LINGUISTIC HOMOGENEITY IN CORPORATE MANAGEMENT GROUPS

A corporate organisation, because it exists in a climate characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity and a need for accurate communication, tends to choose a new organisation member on his/her perceived similarity to group social norms. One of the most important of these is language. Since membership results in greater allocation of scarce resources (social acceptance, money and power), self‐interests push the new member to accommodate more closely the group's speech norms. Choice of new members on the basis of language has serious implications for the question of discrimination towards minority groups who typically have their own group‐specific speech norms which may not correspond to management norms.