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

Predictive biometrics: A review and analysis of predicting personal characteristics from biometric data

Interest in the exploitation of soft biometrics information has continued to develop over the last decade or so. In comparison with traditional biometrics, which focuses principally on person identification, the idea of soft biometrics processing is to study the utilisation of more general information regarding a system user, which is not necessarily unique. There are increasing indications that this type of data will have great value in providing complementary information for user authentication. However, the authors have also seen a growing interest in broadening the predictive capabilities of biometric data, encompassing both easily definable characteristics such as subject age and, most recently, `higher level' characteristics such as emotional or mental states. This study will present a selective review of the predictive capabilities, in the widest sense, of biometric data processing, providing an analysis of the key issues still adequately to be addressed if this concept of predictive biometrics is to be fully exploited in the future

User involvement in healthcare technology development and assessment: Structured literature review

Purpose – Medical device users are one of the principal stakeholders of medical device technologies. User involvement in medical device technology development and assessment is central to meet their needs. Design/methodology/approach – A structured review of literature, published from 1980 to 2005 in peer-reviewed journals, was carried out from social science perspective to investigate the practice of user involvement in the development and assessment of medical device technologies. This was followed by qualitative thematic analysis. Findings – It is found that users of medical devices include clinicians, patients, carers and others. Different kinds of medical devices are developed and assessed by user involvement. The user involvement occurs at different stages of the medical device technology lifecycle and the degree of user involvement is in the order of design stage > testing and trials stage > deployment stage > concept stage. Methods most commonly used for capturing users’ perspectives are usability tests, interviews and questionnaire surveys. Research limitations/implications – We did not review the relevant literature published in engineering, medical and nursing fields, which might have been useful. Practical implications – Consideration of the users’ characteristics and the context of medical device use is critical for developing and assessing medical device technologies from users’ perspectives. Originality/value – This study shows that users of medical device technologies are not homogeneous but heterogeneous, in several aspects, and their needs, skills and working environments vary. This is important consideration for incorporating users’ perspectives in medical device technologies. Paper type: Literature review

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Designing for frustration and disputes in the family car

This article appears with the express permission of the publisher, IGI Global.Families spend an increasing amount of time in the car carrying out a number of activities including driving to work, caring for children and co-ordinating drop-offs and pickups. While families travelling in cars may face stress from difficult road conditions, they are also likely to be frustrated by coordinating a number of activities and resolving disputes within the confined space of car. A rising number of in-car infotainment and driver-assistance systems aim to help reduce the stress from outside the vehicle and improve the experience of driving but may fail to address sources of stress from within the car. From ethnographic studies of family car journeys, we examine the work of parents in managing multiple stresses while driving, along with the challenges of distractions from media use in the car. Keeping these family extracts as a focus for analysis, we draw out some design considerations that help build on the observations from our empirical work.Microsoft Research and the Dorothy Hodgkin Awar

Using Noninvasive Brain Measurement to Explore the Psychological Effects of Computer Malfunctions on Users during Human-Computer Interactions

In today’s technologically driven world, there is a need to better understand the ways that common computer malfunctions affect computer users. These malfunctions may have measurable influences on computer user’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. An experiment was conducted where participants conducted a series of web search tasks while wearing functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and galvanic skin response sensors. Two computer malfunctions were introduced during the sessions which had the potential to influence correlates of user trust and suspicion. Surveys were given after each session to measure user’s perceived emotional state, cognitive load, and perceived trust. Results suggest that fNIRS can be used to measure the different cognitive and emotional responses associated with computer malfunctions. These cognitive and emotional changes were correlated with users’ self-report levels of suspicion and trust, and they in turn suggest future work that further explores the capability of fNIRS for the measurement of user experience during human-computer interactions