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Businesses that operate globally bring together people from different cultures and traditions; educated through different learning processes; and who operate in different political systems, in regions with different levels of industrial development. Language affects the ability of multinational organizations to function in the global market. Yet, the need for corporate language policies has not been adequately recognized in both the strategic management literature and communications literature. In this paper, we discuss some of the emergent conditions that necessitate corporate foregrounding of language in the formulation of business strategies. We also examine some of the critical factors that would define the development of a corporate language policy in a globalized market, drawing upon insights from traditional language planning in the sociopolitical context of community and nation building.

Three distinct trends are evolving that characterize the challenges facing corporate planners in managing language as a corporate asset. These are the evolution of the knowledge economy, the globalization of business and economy, and the increasing diversity of the workforce. These trends call for attention to the role language plays in the creation of intellectual and organizational capital. Linguists have been hampered by their inability to model how linguistic conditions affect economic processes. They have long attempted to assess the economic value of language as a commodity, but with little success. The purpose of this article is to describe language as an asset, and argue that recent advances in decision sciences have sufficiently removed the deficit in theoretical and empirical research that challenged the linguists.

Drawing an analogy between language and currency, this article identifies the functions that language must perform in terms of exchange, accounting and storage of information, knowledge and know‐how.

Factors that contribute to the value of a language are discussed through comparative analysis of these functions from the perspectives of linguists, economists and decision analysts. Based on the Social Judgment Theory, the article develops a judgment‐analytic framework for the assessment of the value of a language.

Concluding that the corporate and community planning perspectives are divergent, the paper identifies the direction for future research to inform formulation of language policies. The value of a language may be affected by the degree to which the language is used in the demographic community defining an organization's strategic environment, the investment in the language relative to other available languages, demand for the language as a commodity within the organization's strategic community, and so on.

With such conception of language, corporations can begin to think in terms of a portfolio of language assets much in the same way as it thinks of portfolio of financial currency assets.

Recent years have seen a technological change, Industry 4.0, in the manufacturing industry. Human–robot cooperation, a new application, is increasing and facilitating collaboration without fences, cages or any kind of separation. The purpose of the paper is to review mainstream academic publications to evaluate the current status of human–robot cooperation and identify potential areas of further research.

A systematic literature review is offered that searches, appraises, synthetizes and analyses relevant works.

The authors report the prevailing status of human–robot collaboration, human factors, complexity/ programming, safety, collision avoidance, instructing the robot system and other aspects of human–robot collaboration.

This paper identifies new directions and potential research in practice of human–robot collaboration, such as measuring the degree of collaboration, integrating human–robot cooperation into teamwork theories, effective functional relocation of the robot and product design for human robot collaboration.

This paper will be useful for three cohorts of readers, namely, the manufacturers who require a baseline for development and deployment of robots; users of robots-seeking manufacturing advantage and researchers looking for new directions for further exploration of human–machine collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the problems associated with the prevailing rhetoric in corporate communication. It proposes the consideration of nonviolent rhetorical approaches.

This paper explains corporate communication's affinity for aggressive, militaristic language in terms of constraint of time, and expediency and efficiency of standardized communication strategies designed for large‐scale effectiveness. However, such communication strategies run the risk of dehumanizing the intended targets, distancing the individuals, and compromising socially responsible corporate behavior. The recent corporate scandals of unprecedented scale, occurring in spite of vast improvements in communication theory and technology, have highlighted the need for alternative approaches to corporate communication. Further, it examines the prerequisites that must exist for corporate communication based on nonviolent rhetoric to be effective. The conditions that must be present in the environment, in the corporation or its agent, and in the method of communication, for nonviolent rhetoric to prove effective are discussed.

Corporations seek to establish and modify relationships by influencing stakeholder beliefs, values, expectations and needs. Corporate rhetorical success is reflected in enhanced reputation and respectability, which in turn has significant economic consequences. To achieve these ends, corporations expend considerable effort on communication to educate, entertain and inform their stakeholders. Yet, scholars have generally neglected to study role of rhetoric and language in public relations.

This paper would be of value to researchers and practitioners, in the fields of corporate communication, organizational communication, public relations, and strategic management, seeking to promote, practice or otherwise influence socially responsible corporate behavior.

With growing literature on corporate reputation, different perspectives are being reported on the concept of corporate reputation. These stem from different sets of issues to be managed, and various disciplinary competencies brought to bear on them. This paper presents a review of these efforts.

Additionally, a new methodological basis for understanding perceptions of corporate reputation is presented. This paper introduces social judgement theory as a potentially useful theoretical and methodological basis for understanding perceptions of corporate respectability.

Though it is generally recognized that subjectivity plays an important role in the assessment of reputation, that people rely on naïve theories of judgement to make such assessments, and that subjective or clinical judgements are generally not accurate, investigations of the process by which corporate respectability is assessed are not generally reported. However, a computerized procedure facilitates identification, measurement and reporting of judgemental sources of assessment of corporate respectability.

This paper provides an account of an empirical study as an example of how the procedure described here can be used for both research and practical application in formulating corporate reputation policy.

The procedure described here can be used for both research and practical application in formulating corporate reputation policy. The approach presents an alternative approach to the assessment of corporate respectability.

The description of policies in terms of parameters of the judgement process provides an operational definition of the decision makers’ cognitive sets about the domain of corporate respectability. This information would prove invaluable in developing and implementing a judgement‐based decision support system for the benefit of managers of public relations, corporate communications, and corporate reputation.

This paper seeks to analyze instances of nonviolent strategies adopted by a class of stakeholders – the women of the Niger Delta region.

It analyzes their successes and failures in terms of a set of prerequisite conditions that must be met for such strategies to be effective. These prerequisite conditions must be present in the environment, the agent, and the methodology of nonviolent action, for assurance of efficacy.

The experience of the women of Niger Delta with nonviolent action indicates that it is possible to meet the prerequisite conditions for assurance of efficacy and for formulation of nonviolent strategies to conflict resolution. It is, therefore, determined that nonviolent action offers a viable alternative for persuasion of the multinational oil corporations in the Niger Delta region.

This paper would be of value to researchers and practitioners, in the fields of corporate communication, organizational communication, public relations, and strategic management, seeking to promote, practice or otherwise influence socially responsible corporate behavior.