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Current Issues in Language Planning
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Pre-interaction management in multinational companies in Central Europe
Jií Nekvapil a; Tamah Sherman a
a Department of General Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2009
To cite this Article Nekvapil, Jií and Sherman, Tamah(2009)'Pre-interaction management in multinational companies in Central
Europe',Current Issues in Language Planning,10:2,181 — 198
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14664200802399133
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664200802399133
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Pre-interaction management in multinational companies
in Central Europe
Jir
ˇı
´Nekvapiland Tamah Sherman
Department of General Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
This article is devoted to the linguistic, communicative and sociocultural situation in
branches of multinational companies located in the Czech Republic and Hungary.
There are typically several languages used in these branches. In addition to the local
languages, there are the languages of the parent companies – most commonly
English or German, and also French. The core of the article is the description of the
strategies on various levels of the company used to manage problems anticipated in
future interactions. We demonstrate that these strategies originate as the result of
communication problems the employees have already experienced and are created
and reproduced in anticipation of similar problems in the future. We place emphasis
on the close relationship between the way in which individuals systematically solve
language and communication problems and how multinational companies do so, and
we thus contribute to the further investigation of the interplay between micro- and
macro-language planning. The article has its theoretical basis in language
management theory as conceived by J.V. Neustupny
´and B.H. Jernudd, but its
ambition is also to develop the theory further, above all through the concept of pre-
interaction management.
Keywords: language management; interaction; multilingualism; business
communication
Introduction
Economic relationships are currently the driving force in international collaboration. They
stimulate various forms of international cooperation, and the formation of multinational
companies is one of the most visible forms of this. Multinational companies establish
branches in areas that enable them to optimally increase their profits, meaning that in
many cases these are locations where the economic level lags behind that of the
country in which the parent company is located. This was (and to a certain extent, still
is) true of the former Soviet bloc countries. Though the Czech Republic and Hungary
became members of the European Union, they still have not caught up economically
with countries such as the Netherlands, Germany or Austria, countries whose share of
foreign direct investment in the post-communist countries is quite high. This economic
imbalance is projected into the power relationships in multinational companies – the
expatriates, the representatives of the parent company, nearly always hold top manage-
ment positions in the branches. This is related to the status and distribution of the
ISSN 1466-4208 print/ISSN 1747-7506 online
#2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14664200802399133
http://www.informaworld.com
Corresponding author. Email: jiri.nekvapil@ff.cuni.cz
Current Issues in Language Planning
Vol. 10, No. 2, May 2009, 181 – 198
Downloaded By: [Nekvapil, Jií] At: 15:36 11 June 2009
languages used – the languages used by the expatriates may be perceived as more power-
ful than the local languages and it is essentially assumed that the local employees will
acquire these languages, while the expatriates can allow themselves to function without
knowledge of the local languages.
The imbalance in power relationships in the branches of multinational companies
operating in Central Europe is also strengthened by the varying degree of linguistic, com-
municative and sociocultural competence of the expatriates and local employees. It should
be pointed out that foreign capital and the expatriates that accompany it come from
countries to which it was difficult to travel from Czechoslovakia or Hungary prior to
the fall of the communist regime in 1989, which was reflected in the lower motivation
of Czechs or Hungarians to learn the respective foreign languages at all, much less to
attain a high level of competence in them. This means not only that an expatriate, e.g.
a German employee, can communicate in the work environment in German much
better than a local Czech or Hungarian employee (which is self-evident), but even that
this person has a much higher competence in English (which is not self-evident), i.e. in
the language which is often the corporate language even in daughter companies with a
parent company in Germany.
This unequal state, which we present only in a schematic sense, is, however, slowly
beginning to change, and not only in Western European companies. For example, there
are a number of recent trends to consider, which put the power relationships in perspective.
Czech companies have now found themselves in the position of parent company, with
daughter companies further east, e.g. in Russia. Russian employees, like Czech employees,
are also at a historical and linguistic disadvantage when it comes to learning English. Yet
Czech employees, due to their political past and the linguistic closeness of Czech and
Russian, are more likely (and often expected) to speak Russian. Finally, companies from
Asian countries such as Japan and Korea have established branches in Central Europe.
In these companies, the common language is English, and neither group of employees is
expected to learn or speak the other’s language.
Our paper aims to show how both local employees and expatriates deal with language,
communication and sociocultural problems occurring in specific situations, and primarily
how they prevent them. That is, this is a description of language behaviour which we
will call ‘pre-interaction management’. This term is rooted in language management
theory (LMT), which we will now briefly discuss.
Theoretical framework: LMT
This theory originated primarily in the work of J.V. Neustupny
´and B.H. Jernudd (see
Jernudd & Neustupny
´, 1987). Unlike the theories of language planning of that time, it
does not only deal with language problems on the level of the entire society (‘macro-
language planning’). Instead, it devoted attention to language problems in less complex
social organisations and in concrete interactions (‘micro-language planning’) and indicated
the possibility of a relationship between these levels (Nekvapil, 2008; Nekvapil & Nekula,
2006a, p. 309). LMT’s point of departure is the differentiation between two processes in
language use: (1) the production of utterances or communicative acts and (2) management
of the produced utterances or communicative acts. The theory thus begins with the
everyday experience that we are able to communicate without our attention being oriented
towards the fact that we are communicating, or we note various aspects of this communi-
cation (e.g. a slip of the tongue, or the fact that we do not understand something or that
we are not able to find the right word, that our communication partner’s pronunciation
182 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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is funny, etc.). The management process, however, need not end merely with the noting
of something that deviates from someone’s expectations or from an established norm, but
can continue with the speaker or listener evaluating (e.g. negatively) the given deviation,
thinking about how to eliminate it and finding a solution (in LMT speak this phase is
labelled adjustment design), and finally, the given design can be used in communication,
implemented. Important for the topic of this article is the fact that in LMT the ‘problem’
is clearly delineated as the negatively evaluated deviation from an expectation (norm).
