Language, Culture, and Management: The Impact of Enlargement on Language Use in the Commission

Abstract

The management literature devotes little attention to questions of language use, and yet language and communication styles are management challenges, particularly in international and multinational organizations. Language and communication are relevant to our analysis for several reasons. First, language use is linked closely to cultural values, and destabilizing the established norms of language use is one way in which enlargement is reshaping culture. In fact, enlargement had a paradoxical effect on language use, increasing the number of official languages but reinforcing the shift toward English as the common working language within the Commission. As a result, by far the most common response to a question about the impacts of enlargement was that it increased use of English.