Abstract
This study adopts a postcolonial perspective on the growing use of English as the lingua franca of international business – ‘corporate englishization’. Drawing on fieldwork in India within the call centre units of two outsourc-ing organizations serving Anglo-American corporations, we show how corporate englishization (re-)produces neo-colonial power relations between the ‘Anglosphere’ and the ‘Rest’. In particular, we elucidate three crucial neo-colonial aspects of the process: (1) how it relies on, and contributes to producing, comprador managerial cadres; (2) how it serves to construct a transnational intra-linguistic hierarchy of power and privilege; and (3) how it undercuts its own effectiveness by simultaneously eliminating and maintaining the otherness of the ‘Oth-er’ through processes of mimicry and hybridity. In so doing, our analysis contributes to a better understanding of corporate englishization and opens up a new avenue for postcolonial analyses of the role of language in interna-tional busin...
Published Version
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