Linguistic entrepreneurship: Common threads and a critical response
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Ryuko Kubota
Abstract
The impact of neoliberalism on language education has recently attracted scholars' attention. Linguistic entrepreneurship is a conceptual lens through which neoliberal implications for language learning and use can be investigated. This commentary offers comments on common threads of themes running through the four articles in this special issue. While neoliberal ideas provide people with hopes and desires to socioeconomically succeed through management of their linguistic resources, the neoliberal system reproduces inequalities for language learners, teachers, and users as well as for multiple languages. However, the perceived superior status of English that often serves as the foundation for linguistic entrepreneurship is considered to be a social imagination, given the complexity of global geopolitics and the multiple directions of global human mobility. Also, the neoliberal engagement with linguistic entrepreneurship-such as commodified language learning or writing in English for academic publication-often deviates from the genuine aims of learning and research. Such deviation also applies to our own scholarly activities. This recognition encourages us to explore how subversive actions can be made possible for not only language learners/users but also researchers ourselves.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Why linguistic entrepreneurship?
- “Our graduates will have the edge”: Linguistic entrepreneurship and the discourse of Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore
- “We contribute to the development of South Korea”: Bilingual womanhood and politics of bilingual policy in South Korea
- Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
- Problematizing enterprise culture in global academic publishing: Linguistic entrepreneurship through the lens of two Chinese visiting scholars in a U.S. university
- Linguistic entrepreneurship: Common threads and a critical response
- The discourse of the edge: marginal advantage, positioning and linguistic entrepreneurship
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Why linguistic entrepreneurship?
- “Our graduates will have the edge”: Linguistic entrepreneurship and the discourse of Mandarin enrichment centers in Singapore
- “We contribute to the development of South Korea”: Bilingual womanhood and politics of bilingual policy in South Korea
- Regimes of linguistic entrepreneurship: neoliberalism, the entanglement of language ideologies and affective regime in language education policy
- Problematizing enterprise culture in global academic publishing: Linguistic entrepreneurship through the lens of two Chinese visiting scholars in a U.S. university
- Linguistic entrepreneurship: Common threads and a critical response
- The discourse of the edge: marginal advantage, positioning and linguistic entrepreneurship
