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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to previous research on intraorganizational power in multinational corporations (MNCs). It shows that a subsidiary manager may use language and acts of translation to resist control from headquarters and to (re)define his and his unit’s power position in a headquarters-subsidiary relationship. It also uncovers the interplay between natural languages and “company speak” as a specialized language.

The paper is based on a single case study of a European MNC undergoing strategic change. The data were drawn from company documents, personal interviews and focus group discussions.

The findings show that actors at both headquarters and in the focal subsidiary employed language and translation to exercise power over meanings; headquarters exerted control over “mindsets” and practices, while subsidiaries responded by resisting these meaning systems. The authors argue that the crossing of language boundaries offers a window onto shifting power positions and micro-politics in the MNC.

The study was limited to a single translation act in a focal headquarters-subsidiary relationship.

From the managerial perspective, any process of communication in a multilingual context needs to be sensitive to power (re)definitions associated with language and translation.

This study sheds light on translation as a political act and hidden activity in the MNC.

The purpose of this paper, drawing mainly on insights from Foucault and Wittgenstein, is to conceptualise intellectual capital (IC) in very generalist terms as both language game and power in order to initiate a critical understanding of IC.

IC is viewed as knowledge about knowledge, knowledge creation and how such processes might be leveraged into value. It is argued that a critical understanding of IC requires a historical, contextual and linguistic understanding of how IC has emerged and how IC is used. Perceiving IC as language game and power is one way of initiating such critical understanding.

IC is perceived as a social construction and the genealogical focus is on how actors, positions and interests influence this process of social construction.

The paper offers concepts and methods that facilitate historical and contextual research on how IC emerges and how IC is used. Further historical studies are necessary in order to reflect upon and improve extant IC concepts and methods

The paper offers a critical understanding of IC by introducing concepts from the organisational discourse literature. Further it offers practical methodological guidelines for conducting critical genealogical research.

In this chapter, we align two approaches on the multinational enterprise (MNE), that is, research on languages and international business, and micropolitics, in order to establish the language-based underpinnings of micropolitical behavior in the MNE.

This theoretical chapter departs from a social, relational perspective on power relationships in the MNE. Power relationships are constituted in multilingual encounters between different language users.

Our analysis builds on the assumption that the mandated corporate language in the MNE, which often is English, results in a language hierarchy. This hierarchy creates inequality and tension between the languages in use in the MNE. However, language agents, that is, headquarters, foreign subsidiaries, teams, managers, and employees can – individually or collectively – change, challenge, and disrupt this hierarchical order. Their micropolitical behavior is essential for action as it redraws organizational structure, alters the degree of foreign subsidiary autonomy and control, redefines the privileged and the disadvantaged groups in the MNE, and reinforces subgroup formation and dynamics in multilingual teams.

We highlight the important role played by language agents who sit at the interstices of organizational networks in the MNE. The interplay between their actions and motivations and their historical and situational contexts represents an underexplored and undertheorized area of study.

Senior managers in MNEs are frequently very competent or native users of the English language. Appreciating the continued existence of various languages has implications for how different MNE units can effectively connect and operate as an overall entity.

This chapter highlights the languages-based mechanisms that underpin power relationships in the MNE.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach, this paper illustrates how language becomes part of a mechanism of negotiating group membership and of perpetuating or challenging power asymmetries through social and ideological processes.

This paper draws on interview data from an ethnographic case study of a Korean MNC to understand language ideologies in one working team. The interview data are analysed through an IS framework to connect the situated interaction to the broader social context.

This paper shows that participants’ discourse of linguistic differentiation becomes an interactional resource in challenging the organisational status quo. Linguistic superiority/inferiority is constructed through particular sequencing and the systematic production of a dichotomy between two groups – expatriate managers and local employees – at various levels of their company structure. Group membership is enacted temporarily in positioning the self and the others.

This paper offers a methodological contribution to international business language-sensitive research on language and power by conducting interactional analysis of interview talk. Through the lens of IS, it provides insights into how discourse becomes a primary site of negotiating power and status and a multi-level approach to the study of organisational power dynamics and the complex linguistic landscape of any workplace.

