Language in international business: a review and agenda for future research

A fast growing number of studies demonstrates that language diversity influences almost all management decisions in modern multinational corporations. Whereas no doubt remains about the practical importance of language, the empirical investigation and theoretical conceptualization of its complex and multifaceted effects still presents a substantial challenge. To summarize and evaluate the current state of the literature in a coherent picture informing future research, we systematically review 264 articles on language in international business. We scrutinize the geographic distributions of data, evaluate the field’s achievements to date in terms of theories and methodologies, and summarize core findings by individual, group, firm, and country levels of analysis. For each of these dimensions, we then put forward a future research agenda. We encourage scholars to transcend disciplinary boundaries and to draw on, integrate, and test a variety of theories from disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to gain a more profound understanding of language in international business. We advocate more multi-level studies and cross-national research collaborations and suggest greater attention to potential new data sources and means of analysis

The making of Irish-speaking Ireland: The cultural politics of belonging, diversity and power

This paper is about linguistic justice issues in the post-colonial context of an Irish-speaking region in the south-west of Ireland, drawing on a study of political mobilization around the Irish-medium education policy of the region’s secondary school. I explore how the incipient Irish state was involved in a nationalizing project of developing strategies to constitute the Irish polity into a particular nation bound by an language of ‘archaic belonging’. Ithen examine how this nationalizing project was disrupted by structural shifts in the economic and demographic basis for the Irish-speaking communities on the Irish western seaboard. It is in this historical context that the Irish language emerges as a necessary nodal point around which political identity is formed. Local linguistic struggles are conceived as attempts to impose particular kinds of order on a field of meanin