With regard to the text below, we will refer to such a phenomenon as a ‘smaller
problem’.
A series of phases of the management process can be demonstrated using the following
example (M is a Czech manager in a large German – Czech company and S is a Czech
researcher interested in the situation in this company):
Example 1 (from Nekvapil,1997a,1997b)
1
In this fragment we see that M has used the ethnic category ‘Germans’ (line 2), but after a
short pause he replaced it with a professional category, i.e. ‘experts’ (line 2). On the basis of
empirical research (Nekvapil, 1997a, 1997b), we are aware that the ‘norm’ in the given
company is to not use ethnic categories, because they evoke ethnic stereotypes and the pro-
blematic common history of Czechs and Germans (we could say that this norm is an
example of a sort of local political correctness). The management process thus likely
occurred in the following manner: M noted that he had deviated from the norm, he evidently
evaluated this deviation negatively (which is made explicit by his turn in line 4), sought and
found an adjustment design (i.e. a non-ethnic category with the same referent) and
implemented it, i.e. by using the expression ‘experts’.
Management that occurs within concrete interactions is ‘simple’; Jernudd (2002), in
the spirit of computer metaphors, calls it ‘on-line’. However, management can also take
place outside of concrete interactions, to which, however, it is nevertheless related in
some way (more on this below), and therefore occurs ‘off-line’. This type of management
can take place in rather complex social networks, which is why the phrase ‘organised man-
agement’ is often used to describe it. Nekvapil (2008) designated five aspects for its charac-
terisation:
(a) Management acts are trans-situational
(b) A social network or even an institution is involved
(c) Communication about management takes place
(d) Theorising and ideology intervene
(e) In addition to language as discourse, the object of management is language as a
system
The organised nature of language management is, of course, a matter of degree. Highly
organised language management takes place, for example, in language institutes
Current Issues in Language Planning 183
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(academies) and its result can be a language reform proposal. Considerably organised man-
agement also takes place in multinational companies and its result can be the introduction of
a corporate language or the organisation of intercultural training.
As opposed to simple management, organised management is devoted to ‘larger pro-
blems’ – negatively evaluated deviations from expectations (norm), which are also
reflected ‘off-line’ become the subject of management, which likely happens because
speakers or listeners in concrete interactions did not find the necessary adjustment design
or that the given ‘smaller problem’ is often repeated, and is thus experienced as ‘larger’.
In such a case it can be assumed that speakers ‘solve’ problems of this type among them-
selves (informally, among friends, in the family, in laymen’s interest groups) and, in last
case scenario, they turn to language experts located in an institution, and their questions
can serve as an impulse for official measures of a general character (e.g. a change in pre-
scriptive pronunciation norms).
Thus far in LMT research, attention has been devoted above all to the analysis of simple
management, primarily in various contact situations, i.e. in situations where members of
differing ethnicities communicate, regardless of which language they use. Organised
management has not been studied much using LMT, as it was possible to assume that it
had already been researched using theories of language planning. On the declarative
level, emphasis was placed on the interrelated nature of simple and organised management,
but this was not further examined in depth. Neustupny
´(1994, p. 50) was often quoted in
regard to this matter:
I shall claim that any act of language planning should start with the consideration of language
problems as they appear in discourse, and the planning process should not be considered com-
plete until the removal of the problems is implemented in discourse.
The fact described in this quotation became the inspiration for the development of the
concept of language management cycle (Nekvapil, 2008), and in this article, we attempt
to contribute to the analysis of the dynamic relationship between simple and organised
management with the help of the concept of pre- or post-interaction management.
The concept of pre-interaction management
This concept essentially appeared as early as in the first sketch of LMT, labelled ‘pre-
correction’ (Neustupny
´, 1978, p. 249). In order to define this concept, it is important to
have a sense of the timeline and the place of the norm deviation on it: Does the manage-
ment occur prior to the beginning of the utterance in which the norm deviation occurs?
More precisely, does it occur in anticipation of the deviation from the norm or a language
problem? Neustupny
´(2004, p. 26) formulates it thus: ‘According to when management is
executed, it is possible to speak of pre-management (executed before a deviation appears)
...’. By the same logic, Neustupny
´speaks of ‘in-management’ and ‘post-management’
here.
Because LMT is not devoted merely to language in the narrowest sense, but to com-
munication, or interaction, as well, in this article we introduce the concept of pre-interaction
management (see also Nekvapil & Nekula, 2006a, p. 320) and the analogous concept
of post-interaction management. The advantage of these concepts, in our opinion, is that
we can better capture the dynamics of the management processes, their varying scope
and effects on further management processes in further interactions and on various societal
levels.
184 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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We therefore define pre-interaction management as the language management process
(noting of a deviation from a norm, evaluation, adjustment design, implementation) done
in anticipation of a future interaction or, more precisely, in anticipation of potential
problems in a future interaction. This can include looking up words and phrases in a
dictionary or textbook, consulting language concerns with a language expert or, even
‘avoidance strategies’ such as preferring written communication to oral communication,
bringing along an interpreter or avoiding the interaction altogether (for more detail on
this, see below).