This chapter explores how critical language theory could be applied to the language dynamics in higher education that is created by internationalization and university's traditional role in maintaining national languages. Language policy is an instrument of governance that is increasingly used to regulate the linguistic situation at the university, so it is at the center of my analysis. As a broad concept, language policy is not limited to the formulations of the policy text but includes interactions of different actors and addresses instruments mediating the university's linguistic situation. A critical approach highlights that language policy is permeated with power, which is unequally distributed between different actors. I suggest further conceptualization of the language dynamics of the internationalized university created by national language protection and internationalization through three layers of analysis. The first layer derives from the Bourdieu's approach to language in society focusing on the societal hierarchies that are underpinned by language use. It also includes a discussion about structure versus agency, and a conversation about the navigational capacities of individuals to challenge preestablished social structures. The second layer discusses dialogue as a theoretical approach to the process of negotiating language policy. This is where agency is being realized, depending on the relative power of different actors in the particular social context. The third layer explores the conception of language, how different ways to understand what language is are turned into policy principles.

This paper aims to present a critical interpretation of unfolding events related to corporate and policymaking elites during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic crisis to serve as a point of contrast to mainstream views.

Drawing upon literature on elite maintenance and power, learning from recent previous crises and emerging evidence during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, this study develops arguments to question and problematize the exercise of power by elites toward maintenance of existing systems across the pandemic.

Critical examination points attention to three related but analytically distinct strategies in the exercise of elite power: reinforcing myths, redirecting blame and reclaiming positions, all directed to maintain the system and preserve power. The potential effects of this ongoing elite maintenance are highlighted, revealing the old and new forms of power likely to emerge at the corporate, national and global levels across the pandemic crisis and endure beyond it.

It is hoped that the critical examination here may build more awareness about the deep and complex nature of elite power and systems across the globe that preclude meaningful system change to address societal challenges. It may thereby provide more informed engagement toward system change.

The main originality of the paper lies in its attempt to tie together the various types of elite maintenance works and their potential effects into an overarching narrative. Making these connections and interpreting them from a critical perspective provides a rare large-canvas picture of elite power and system maintenance, particularly across a global crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the change experience of a regional health centre that was merged in the late 1990s and shows how organizational talk becomes privileged in the change process, and how some talk becomes meaningful in the constitution of organizational identity.

The paper analyzes the process through which some talk is privileged in the organizational change process. The deconstruction of language used throughout this analysis highlights the relationship between sites of power and the ability to affect sensemaking among organizational members. Using a post‐structuralist approach, the authors apply the analytic framework of critical sensemaking (CSM) and critical discourse analysis.

Organizational talk is presented as the enactment of a sensemaking process and insights are offered into the process of how organizational identities are maintained, altered or constrained during change. The discursive effects of the language of change, including the belief that change is actually a discursive process about the mutual constitution of language and identity in a process of making sense of the discourse of change, are discussed.

The merging of critical discourse analysis with CSM provides an alternative means of understanding organizational change, including the socio‐psychological processes that occur within the privileging of the language of change.

For organizational change practitioners, the paper provides insights into the importance of how organizational members make sense of the change language discourse, which can affect how they introduce future change processes.

The paper provides a novel way of understanding the change process and furthers the empirical use of (critical) sensemaking as a method.

Disaster studies has emerged as an international interdisciplinary body of knowledge; however, similar to other academic disciplines, its terminology is predominantly anglophone. This paper explores the implications of translating disaster studies terminology, most often theorised in English, into other languages and back.

The authors chose six of the most commonly used (as well as debated and contested) terms that are prominent in academic, policy and public discourses: resilience, vulnerability, capacity, disaster, hazard and risk. These words were translated into 54 languages and the meanings were articulated descriptively in cases where the translation did not have exactly the same meaning as the word in English. The authors then analysed these meanings in order to understand implications of disaster scholars working between dominant and “peripheral” languages.

Findings of the study demonstrate that many of the terms so casually used in disaster studies in English do not translate easily – or at all – opening the concepts that are encoded in these terms for further interpretation. Moreover, the terms used in disaster studies are not only conceptualised in English but are also tied to an anglophone approach to research. It is important to consider the intertwined implications that the use of the terminology carries, including the creation of a “separate” language, power vs communication and linguistic imperialism.

Understanding of the meaning (and contestation of meaning) of these terms in English provides an insight into the power relationships between English and the other language. Given the need to translate key concepts from English into other languages, it is important to appreciate their cultural and ideological “baggage”.