English Presentation

1. HEGEMONIC PRACTICES AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN
THE MANAGEMENT ACADEMY: AN ENGLISH LANGUAGE
PERSPECTIVE
Introduction
The conditions of generating and disseminating knowledge in
higher education sectors around the world are changing in
that they have become more internationalised and competitive
in character (Paasi, 2005; Wedlin, 2006).

2. ENGLISH AS THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL LINGUA
FRANCA
A lingua franca is an idiom that non-native speakers can draw
on in order to communicate with other non-native speakers
(Vandermeeren, 1999) or indeed with native speakers of this
language (Tietze, 2008b). There have been many examples of
lingua franca in history, yet English has emerged as the
dominant contemporary linguistic force. The reasons why
English has become such a dominant global language need to
be seen in an historical context.

3. ENGLISH AS A HEGEMONIC FORCE
The above-mentioned writers point to English as having
‘hegemonic powers’. From this perspective, the use of the
English language is not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’, rather
assumptions about how to best order economic (as well as
the social and cultural) affairs are coded into its syntactical
structure and its semantic fields. In the contemporary economic
context, these carry with them connotations, assumptions
and values expressive of neoliberal worldviews, which
act to privilege certain worldviews (typically those expressed
by the ‘core’ or ‘centre’) over others (those expressed by the
‘periphery’).

4. ENGLISH AS THE LANGUAGE OF ACADEME
There are significant pressures on scholars to publish in
English language journals (Curry & Lillis, 2004; Ferguson,
2007; Swales, 2004), and this is especially the case for
management scholars (Tietze, 2008a, 2008b). The higher
status and prestige that is associated with English language
journals has resulted in what has been termed a geopolitics of
academic publishing (Canagarajah, 2002; Paasi, 2005). This
geopolitics means that scholars based in peripheral locations
(typically, those that are outside Europe, Japan or North
America) face considerable disadvantages.

5. ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION: THREE
EMPIRICAL STUDIES
Curry and Lillis (2004) and Lillis and Curry (2006a, 2006b)
longitudinal study investigates the text production, publication
practices and experiences of scholars from pedagogy and
psychology. These scholars work in institutions of higher
education in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal and none
of them is a native speaker of English. Using a ‘text-oriented
ethnographic’ approach to track, record and investigate the
‘text histories’ of scholarly research work produced by ‘nonnative
speakers of English’ and working in non-English contexts,
their findings confirm several of the arguments presented
in the first part of this paper.

6. FUTURE DIRECTION FOR EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
• Based on the brief review of recent empirical work, avenues
for future enquiry could comprise the investigation of
academic practices and institutional contexts from a
language perspective (to include both a focus on English
aswell its interplay with (‘other languages’);
• and the consequences of these for the kind of knowledges
which are produced and put into the world (including those
that aremuted, silenced or deleted).

7. CONCLUSION
• English is currently the most dominant medium and channel
through which business and management knowledge is
constituted and expressed.
• as the generation of knowledge is central to academic work
and practice, we need to understand better and, more fully,
the consequences of the ‘English-only’ approach that has
emerged over time, and is now taken-for-granted.

8. THANK YOU