Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

<p> In many organizations, the working activities of individuals are accounted for on the basis of projects to which they are assigned. Usually all such information and the descriptions of the projects are recorded manually during the advancement of each project. This primitive procedure is not efficient to maintain information for enabling ongoing project control and analysis of the allocation of personnel resources. Hence there is a need for a computerized system. Such a system has been designed and partly implemented by employing the CDC DMS-170 Database Management System using COBOL as the host language.</p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

No / This book draws on case studies of language management within British organisations to examine the decisions they make about language diversity in their professional communications in order to be successful in a multilingual world. It explores the practices that the organisations use to manage language diversity in interorganisational relationships, and why certain practices occur in some situations and not others. The book highlights how organisations rely on individual employees to perform a variety of language tasks and the implications of this; the effect of English as a global lingua franca; and the translation challenges which organisations face. The book demonstrates that practices to manage language diversity are often a result of the resources organisations have at given moments in time, rather than being part of a deliberate language management strategy.

This sociolinguistic diploma thesis focuses on the implementation of spelling reform in Austria. Practical research is based on the theory of language management. The thesis describes also developmental path to the spelling reform through the entire 20th century. The work aims to shed light on the issues and barriers associated with the implementation of spelling reform, i.e. the last phase of language management. Regarding methodology, it was conducted qualitative research using semi-structured interviews with participants in the process. Representatives of secondary schools and newspapers were chosen for the research. The obtained data is analyzed in comparison with the discourse concerning the spelling reform in the German-speaking area. Keywords Language management, language planning, spelling reform, Austria, secondary education, print media

<p> Effective communication is important, particularly for the over 26 million immigrant workers with non-English speaking backgrounds who have entered the U.S. workforce. The research problem addressed the disillusion of non-English speakers in the workplace because of the communication gap. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the experiences of non-English speaking immigrant workers in overcoming language and cultural communication challenges at work. The research question focused on how non-English speakers or English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers describe their communication experiences in the workplace. The theoretical framework was based on the cultural approach to organizations and the transactional model of communication. A qualitative narrative inquiry design was used that employed sources of information including an interview questionnaire and existing literature. The target population was immigrant employees who are managers, assistant managers, and supervisors in New York City and Long Island who work in accounting, banking, finance, information technology, and marketing with at least 5 years&rsquo; experience. A purposive sampling procedure was used to select 20 participants for semistructured interviews. The qualitative data were subjectively analyzed by using member checking and triangulation. Key findings indicated 6 themes: miscommunication, lack of appropriate terms, delays in work completion, loss of respect, inability to express oneself clearly, and the need to use alternative means of communication. Opportunity for contributions to social change can include increased understanding and utilization of effective management and communication strategies for dealing with non-English-speaking and ESL workers. This can also help to bridge cultural and language gaps.</p><p>

Thesis (M. A. (Translation Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2016 / This study is an evaluation of language management by the University of Limpopo. It is divided into six chapters which are arranged as follows: Chapter one serves to introduce the study by first giving background to the study and the research problems. The researcher’s aims and objectives as well as the research design, method used to collect and analyse data were discussed. Chapter two deals with literature review that covers the scope of Language Management Theory; the language policy in higher education; the intellectualisation of African languages; the advantages of using African languages in education; the non-implementation of language policies; and the attitudes towards the use of African languages. Chapter three discusses the methodology used in the research. The methodology used in this research is qualitative and the method used to collect data was questionnaires and interviews. Ten students and ten lecturers answered the research questionnaires and furthermore five language practitioners were also consulted for this study. Chapter four of this research compiled a sociolinguistic profile of the University of Limpopo. SWOT analysis of languages was also done to determine the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the official indigenous languages of the University of Limpopo. Chapter five presents the interpretation of results. The data from students, lecturers, and language practitioners were examined separately. SPSS version 23 was used to analyse the data collected through questionnaires and the graphs are shown in chapter four. Content analysis was used as well to analyse the data collected through interviews. And lastly, the summary of the results was presented. Chapter six presents the summary of all the chapters included in this research. It also provides the recommendations of the study.

In this thesis the discourse on intercultural and language contact of German native speakers in the Czech Republic (so called "expatriates") is analysed in accordance with the Language Management Theory. Individual interactions on the discourse-based (micro) level are the source of data for the analysis of linguistic, communicative and socio-cultural language problems. Language problem is understood as a noted and negatively evaluated deviation from the expectation of the expatriates. Which language problems have been recognized by the German native speakers and which strategies to solve them have been chosen is examined in three domains "work domain", "leisure domain" and "daily life domain". The Czech language competence is the most mentioned language problem in the discourse. As a result of the discourse analysis it has been found out that Language Management cannot be seen as an objective process of solving language problems, as the expatriates possess diverse expectations according to their individual interests and further aspects (situation conditions or the issue of social power). Therefore it is not possible to give a general recommendation of how to solve the language problems. Key words: Expatriates, Discourse, Language Problem, Language Management, Language Management Theory, Adjustment...

What explains institutional change in authoritarian regimes presiding over fragmented societies? A popular assumption is that, because the state is so powerful, major institutional change takes place only when certain actors within the state system see such change as beneficial for their personal or collective interests. In other words, institutional changes are necessarily top-down and elitist in nature. Challenging that position, this thesis articulates a theory of gradual institutional change in authoritarian regimes, arguing that authoritarian institutions, as distributional instruments laden with power implications, are likely to be unstable and ambiguous, allowing social actors to advance their personal or collective interests through gradual institutional modifications. As these resistances accumulate, the costs for state actors to maintain their increasingly ineffective institutions rise to an unsustainable level, incentivising them to revise their core practices—and, by extension, sometimes expand existing rights or extend new ones to their citizens. This argument is supported by a systematic examination of the Chinese state’s historic attempts to promote the use of a standardised language form—putonghua—and simplified Chinese characters on a national scale, and a range of popular resistance efforts against them. Drawing upon newly available archival materials, survey data, and in-depth interviews, I conduct process-tracing case studies of three successive language management regimes—namely, top-down (from the 1950s to 1980s), incentivising (from the 1990s to mid-2000s), and selective (from the mid-2000s), demonstrating how they were challenged and gradually modified by their subjects. From this position I argue that the deployment of official language policy in the PRC is determined endogenously by the ambiguities of existing language institutions as well as exogenously by levels of economic development and communication technology. The casual arguments are then evaluated in light of evidence from the history of language management in the former Soviet Union and Tawian.

This qualitative case study deals with management of multilingualism at the workplace in a multinational IT company in the Czech Republic. The multilingualism at the workplace was thoroughly described pursuant to using qualitatively won data (semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, additional written material) without making preliminary hypotheses. Thematically, this study aims at the employees'origin and their language knowledge, languages and their influence on job performance and hierarchical ranking, internal and external communication (language problems, communication channel, communication strategies), official language, interpreting and translating, language courses, multicultural milieu and identity.

The aim of the diploma thesis is to carry out a qualitative research of communication problems with foreigners in a hospital in Lower Austria (Landesklinikum Gmünd). The research is focused on finding out, which problems the hospital staff has to solve, how they deal with them (e.g. language courses provided by the language competence center from Lower Austria) and which foreign languages (Czech, Turkish) are related to these problems. The research uses the method of semi-structured interviews for collecting the data. The theoretical basis of the dissertation is the language management theory. Moreover, the dissertation also deals with the cross-border cooperation of the Czech Republic with Austria and Germany. This cooperation is represented by some selected projects, which objective is to support the language of the neighbouring country (Czech, German).