ABSTRACT

The role of language and language management in MNCs and other international organisations is attracting increasing academic interest (e.g. Piekkari and Zander, 2005; Piekkari and Tietze, 2011). Luo and Shenkar (2006) frame the MNC as a multilingual community in which parent functional language and subunit functional languages are concurrently used and linked through a headquarter driven language system. More generally, in organisation studies a perspective labelled ‘communicative constitution of organisation’ (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen and Clark, 2011) has been identified suggesting organisations are ‘talked’ into existence. This perspective shifts the attention from viewing organisational communication as a vehicle of knowledge transfer to viewing it as a constitutive force of organisations and organising. It also gives language a central position in the discussion. This chapter is located in this tradition, but expands the field's perspective by arguing that MNCs and other international organisations are discursively constructed through the use of several languages. We seek to understand this process by utilising established dimensions of international human resource management (IHRM), namely standardisation and localisation, and reconsider these in terms of what they mean for language policies and practices.