The neo-liberal notion of global language skills vs. monolingual corporate culture: co-existence or rivalry?

ABSTRACT

Stimulated by studies on South Korean students’ early and later-on study abroad and Japanese companies’ practice of hiring monolingual college students, the present literature-based discussion advances the knowledge of commonalities and distinctiveness between the two nations that manifest in either a textbook-case or a non-linear relationship between people's investment in English study during schooling and their marketability in the real world. For example, while equally known for their nationwide ‘education/English craze’ and global economies, the two East Asian neighbours differ significantly in their upper/middle-class citizens’ (non)practice of overseas educational migration and leading companies’ (non)hiring of overseas-educated youth with language skills. The discussion begs future research questions as to (1) the coexistence between neo-liberal discourse about global talents’ career success and the pervasiveness of social inequalities (e.g. gender discrimination at work); (2) the location of applied linguistics researchers and L2 practitioners in social institutions that (are pressured to) balance the neo-liberalism-driven production of global human resources and the transmission of the dominant values of social inequalities; (3) the potentiality of scholarly discussion that entails little or no definition of (non)professional, (un)skilled workers with(out) global language skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-liberalism
• Japan
• South Korea
• gender inequality
• English skills

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yoko Kobayashi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8427-2764