870Jacoby, Sanford M. 2005. "Business and Society in Japan and the United States." British Journal of Industrial Relations 43(4): 617. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2005.00476.xJameson, Daphne A. 2007. "Reconceptualizing Cultural Identity and its Role in Intercultural Business Communication." The Journal of Business Communication (1973) 44(3): 199-235. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021943607301346Johannsen, Anders, Dirk Hovy, and Anders Søgaard. 2015. "Cross-lingual Syntactic Variation over Age and Gender." In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 103-112. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/K15-1011Kankaanranta, Anne, and Wei Lu. 2013. "The Evolution of English as the Business Lingua Franca: Signs of Convergence in Chinese and Finnish Professional Communication." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 27(3): 288-307. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651913479919Keeley, Tim. 2001. International Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms: Their Greatest Challenge. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597655Kopp, Rochelle. 1994a. "International Human Resource Policies and Practices in Japanese, European, and United States Multinationals." Human Resource Management 33(4): 581-599. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930330407Kopp, Rochelle. 1994b. The Rice-paper Ceiling: Breaking Through Japanese Corporate Culture. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.Kwok, Linchi, and Bei Yu. 2013. "Spreading Social Media Messages on Facebook: An Analysis of Restaurant Business-to-Consumer Communications." Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 54(1): 84-94. https://doi.org/10.1177/1938965512458360Luo, Ning, Yilu Zhou, and John Shon. 2016. "Employee Satisfaction and Corporate Performance: Mining Employee Reviews on Glassdoor.com". In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Information Systems. 1-16.Martin, Roger L. 2009. The Opposable Mind How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.Milroy, Lesley, and Matthew Gordon. 2008. Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation, vol. 13. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.Moniz, Andy. 2016. "Inferring Employees' Social Media Perceptions of Goal-setting Corporate Cultures and the Link to Firm Value." Unpublished Working Paper. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2768091Morishima, Motohiro. 1995. "Embedding HRM in a Social Context." British Journal of Industrial Relations 33(4): 617-640. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1995.tb00459.xNeeley, Tsedal. 2011. "Language and Globalization: 'Englishnization' at Rakuten." Harvard Business School Organizational Behavior Unit Case (412-002).Neeley, Tsedal. 2017. The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400888641Nelson, Laura K. 2020. "Computational Grounded Theory: A Methodological Framework." Sociological Methods & Research 49(1): 3-42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729703Nguyen, Dong, A Seza Doğruöz, Carolyn P Rosé, and Franciska De Jong. 2016. "Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey." Computational Linguistics 42(3): 537-593. https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00258Nguyen, Dong, Dolf Trieschnigg, and Theo Meder. 2014. "Tweetgenie: Development, Evaluation, and Lessons Learned." In Proceedings of Coling 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 62-66.Nixon, Richard Mark. 2015. "Workplace English Usage in Japan." The Journal of the Faculty of Foreign Studies 47: 21-34.Ringberg, Torsten V., David Luna, Markus Reihlen, and Laura A. Peracchio. 2010. "Bicultural-bilinguals: The Effect of Cultural Frame Switching on Translation Equivalence." International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 10(1): 77-92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595809359585Rumsey, Alan. "Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology." 1990. American Anthropologist 92, no. 2: 346-61. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1990.92.2.02a00060Schaaper, Johannes, Bruno Amann, Jacques Jaussaud, Hiroyuki Nakamura, and Shuji Mizoguchi. 2013. "Human Resource Management in Asian Subsidiaries: Comparison of French and Japanese MNCs." The International Journal of Human Resource Management 24 (7): 1454-70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2012.712545Sekiguchi, Tomoki, Fabian Jintae Froese, and Chie Iguchi. 2016. "International Human Resource Management of Japanese Multinational Corporations: Challenges and Future Directions." Asian Business & Management 15(2): 83-109. https://doi.org/10.1057/abm.2016.5Shiraki, Mitsuhide. 2007. Role of Japanese Expatriates in Japanese Multinational Corporations: From the Perspective of the Multinational Internal Labor Market." Working Paper No.42. Tokyo: School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University.Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511801624Tanimoto, Taffee T. 1958. "Elementary Mathematical Theory of Classification and Prediction." International Business Machines Corp.Törnberg, Anton, and Petter Törnberg. 2016. "Combining CDA and Topic Modeling: Analyzing Discursive Connections Between Islamophobia and Anti-feminism on an Online Forum." Discourse & Society 27(4): 401-422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926516634546Tung, Rosalie L. 1984. "Strategic Management of Human Resources in the Multinational Enterprise." Human Resource Management 23(2): 129-143. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930230204Vayansky, Ike, and Sathish A.P. Kumar. 2020. "A Review of Topic Modeling Methods." Information Systems 94: 101582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2020.101582Welch, Denice E., and Lawrence S. Welch. 2008. "The Importance of Language in International Knowledge Transfer." Management International Review 48(3): 339-60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-008-0019-7Wong, Heung Wah. 2010. "Why a Globalizing Corporate Culture Still Inhibits Localization of Management; the Yaohan Case." Sangyō Keiei Kenkyū 32(1): 31-48.Wong, May M.L. 1996. "Shadow Management in Japanese Companies in Hong Kong." Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 34(1): 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1177/103841119603400106Xiang, Zheng, Qianzhou Du, Yufeng Ma, and Weiguo Fan. 2017. "A Comparative Analysis of Major Online Review Platforms: Implications for Social Media Analytics in Hospitality and Tourism." Tourism Management 58: 51-65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.10.001Yagi, Noriko, and Jill Kleinberg. 2011. "Boundary Work: An Interpretive Ethnographic Perspective on Negotiating and Leveraging Cross-cultural Identity." Journal of International Business Studies 42(5): 629-653. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2011.10Zhang, Ziyuan. 2021a. "Content Analysis of Language-Sensitive Recruitment Influenced by Corporate Language Policy Using Topic Modeling." HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, no. 61: 77-91. https://tidsskrift.dk/her/article/view/127928 https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.vi61.127928Zhang, Ziyuan. 2021b. "It is All about Topic: Discovering Topics and Trends in Employee Perceptions of Corporate Language Policy." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2021.193808

