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Corporate examples exist in abundance
(Haymes, 1995), both in the United States
(Light and Tilsner, 1994; Anonymous, 1998)
and outside the United States (Anonymous,
1999; Taylor, 2000). A prevailing example of
corporate jargon from the United States is the
term ‘procrastosnacking’, which stands for the
negative phenomenon of ‘taking endless
coffee or snack breaks in the staff canteen’ to
avoid work (Waller, 2001). Dobrzynski (1993)
describes the corporate vocabulary of IBM,
which includes words, such as flatten, meaning
to resolve an issue, as in ‘we have to flatten
this before tomorrow’s meeting’; nonconcur,
to disagree; pushback, a non-concurrence,
as in ‘I took the issue past Mike, but I
got a lot of pushback’; foil, an overhead slide;
and reswizzle, to tweak or improve something,
as in ‘Joe’s boss asked him to reswizzle his
foils.’
Opportunity in redundancy
Abrams (1983) observes that since the development
of new terms to represent new concepts
is motivated by private benefits to be
had, individuals or groups may coin new
terms for concepts that already exist, and
ascribe new definitions to terms that already
exist. Abrams bemoans the fact that this
results in what he refers to as terminological
redundancy. He cites the example of the economic
concept of ‘positive externality’, for
which redundant terms include ‘external
economy, spill-in, social benefit, beneficial
third-party effect, spill-over benefit, beneficial
neighbourhood effect, to name just a few’
(Abrams, 1983). As an economist, he sees
such redundancy to be a problem. However,
to a corporate planner or strategist, this possibility
of redundancy is attractive, because it
offers the possibility to develop the corporation’s
unique set of concepts and terms that
best suits its unique culture. Corporations seek
to use their working language to facilitate the
creation of economic value through an
exchange of ideas, within the context of their
respective corporate culture. Through their
language, corporations communicate information,
and create knowledge that gives them
an edge over their competitors in the marketplace.
Thus, the language of an organization
may be viewed as the repository of that
organization’s knowledge base. As such, a language,
like currency, is not value in itself, but
creates value in its use or exchange (Coulmas,
1991; Dhir and Savage, 2002).
The economics of language
Dhir and Savage (2002) describe two
approaches used by economists to empirically
measure the value of a language. In the first,
language is regarded as a means of exchange
and a store of value (Coulmas, 1991; Vaillancourt,
1991: 30). Coulmas (1991) notes that
every language has utilitarian value. Utility
value refers to the sorts of tasks the language is
suitable for and the actual opportunities for
using a language at a given time and place.
Coulmas also notes that in the context of
international transactions and global markets,
every language acquires an exchange value,
which is determined by its demand. Both
the utility value and the exchange value of
language can vary from context to context,
and markets to markets. Dhir and Savage
(2002) offer an approach to the assessment of
the value of a working language in the context
of the strategic environment in which the
organization assessing it exists and operates.
Treating language as human capital (Grenier
1982), Breton (1998) uses the concept of
‘network externalities’ to describe how a
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors