We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Translating Culture in the Global Workplace: Language, Communication, and Diversity Management.
- Authors
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul
- Abstract
In the highly multicultural workplace of today's multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this article, I consider these questions through a discussion of the corporate discourse of diversity management, in which the cultural diversity of the workforce is understood as a resource for maximizing profit. Based on a critical review of diversity management literature and a study on Korean managers working for non-Korean MNCs in Singapore, I first show how diversity management's claim of openness and inclusivity actually works to reproduce unequal relations in the workplace. I then argue that attention to the politics of translation, where the ideological nature of evaluations of cultural (in)commensurability is highlighted, is needed for applied linguists' engagement with language and communication in the multicultural workplace.
- Subjects
INTERNATIONAL business enterprises; MULTICULTURALISM; WORK environment; KOREANS; EXECUTIVES
- Publication
Applied Linguistics, 2020, Vol 41, Issue 1, p109
- ISSN
0142-6001
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/applin/amz019