When little things make a big difference: A Bourdieusian perspective on skilled migrants’ linguistic, social, and economic capital in multinational corporations

While general foreign language proficiency is shown to provide important power and career-related advantages to employees in organizations, surprisingly little is known about how and why context-specific language capabilities (e.g., accents) in the form of linguistic capital, influence skilled migrants’ (SMs’) access and accumulation of social and economic capital in multinational corporations (MNCs). In this paper, we apply the theory of practice (Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977) and interviews with 156 SMs to abductively examine interrelations among linguistic, social, and economic capital in Japan-based MNCs. Our analysis shows that actual or perceived insufficient linguistic capital prevented SMs’ access and accumulation of social capital (e.g., social networks) and economic capital (e.g., job promotions). Due to the reproductive interrelations among these three types of capital, linguistic capital explained the sustained disadvantaged positions of SMs in MNCs. This study contributes to the literature by focusing on SMs and the dynamic interrelations among linguistic, social, and economic capital, explaining why and how context-specific language capabilities create and sustain unequal relations between SMs and local employees in MNCs, leaving room for individual agency in the theory and research of practice, and bringing culture back to research on language in MNCs.