ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part presents a historically framed review of the emergence of cross-cultural management and language studies, with specific regard to the international business and multinational corporation constructs. Using two innovative qualitative research techniques, it demonstrates how categorization and language use in diverse contemporary organizational contexts can be influenced by boundaries between local competitive identities in interplay with varieties of lingua franca such as English and Spanish. The part also examines an issues from the point of view of corporate human resource strategy. It then advances a view of companies, which, rather than seeing language as a consequence of corporate activity, sees it as a force that shapes their identity on all levels. The part provides an expression of a language-general approach using theory from linguistics and sociology to analyze the cross-cultural management process in a company.
