Cheryl Marie Cordeiro with Philippe Lecompte at the GEM&L International Workshop on Management & Language, 4-5 Jul., Copenhagen, Denmark. The theme this year was ”Revisiting multilingualism at work: New perspectives in language-sensitive research in international business”.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2017
The 11th international workshop of the Groupe d’Études Management & Langage (GEM&L) was held on 4 to 5 July 2017 at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. 34 papers were presented at the workshop that ran in three parallel sessions. About 50 participants attended the conference with international representation from Australia, Canada, Colombia, India, Europe, Singapore, South Korea and the USA. The theme addressed this year was Revisiting multilingualism at work: New perspectives in language-sensitive research in international business. Pursuing a continued and parallel interest on research methodology from EURAM 2017 that took place just over a week ago in Glasgow, Scotland, to GEM&L 2017, I followed papers presented that addressed new directions in research in international business (IB) studies at this international workshop.
The GEM&L annual international workshops on management and language have a much different atmosphere and feel than the considerably larger international management conferences. The GEM&L annual international workshops offer a decidedly niche and focused platform for scholars deeply interested in researching the language dimension in organization studies / management science. The very theme of the conference, being labelled ”language-sensitive research in international business” perhaps acknowledges both the burgeoning but continued peripheral status that language constitutes as a subject of research in the field of IB studies.
Of the more interesting ideas were those presented by Anne-Wil Harzing on behalf of her co-authors Helene Tenzer and Siri Terjesen. It was a paper entitled Language in International Business: A review and agenda for future research currently in press for the Management International Review. The paper by Tenzer et al. (2017) outlined the geographical centres of language in IB research, followed by dominant theories and methods employed. The concluding thoughts that seemed to echo too in the roundtable discussions through GEM&L 2017 is how the field of language in IB ”remains fragmented, with serious knowledge gaps in theory, data, methodology, and content”, and the task at hand to pursue is to ”encourage the integration of insights from different academic disciplines as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of language complexity in international business” (Tenzer et al., 2017, in press).
Philippe Lecompte, President of Groupe d’Études Management & Langage (GEM&L), in his Welcome Address at this international workshop.
Dorte Lønsmann, Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at the Copenhagen Business School and part of the GEM&L 2017 organizing committee addressing participants at the opening of the event.
Jo Angouri, Keynote Speaker from the University of Warwick, on ”The politics of language in the multilingual workplace”.
Roundtable, ”New frontiers in language-sensitive IB research.”
L-R: Betty Beeler (Roundtable Chair), Susanne Tietze, Dorte Lønsmann, Anne-Wil Harzing, Sierk Horn.
Ovnhallen, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Coffeebreak.
Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, presenting at the ”New directions in research on management and language” track. The presentation is entitled, ”Language as a heteroglot: The bridging qualities of Swedish-English (SweE) and Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) in cross-cultural working environments”.
L-R: Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Etieno Enang.
Etieno Enang is currently at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland pursuing her doctoral degree. She gave a presentation entitled, ”Antenarrative Embodiment Contributions to Language Performance in International Business”. Her academic background in the pure sciences, in particular quantum physics and biology, has led her endeavour of connecting the language of science in explanation of the phenomenoa of mergers and acquisitions in international business studies.
L-R: Alex Klinge, Cheryl Marie Cordeiro. Alex Klinge is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. He is also part of the GEM&L 2017 organizing committee.
Philippe Lecompte, President of Groupe d’Études Management & Langage (GEM&L).
Reference
Tenzer, H., Terjesen, S., Harzing, A.W. (2017) Language in International Business: A review and agenda for future research. In press for Management International Review. DOI 10.1007/s11575-017-0319-x. Internet resource at http://bit.ly/2tZ0ldM. Retrieved 7 Jul. 2017.