Open-Source Telemedicine Platform for Wireless Medical Video Communication

An m-health system for real-time wireless communication of medical video based on open-source software is presented. The objective is to deliver a low-cost telemedicine platform which will allow for reliable remote diagnosis m-health applications such as emergency incidents, mass population screening, and medical education purposes. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated using five atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. The videos are encoded at the clinically acquired resolution, in addition to lower, QCIF, and CIF resolutions, at different bitrates, and four different encoding structures. Commercially available wireless local area network (WLAN) and 3.5G high-speed packet access (HSPA) wireless channels are used to validate the developed platform. Objective video quality assessment is based on PSNR ratings, following calibration using the variable frame delay (VFD) algorithm that removes temporal mismatch between original and received videos. Clinical evaluation is based on atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video assessment protocol. Experimental results show that adequate diagnostic quality wireless medical video communications are realized using the designed telemedicine platform. HSPA cellular networks provide for ultrasound video transmission at the acquired resolution, while VFD algorithm utilization bridges objective and subjective ratings

Interoperability, Trust Based Information Sharing Protocol and Security: Digital Government Key Issues

Improved interoperability between public and private organizations is of key significance to make digital government newest triumphant. Digital Government interoperability, information sharing protocol and security are measured the key issue for achieving a refined stage of digital government. Flawless interoperability is essential to share the information between diverse and merely dispersed organisations in several network environments by using computer based tools. Digital government must ensure security for its information systems, including computers and networks for providing better service to the citizens. Governments around the world are increasingly revolving to information sharing and integration for solving problems in programs and policy areas. Evils of global worry such as syndrome discovery and manage, terror campaign, immigration and border control, prohibited drug trafficking, and more demand information sharing, harmonization and cooperation amid government agencies within a country and across national borders. A number of daunting challenges survive to the progress of an efficient information sharing protocol. A secure and trusted information-sharing protocol is required to enable users to interact and share information easily and perfectly across many diverse networks and databases globally.Comment: 20 page

A review on analysis and synthesis of nonlinear stochastic systems with randomly occurring incomplete information

Copyright q 2012 Hongli Dong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In the context of systems and control, incomplete information refers to a dynamical system in which knowledge about the system states is limited due to the difficulties in modeling complexity in a quantitative way. The well-known types of incomplete information include parameter uncertainties and norm-bounded nonlinearities. Recently, in response to the development of network technologies, the phenomenon of randomly occurring incomplete information has become more and more prevalent. Such a phenomenon typically appears in a networked environment. Examples include, but are not limited to, randomly occurring uncertainties, randomly occurring nonlinearities, randomly occurring saturation, randomly missing measurements and randomly occurring quantization. Randomly occurring incomplete information, if not properly handled, would seriously deteriorate the performance of a control system. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with randomly occurring incomplete information. The developments of the filtering, control and fault detection problems are systematically reviewed. Latest results on analysis and synthesis of nonlinear stochastic systems are discussed in great detail. In addition, various distributed filtering technologies over sensor networks are highlighted. Finally, some concluding remarks are given and some possible future research directions are pointed out. © 2012 Hongli Dong et al.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61273156, 61134009, 61273201, 61021002, and 61004067, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, the National Science Foundation of the USA under Grant No. HRD-1137732, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of German

Fuzzy-logic-based control, filtering, and fault detection for networked systems: A Survey

This paper is concerned with the overview of the recent progress in fuzzy-logic-based filtering, control, and fault detection problems. First, the network technologies are introduced, the networked control systems are categorized from the aspects of fieldbuses and industrial Ethernets, the necessity of utilizing the fuzzy logic is justified, and the network-induced phenomena are discussed. Then, the fuzzy logic control strategies are reviewed in great detail. Special attention is given to the thorough examination on the latest results for fuzzy PID control, fuzzy adaptive control, and fuzzy tracking control problems. Furthermore, recent advances on the fuzzy-logic-based filtering and fault detection problems are reviewed. Finally, conclusions are given and some possible future research directions are pointed out, for example, topics on two-dimensional networked systems, wireless networked control systems, Quality-of-Service (QoS) of networked systems, and fuzzy access control in open networked systems.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374039, 61473163, and 61374127, the Hujiang Foundation of China under Grants C14002 andD15009, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Delivery of broadband services to SubSaharan Africa via Nigerian communications satellite

Africa is the least wired continent in the world in terms of robust telecommunications infrastructure and systems to cater for its more than one billion people. African nations are mostly still in the early stages of Information Communications Technology (ICT) development as verified by the relatively low ICT Development Index (IDI) values of all countries in the African region. In developing nations, mobile broadband subscriptions and penetration between 2000-2009 was increasingly more popular than fixed broadband subscriptions. To achieve the goal of universal access, with rapid implementation of ICT infrastructure to complement the sparsely distributed terrestrial networks in the hinterlands and leveraging the adequate submarine cables along the African coastline, African nations and their stakeholders are promoting and implementing Communication Satellite systems, particularly in Nigeria, to help bridge the digital hiatus. This paper examines the effectiveness of communication satellites in delivering broadband-based services