Pre-interaction management can be targeted, i.e. oriented towards a specific future
action, or generalised, i.e. oriented towards a multitude of similar interactions.
In an analogous manner, we define post-interaction management as the language man-
agement process (noting of a deviation from a norm, evaluation, adjustment design,
implementation) which takes place after the given interaction. Obviously, post-interaction
management also takes place before future interactions, it cannot be otherwise, but while
pre-interaction management is oriented to an upcoming specific interaction or, generally,
to a particular set of upcoming interactions, post-interaction management is oriented to
what has happened in the previous interaction without the speaker’s immediate consider-
ations of future interactions.
Methodology and empirical research
Advocates of LMT, like those of conversation analysis, have always emphasised that it is
necessary to operate on the basis of analysis of naturally occurring data, that is, from record-
ings of talk-in-interaction. Unlike conversation analysts, they would then subject the
recordings to further research with the help of the so-called follow-up interview, most
often with the focus on the evaluations of norm deviations. This method of gathering
data in multinational companies is extremely difficult, because these companies fear the
release of important information (for example, if various meetings and telephone confer-
ences, etc., are recorded). This is why the researchers are often forced to limit themselves
to structured or semi-structured interviews with company employees, which can lead to a
biased depiction of what actually happens in a specific interaction.
In contrast to this, research on pre-interaction management using interviews is more or
less adequate. This is because pre-interaction management is something reflected, often
stabilised, by the speakers or writers, passed on as a tested strategy (generalised adjust-
ment designs) and thus shared. Speakers and writers talk about the pre-interaction man-
agement among themselves, and so they can also talk about it with a researcher during
an interview.
The research involved interviews and participant observation in four multinational com-
panies with branches in the Czech Republic or Hungary. The history of the companies
varies: while some companies were directly founded by foreign companies, others are
the result of foreign company purchases or privatisation of local companies. Still others
have changed owners, from one foreign company to another, larger one.
The larger research project also investigated further companies, e.g. companies from
Asia, and locally owned companies that are oriented towards foreign markets further east
(Russia, Ukraine) or are supported by foreign capital. We also draw upon data from
earlier research on similar topics (Nekvapil & Nekula, 2006a, 2006b; Nekula, Nekvapil, &
S
ˇichova
´, 2005; Nekvapil & Sherman, 2009).
A total of 34 interviews were conducted in the companies by a multi-ethnic team,
consisting of native speakers of Czech, Hungarian, German and English. Participant
Current Issues in Language Planning 185
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observation and the collection of written materials were also important parts of the research.
A brief description of the companies follows:
Company A manufactures car components. It is a branch of a German company with
other branches and clients all over the world. The branch of Company A which is the
subject of our research is located in Eastern Moravia (Czech Republic), and production
here began in 1996. As of June 2007, the branch had 2182 employees, most of whom
were Czech, but who were also Slovak, Polish and of other origin. All ‘expatriates’ or
‘delegates’ (German and Austrian nationals sent by the parent company to the subsidi-
ary) working in the branch (10 persons) occupy top management positions. Originally,
the corporate language of this branch was German, but as a consequence of the
merging with another German-based company operating more worldwide, English has
been officially introduced. In this company, 12 interviews were conducted with 11 indi-
viduals (5 Czech, 3 German, 3 Austrian) in English by a native speaking interviewer.
The individuals included eight top managers (three German, three Austrian, two
Czech), one assistant (Czech), one HR employee (Czech) and one language course
organiser (Czech).
Company B manufactures rail transportation products and is a part of large inter-
national concern with headquarters in Germany. The branch in question is located on
the outskirts of Prague. The company began operations in the Czech Republic in 2002,
when it took over and restructured the production of a Czech company. There is no offi-
cially declared corporate language, but both German and Czech are claimed by the
employees to have this role. The company employs over 1000 people. Technical
experts and managers are sent from the parent company in Germany, and there were
approximately 20 such individuals working there at the time of the research. Six inter-
views in German and one interview in Czech were conducted by a German native
speaker with Czech language skills. The persons interviewed include one of the chief
managers, the personal manager, a German expatriate, a German employee working on
a Czech contract, a Czech employee working in the field of communication and one of
the interpreters of the company.
Company C manufactures rubber products and the branch under study is located in
Hungary. It was formerly a German company with headquarters in Germany. In 2004,
it was bought by another German multinational company with English as its corporate
language. There were no expatriate employees in the company at the time of the research,
but rather, the local employees were responsible for communication with the parent
company and with other companies throughout Europe. In the company, a total of 12
interviews were conducted in Hungarian (by a Hungarian native speaker), in German
(by a German native speaker) and in English. Ten are individual interviews with the
employees of the company in different positions, one is an individual interview with
one of the English teachers teaching the employees of the factory and one is a group inter-
view with 4 participants. Interviewees included one of the English teachers, one ‘main’
head of department, two heads of departments, one employee working with foreign
customers at the accountancy and one employee working at the production-preparation
department.
Company D is an electricity company with a branch in Hungary. It was founded in 1951
and remained in Hungarian state ownership until 1995 when it was privatised and bought by
a French company. Since then, both French and Hungarian experts execute the management
tasks at various levels in the company. There has thus far been no declaration officially
about an official corporate language, though both English (by the HR department) and
Hungarian (by the local employees) have been mentioned as candidates for this
186 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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classification. Research in the company was done on the basis of weekly participant
observation. Also, three interviews (including a group interview) with a total of five
individuals (all Hungarian), including three Hungarian managers and two English
teachers, were conducted by a native English speaker in English.
