The Practitioner’s View: The Value of Linguistics in International Business Consultancy

Abstract

My work is self-consciously political. Taking the perspective of a practitioner, this chapter focuses on how consultancy work delivered to international businesses in Mauritius provides a creative space of reconciliation across my personal and public politics, my activism and my academic training as a linguist. This chapter engages critically with the value of language and linguistics in global businesses in a way that surpasses the context of language in the professions and overspills into language and politics. The particular axes that I work on are (postcolonial) agency, gender empowerment, the creation of new narratives. This chapter reflects on my experience of the impact of research-based consultancy on individuals, business and society, and finally advocates for the professional wielding of language, as our most powerful human technology, to re-create society.