Organising multilingually : setting an agenda for studying language at work

This paper brings together IB and Sociolinguistic research on the use of language in multilingual organisations and organising. We problematise core categories and underlying assumptions that have been widely adopted in this field of research and to argue for a holistic and context sensitive approach. Special attention is paid to the notion of national language and the multinational organization. Scholars have started to argue for new ways of researching language in organisations and to call for more processually oriented categories and meanings such as organising and languaging. Current core categories such as monolingual/multilingual, small/large and national/multinational often remain static, structural and binary and hence are not in sync with the fluidity and change of human activity nor with the promise of the broader linguistic and discursive turns in social sciences. We argue for multidisciplinary enquiry in this field of research. We propose theoretical and methodological advances and close the paper with a future agenda for studying the dynamics of language in multilingual settings