As we indicated in the introduction, communicative acts in multinational companies in
Central Europe are not often generated spontaneously, rather they become the object of
attention of speakers or writers; in a nutshell, they are ‘managed’. The pre-interaction man-
agement strategies which we will now present are one form of this management of
communication.
Pre-interaction management strategies
This paper is a research probe which aims to look at the use of languages in one type
of multilingual environment from a specific point of view. We are not attempting to
create a typology of these strategies, rather we limit ourselves to an elementary classi-
fication of the data collected thus far, which – we hope – can inspire further research.
We will first devote our attention to the strategies that individual employees use more
or less spontaneously, and then the strategies which the companies themselves
implement.
Individual language management
Face-to-face communication between the local employees and expatriates
The limited linguistic and communicative competence of employees becomes apparent
very quickly in face-to-face communication, which is why we often observed that the
local employees in the multinational companies under study tried to avoid such
communication in a number of different ways, and the expatriates tried to simplify this
communication. The most common strategies are thus ‘avoidance strategies’ and
‘foreigner talk’.
Avoidance strategies
These strategies can be defined as management strategies that involve not performing a
communicative act due to the difficulties associated with it, or selecting a communicative
act which requires less work, less confrontation or does not threaten one’s professional
image. When local employees evaluate their linguistic competence in English or
German negatively, one potential adjustment design would be to acknowledge this in
interactions and request help from other interlocutors. However, such an adjustment
may result in a negative image of the employees themselves or, in fact, of the
company. So often the adjustment design selected is the avoidance of such an open
acknowledgement of the problem.
One such strategy is the preference of written communication to oral communication.
This allows for the use of language aids such as dictionaries, for editing, and for the invol-
vement of other (potentially more proficient) language users (colleagues) in the formu-
lations (see also below). However, written communication in itself may be less effective
and more time-consuming, e.g. it may take longer to deal with a problem over e-mail
than by making a simple phone call. And, in fact, this is a case which has provoked organ-
ised language management, as in Example 2.
Current Issues in Language Planning 187
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Example 2
Czech director (P) of Company A had noted and negatively evaluated the deviation
described in lines 25– 27, in which the employees used the direct communication avoidance
strategy by preferring to send e-mails than to make a phone call or communicate face-to-
face. In his view, such a strategy not only prolongs the solution to time-sensitive issues
(lines 3– 4), but also creates the false pretence that the issue has been solved (line 27).
The hierarchy of communication in such situations, then in P’s view, is that face-to-face
communication is most preferred and e-mail least preferred.
Other strategies include bringing along an interpreter. This is a strategy used mostly
when it is clear beforehand that the speakers will not have a common language, for
example, when the company director does not speak English, or does not speak it profi-
ciently (as was the case in more than one Japanese-owned company), or when guests
from abroad are visiting the company.
A final, more extreme form of ‘avoidance strategy’ is finding a way to avoid the
interaction altogether. This highlights the fact that there are many companies in which
not all employees are able to speak to all other employees, for example, local
employees in production do not (and are often not able to) communicate with expatriate
top managers.
Foreigner talk
Foreigner talk (Ferguson, 1981) refers to speech adjustments made by a native speaker
when in conversation with a non-native speaker. This can include slowing down the
speech tempo, using more simple vocabulary and many other features. And most inter-
actions in the multinationals occur between two or more people, at least one of whom is
not a native speaker of the given language. The pre-interaction management strategy
188 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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most commonly reported by native or highly proficient speakers of a given language is to
speak in ‘foreigner talk’ even before problems in communication occur, given the antici-
pation that they will occur because their interlocutor is not a competent speaker of the
given language or has proven in the past not to be one. A Czech assistant in Company A
revealed the use of foreigner talk in particular with non-native Czech speakers, describing
it as a ‘louder and clearer’ way of speaking and compared it with the form of speech used
when talking to an older person who is hard of hearing. She stated that she was able to
empathise with these non-native Czech speakers because she is learning German and
would like native German speakers to speak this way to her.
The degree to which the use of foreigner talk becomes a common pre-interaction strat-
egy depends on the anticipated language of the interaction, how commonly it is spoken by
foreigners and how much previous experience given native speakers have with non-native
varieties. If the language in question is German or French and the native speaker knows he
or she will interact with non-native speakers, there may be the expectation that foreigner
talk will be used, particularly if such interactions are an everyday event (e.g. a German
manager speaking to Czech subordinates). However, while expatriate employees working
directly in the daughter company or subsidiary may be accustomed to using foreigner
talk when preparing to speak with local employees, customers or employees of the
parent company may lack this pre-interaction management strategy, invoking new pro-
blems. If the language in question is Czech, or Hungarian, which is not commonly
spoken by foreigners, and even less so by western expatriates working in multinational
companies in the Czech Republic and Hungary, foreigner talk is less likely to be the
norm, and such pre-interaction management strategies are exercised even less.
