Pre-interaction management in multinational companies in Central Europe

Abstract

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. Neustupný 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

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, Erzsébet Balogh and Ágnes Tápaine-Balla, for having provided us with valuable data.

Notes

In the presentation of spoken data, we draw on some conventions of conversation analysis.

Throughout this paper, quotes from English-language interviews have not been edited.