There is also the understanding particularly among local employees that successful
foreigner talk should be based on a standard variety of a given language and, in particular,
that dialectal elements should be avoided. This was mentioned in particular in regard to
German in communication with customers on the phone, because these customers speak
a German dialect. The ultimate adjustment implemented is to designate an employee
who had lived in Austria or Southern Germany to take these calls. There appeared to be
no management in this respect done by the German company (the client), which, despite
the knowledge that they were dealing with a Hungarian company branch, employed on
the telephone a person who spoke neither Hungarian nor Standard German. This can
perhaps be attributed to their client status. This problem has also not been managed on
the level of organised management in the Hungarian branch, e.g. by including the acqui-
sition of at least receptive knowledge of the most common dialects in training or by
sending its own local employees to these clients.
Inserting native language pauses into meetings
Sometimes, however, not even foreigner talk is successful. In several of the companies, we
observed that in anticipation of content-based misunderstanding, expatriates use the follow-
ing strategy to simplify the communication between themselves and local employees. They
interrupt the official course of the meeting and direct their Czech colleagues to discuss
the issue among themselves, that is, in Czech. This stands in opposition to the so-called
‘secretive’ function of Czech we have observed in other multinational companies (Nekvapil
& Sherman, 2009) in which Czech employees purposely use the language in order not to be
understood. On the other hand, this strategy recalls the examples of the ‘emotional’ function
of a particular language, when, for instance, Czech employees switch to Czech when
emotions are high and ‘report back’ to their German colleagues once they have resolved
Current Issues in Language Planning 189
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the issue. In any case, this strategy conforms to the claims by many expatriates (in German as
well as Japanese companies) that they assume that conversation in Czech in their presence
indicates that the content is not relevant to them or will eventually be passed on to them in
a more ‘digestible’ form.
Telephone communication
Telephone communication in foreign languages is often very demanding for employees
with limited linguistic and communicative competence, because the visual channel is not
involved. The problems worsen if the native speaker-communication partner (e.g. a
client from abroad) uses a dialect as described above. A typical approach to telephone com-
munication for many employees is therefore avoidance strategies, above all the use of
e-mail. Another strategy is to make it easier to understand each other on the telephone
by taking written notes during the meeting, as voiced by a Hungarian employee:
Example 3
In work teams, it is not uncommon to create the function of ‘telephone specialist’, i.e. an
employee who is known for his or her linguistic or communicative competence in the
given foreign language and who is willing to deal with the necessary telephone calls in
place of his or her colleagues. In one company, we even observed a sort of generalisation
of this strategy – the employees know about such a function from their own work environ-
ment and they assume that there will be an analogous specialist in other companies as well.
This is why, during the first contact with another company (or with a subcontractor), the first
thing they do is ask for the name of this person (‘the contact person’) and discuss more
complex production problems only with that person.
In the work environment, the issue of communication of information concerning
numbers is a very sensitive one. To confuse one number with another can have serious impli-
cations. For this reason, in the Czech army, the form of the numeral 2 was officially managed
years ago. In Czech, this number in the nominative case has the forms dveˇ (pronounced dvje)
or dva (pronounced dva). The dveˇ form was, however, often incorrectly heard as the numeral
5orpeˇt (pronounced pjet) in spoken communication, which is why official military com-
munication permitted only the dva form in spoken numbers (the same strategy is used in
Czech train stations when announcing which track the train will arrive at). In the multilingual
companies under study, problems are caused by the varying spoken realisation of numerals
in the languages used, because their reception demands significant cognitive effort.
190 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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For example, German organises the numerals 13– 99 such that the unit is heard first (e.g.
vier ¼4) and after it the multiple of 10 (e.g. zwanzig ¼20), and the number 24 is
formed. Hungarian, on the other hand, like English, does this in the opposite order, i.e.
‘24’ (huszonne
´gy ¼24, hu
´sz ¼20, ne
´gy ¼4). One Hungarian participant mentioned the
following strategy, with the help of which he can counter the potential misinterpretation
of German numerals: while communicating on the phone, he writes down the numbers
forming the components of the respective numeral in the order that he hears them and
hopes to eliminate misunderstandings in this way.
Written communication
As we pointed out above, written expression, often e-mails, can compensate for insufficient
competence in the production and reception of spoken expression, which is why it is some-
times used as a ‘mild’ form of avoidance strategy. Some pre-interaction management strat-
egies, however, are aimed primarily at removing potential problems in written
communication – including the installation of electronic aids such as German dictionaries
into the computers of the local Hungarian employees. Obviously, this strategy used spon-
taneously by the individuals could be easily noted on the level of organised management,
evaluated positively and, as a generalised strategy, introduced ‘top-down’.
Language for unspecified addressee 1
Another type of strategy that reveals much about the linguistic and sociocultural conditions
in multinational companies is that which is used in e-mail communication with an ‘unspe-
cified’ addressee. In a situation where a language is understood only by a certain group of
employees, the choice of language predetermines the group of potential addressees. This
means that the mere choice of language can indicate what kind of message it is. Expatriates
working in companies in the Czech Republic operate on the basis of the fact that Czech
language mails are not important, because whatever is important is (or should be) written
in another language. They also sort through these mails on the basis of this norm and
Czech mails often end up in the trash. An Austrian manager in Company A summarises
his actions upon receiving e-mails in Czech as follows:
Example 4
This is an avoidance strategy through which expatriates advocate the use of the corporate
language. An alternative strategy used by expatriates is the request for an informal translation
of the Czech mail from one of their local subordinates (in cases where it is not clear whether
the mail is important enough) and in their replies, negotiate the use of another language:
Example 5
Current Issues in Language Planning 191
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Note that the manager tries to avoid certain work situations which he finds inefficient, that
is, the work involved in translating e-mails, both for him (he has to organise colleagues to
do it) and for his colleagues (they have to translate it), and for the original sender of the mail
(who in some cases is asked to re-write the mail in another language, described in lines 2 – 4
here). This is in line with the general policy of the company branch – English is preferred to
translating and interpreting, because it is quicker and more efficient. So ultimately, the
avoidance strategy, perhaps interpretable as a pre-interaction management push towards
English-only in the company, is to not respond to a Czech e-mail at all. It should be
noted, however, that this endorsement of English-only practices need not be interpreted
as a power-dominance issue, but as an efficiency and economics issue. Translating takes
time, and time is money. Also, M continued on in the interview to point out the fact that
the refusal of English often came from Germans.
Language for unspecified addressee 2
The most general strategy advocated in multinational companies operating in the CzechRepub-
lic and Hungary is then: when you have to write something and you do not know whom it is for,
do not use Czech/Hungarian. But what language should be used? In Central Europe, the pos-
ition of German is still relatively strong, and at the end of the 1990s, it was still taughtmore than
English. In the branches of multinational companies in the Czech Republic or Hungary which
have their headquarters in Germany or Austria, it is thus interesting to observe the competition
between English and German (for more on this, see Nekvapil & Sherman, 2009). That is, an
unspecified addressee can be addressed in German or in English. Local employees are
usually not competent in both languages, so they do not deal with the choice of one of these
languages for an upcoming interaction. On the other hand, the German or Austrian expatriates
in Company A developed the following pre-interaction management strategy: they communi-
cate among themselves in German, but in cases where the mail could have a more general audi-
ence, they write in English (even for a German language addressee).
The use of language class for the preparation for a specific upcoming interaction
As is probably clear in some of the strategies described above, individual management operates
in an environment created by corporate language management, e.g. the use of avoidance strat-
egies is often connected to the existence of an official corporate language. Language courses
organised by the company create the opportunity to prepare for upcoming interactions in the
corporate language. As we have observed, however, in these courses, the employees are not
merely preparing themselves on a general level for communication in various types of inter-
actions (which is the essence of language courses as such), but also for actual upcoming inter-
actions. For example, a less-proficient Hungarian Englishspeaker asked his English teacher for
help before a meeting. He prepared everything he wanted to say during the presentation, but he
took advantage of the English lesson and the fact that he was the only one who attended that
lesson, and together with his teacher went through his presentation, and she corrected the mis-
takes first in speech, then also in writing. On the other hand, the employees discuss language
phenomenathey have noted during meetings with their teachers, so one witnesses an interesting
instance of a language management cycle.
Corporate language management
Unlike individuals, companies advocate above all strategies that are meant to have a long-
term effect and are thus aimed at the removal of problems in a number of similar
192 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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interactions (which, however, does not mean that the companies do not also apply, for
example, avoidance strategies in specific cases). This organised language management is
typically manifested through the establishment of a corporate language, through the organ-
isation of language courses and through hiring interpreters and translators. We have already
written about these forms in a number of places (Nekvapil & Nekula, 2006a, 2006b;
Nekvapil & Sherman, 2009; Nekula et al., 2005). For this reason, here we will only
mention other pre-interaction management strategies that have not been at the centre of
analytical attention to such a great degree.
The outward presentation of Czech employees’ names
Czech orthography uses the Latin alphabet, but due to the different sound pattern of Czech
and the need for a more precise differentiation of sounds, it uses letters with diacritic
symbols such as in the letters ı
´,cˇ and u
˚. These letters often cause problems in e-mail com-
munication with foreigners, because they appear as gibberish in many computer systems,
which can lead to the unintelligibility of some expressions. Technically, innovations such
as Unicode are a way to avoid these problems, but Czech e-mails are still often written
without diacritic symbols. This problem is very sensitive in the case of personal names,
because it is difficult to avoid them in both written and spoken communication (how
should a foreigner – the representative of the parent company or a customer – write or pro-
nounce the name of Czech top manager Boz
ˇena Kudla
´cˇkova
´, with whom he or she has nego-
tiations?). Individuals and companies often solve this problem by presenting their personal
names without diacritics (i.e. as Bozena Kudlackova). For example, in one company, we
observed that on the web pages presenting the company are pictures of the Czech top man-
agers with their names without diacritics. This pre-interaction strategy thus anticipates pro-
blems, which could occur in interaction between local employees and foreigners, and
prevents a potential fear by the foreigners of using these names. It would be relevant,
however, to devote further research to the question of whether this strategy does not docu-
ment the specific power situations in the multinational companies under study.
Hiring employees with specific language knowledge
The orientation towards the corporate language leads companies to establish the knowledge
of the corporate language as one of the conditions for hiring new employees. It is not,
however, only a question of the corporate language, but also of the language spoken by
the customer. That is, the customers need not accept communication in the corporate
language and can request communication in their own native language. Therefore, even
though some multinational companies with headquarters in Germany and Austria have estab-
lished English as the corporate language, they are aware of the fact that it is advantageous to
have German-speaking employees in Czech and Hungarian branches – hence the strategy:
English required, German an advantage. In one of the branches, we were told that the
French customers do not speak good English, preferring French. If their interlocutors do
not speak French, the French customers ‘completely treat you in a different way’. For this
reason, French-speaking employees are regularly sought to deal with French customers.
Communication rules
Organised language management in multinational companies occurs because there exist
problems in individual interactions, and its point is to help remove the problems. These
Current Issues in Language Planning 193
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problems, however, are not only language problems (e.g. the absence of linguistic compe-
tence), but also communicative and sociocultural problems. LMT (in spite of its name) is
thus systematically devoted not only to management of language (in a narrow sense), but
also to communicative and sociocultural management and it shows how these three dimen-
sions are interrelated (cf. Neustupny
´, 2003). Our research confirmed that not even good
knowledge of the corporate language guarantees that communication between expatriates
and local employees will not be ‘managed’ – reasons for this can include different commu-
nicative norms or different sociocultural expectations. On the other hand, it is true that com-
municative or sociocultural management is easier if the employees possess advanced
language competence. It is symptomatic that organised management in the branches of multi-
national companies in Central Europe was initially devoted primarily to (narrowly) linguistic
problems and only then to communicative and sociocultural problems. This is most visible
through the fact that the companies organise intercultural training sessions. While several
years ago in Company A the word ‘intercultural’ was all but unknown when we conducted
research in 2005, our later research revealed that intercultural training is now a reality there.
In some companies, we observed the explicit effort to manage what the employees
themselves call ‘communication’ but what often crosses over into the sociocultural dimen-
sion. In one Czech-Japanese company, in which there were Spaniards in addition to Czechs
and Japanese, on the wall of the meeting rooms there was a ‘rule of meeting’ in which the
following is written in English: ‘... if any participant wants to say something, he/she has to
speak officially in English. Czech, Spanish or Japanese language is prohibited in company
meetings’. This ‘rule’ was approved by the company director himself (Sakamoto, 2008).
In one German-Czech company (Company B), a survey was conducted on the various
aspects of work activities, on the basis of which ‘Five principles of internal communication’
were formulated (see Example 6). These principles are hung in the meeting rooms, both in
Czech and in German (from the texts, it is clear that the original was the German version).
Example 6: Five principles of internal communication
German text
(1) Wir wu
¨nschen uns eine offene, ehrliche, sachbezogene und politikfreie
Kommunikation.
(2) Unsere Ziele werden klar formuliert und zeitnah u
¨ber alle Fu
¨hrungsebenen
kommuniziert.
(3) Wir haben den Mut bei unverstandene ((sic!)) Aussagen und Beschlu
¨ssen
Nachzufragen.
(4) Wir dulden keine unsachlichen, perso¨nlichen Angriffe – Fehler werden analysiert
und Verbesserungen gemeinsam herbeigefu
¨hrt.
(5) Wir erwarten, dass unsere Besprechungen durch perso¨nliche Vorbereitung der Teil-
nehmers ((sic!))effizient sind.
Czech text
(1) Chceme otevr
ˇenou, c
ˇestnou a ve
ˇcnou komunikaci bez politikar
ˇenı
´.
(2) Nas
ˇecı
´le jsou jasne
ˇformulova
´ny a aktua
´lne
ˇprojedna
´va
´ny na vs
ˇech r
ˇı
´dı
´cı
´ch
u
´rovnı
´ch.
(3) Ma
´me odvahu se pta
´tvpr
ˇı
´pade
ˇnepochopenı
´informace c
ˇi rozhodnutı
´.
(4) Nestrpı
´me z
ˇa
´dne
´neve
ˇcne
´a osobnı
´u
´toky – chyby jsou analyzova
´ny a na pr
ˇı
´-
slus
ˇne
´m zleps
ˇenı
´pracujeme spolec
ˇne
ˇ.
(5) Oc
ˇeka
´va
´me, z
ˇe nas
ˇe jedna
´nı
´budou efektivnı
´dı
´ky osobnı
´pr
ˇı
´prave
ˇkaz
ˇde
´ho u
´c
ˇastnı
´ka.
194 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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(1) We want open, honourable and topical communication, and not politicking.
(2) Our aims are clearly formulated and continually discussed on all managerial levels.
(3) We have the courage to ask in cases when we do not understand some information
or decisions.
(4) We do not tolerate off-topic or personal attacks – mistakes are analysed and we
work on the appropriate improvements together.
(5) We expect that our discussions will be effective due to the personal preparation of
each participant.
Let us observe that the style of these principles are stridently different from the ‘rule of
meeting’ mentioned above. While the ‘rule of meeting’ above dictates and forbids, the
‘five principles of internal communication’ are presented as the result of the common will
of all employees, either local employees or expatriates. Another matter is the question of
to what degree these pre-interaction management strategies are effective. In our previous
research (Nekvapil, 1997a, 1997b) it was revealed that the Czech employees were very skep-
tical towards formulations which could remind them of former communist propaganda –
it cannot be ruled out that the effect of the ‘five principles of internal communication’ are
limited by this very factor.
Principle number 3 deserves special mention, as it, unlike the other principles, clearly
concerns the communicative dimension (in the sense we have described it throughout this
paper). We have encountered the problem to which this pre-interaction management related
in a number of companies, even in the earliest research. The Czech CEO from another
Czech– German company (Company A) also talks about it.
Example 7
The pre-interaction language management process here can be reconstructed as follows.
The Czech employees in Company A deviated from a communicative norm in that they
nodded their heads and acted physically like they understood what was being asked of
them, but in fact they did not understand (for linguistic or other reasons) (lines 6 – 14).
This deviation was noted when some period of time went by and ‘nothing happened’
Current Issues in Language Planning 195
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(line 18), i.e. someone (likely the CEO) noticed that these employees did not do what they
were supposed to. He evaluated this negatively, because through this behaviour, in his
opinion, the employees ‘are destroying image of you, image of factory, image of even
Czech Czech people’ (lines 22–23). In this evaluation, the CEO projects the potential
evaluations by other employees, clients and non-Czechs (presumably German expatriates).
The adjustment design used here is ultimately an act of generalised pre-interaction man-
agement stemming from individual instances of post-interaction management, as the CEO
pointed out ‘we are teaching our people, please, don’t hesitate to interrupt and to ask. This is
any, any killing point if you didn’t understand’ (lines 1–4). The implementation is charac-
terised by this ‘teaching’, which presumably has become a part of the training for new
employees, particularly those who are observed to have difficulties with English.
Unlike the previous example, this is a case of organised management which is not codi-
fied in official written form, but rather, it is an essential piece of know-how that top man-
agers working in Central Europe (regardless of their ethnic identity or first language) must
be able to utilise and share with one another and with employees on various other levels of
supervision.
Concluding remarks
In this paper, ‘language planning’ has been re-cast in terms of ‘LMT’. In the vein of LMT,
we sought to demonstrate the interplay between the so-called micro and macro; in other
words, how simple language management and organised language management are inter-
twined. Such a task can be accomplished via the concept of language management cycle
which follows the trajectory of management acts produced by particular interlocutors in
particular interactions, through social networks of various complexity (social institutions
and systems as the most complex) and back to particular interlocutors and interactions.
Here we have also examined the dynamic factors that underlie language management
from a different perspective. We have described the management processes that take
place before and after particular interactions, in other words, pre- and post-interaction man-
agement. We have demonstrated that the interlocutors noted and evaluated linguistic, com-
municative and sociocultural phenomena which they encountered in previous interactions,
and outside of the given interaction, but still on its basis, they even designed appropriate
adjustments and sought to implement them in anticipation of problems in similar upcoming
interactions. We have shown that an individual can design such pre-interaction management
with respect to an upcoming specific interaction or with respect to a set of similar inter-
actions, and particularly in the latter case it is apt to speak about pre-interaction manage-
ment strategies. If such strategies are generalised among individuals sufficiently, it is
likely that representatives of organised language management note these strategies, and
due to their power in the company, they can spread these strategies in a ‘top-down’
manner even more or devote due attention to the problems these strategies serve to solve.
We have collected a number of pre-interaction management strategies that are used in
the collaboration of the local employees and expatriates in multinationals in Central Europe.
Overall, the locals employ a broader range of these strategies and they seem to use them
more often than the expatriates or the representatives of the headquarters abroad. This is
due to the fact that we stressed at the beginning of our paper – there is a widespread, if
not explicit, then tacit, expectation that the locals should learn the language of the expatri-
ates while the opposite does not hold. Expatriates or the representatives of the headquarters
abroad more typically ‘generate’ their communicative acts without problems, while it is not
infrequently that the locals ‘manage’ or ‘pre-manage’ theirs. Moreover, some of the
196 J. Nekvapil and T. Sherman
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pre-interaction management strategies are characteristic for the locals (avoidance strategies)
and some for the expatriates (foreigner talk).
The above situation holds particularly for the multinationals under study, but we should
exercise caution in order to not extrapolate it excessively. As we mentioned at the start of
our paper, for example, the situations in Czech-Asian multinationals – where there is no
general expectation that either group will learn the other’s language en masse – or in
Czech-American ones, where the English language is also a marker of one group’s identity
and yet there is no available lingua franca – may look different and are deserving of more
detailed study. Finally, it should be acknowledged that the field for this study consisted
exclusively of the daughter companies/subsidiaries, thus the perspective gained from
research conducted at the parent company headquarters would likely also reveal further
management strategies.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the LINEE project co-funded by the European Commission (contract
nr FP6-2004-CIT4-28388).While writing this paper, we were also supported by the grant MSM
0021620825 awarded by the Czech Ministry of Education. We are grateful to the members of our
research team: Oliver Engelhardt, Maria Kagusheva, Erzse
´bet Balogh and A
´gnes Ta
´paine-Balla,
for having provided us with valuable data.
Transcription conventions
[] the onset and ending of simultaneous talk of two speakers (overlap)
?rising intonation
.falling intonation
,continuing intonation
:lengthening of the preceding syllable
¼sudden insertion of the following expression or turn, without pause
(latching on)
(.) short pause
(..) longer pause
(...)long pause
() unintelligible point
(but) presumed, but not completely intelligible expression
((laughs)) comment by the transcriber
-sudden interruption of the word or construction
never strong emphasis on a syllable or word
... omitted portion of the transcript
Notes
1. In the presentation of spoken data, we draw on some conventions of conversation analysis.
2. Throughout this paper, quotes from English-language interviews have not been edited.
Notes on contributors
Jir
ˇı
´Nekvapil teaches sociolinguistics, conversation analysis and pragmatics at the Department of
General Linguistics at Charles University, Prague. His research interests lie in the issues of language
interaction. He has co-authored the monograph Language Management in the Czech Republic (with
J.V. Neustupny
´), which was published in Current Issues in Language Planning in 2003. His current
research focuses on the language biographies of Czech Germans, language management theory and an
Current Issues in Language Planning 197
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ethnomethodological-based analysis of media discourse. He is also member of an international team
studying to what extent, how and why Czech, German and English are used in multinational compa-
nies operating in central Europe.
Tamah Sherman is a researcher in the Department of General Linguistics at Charles University,
Prague.
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