Finnish, Swedish, or English? In-house communication in recently merged Finnish-Swedish corporations

The first research project carried out in 2000-2002 focused on company-internal communication and dealt with two corporate mergers over the Gulf of Bothnia. In both cases a Finnish company merged with a Swedish one in the late 1990s and two new corporations were formed (see Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005). One of them is a globally operating paper manufacturer and the other a banking group whose markets used to be in Scandinavia but have since expanded to the Baltic countries.

The paper company chose English as their corporate language and the bank initially opted for Swedish as the ‘reporting language and the language for management’. At this point, it is essential to remember that Swedish is the second official language of Finland with some 6% of the population speaking it as their mother tongue.

The starting point for our research was to find out how the employees of the new entities coped with the new linguistic and cultural challenges of the cross-border mergers. We started with a communication survey and interviews in both companies to find out about their communication practices and, in particular, how the Finnish and Swedish employees perceived their each other’s communication cultures. We then analyzed meetings and emails to see if, and how, the survey findings were reflected in authentic data. Here I primarily focus on some of the survey findings and on email messages written in English and exchanged between Finns and Swedes in the paper company.

The findings from the survey were based on around 400 responses from a randomly selected group of Finnish and Swedish employees in both companies (for the full report, see Louhiala-Salminen 2002). The respondents represented different organizational positions, units, and ages. The most interesting findings concerning intercultural issues are related to language choice on both the individual and corporate level and the perceptions about Finnish vs. Swedish communication.

On the individual level, language choice seemed to be a highly pragmatic one: English was used if the participants did not share a mother tongue. Around 20% of all internal communication took place in English and the rest in the respective mother tongue.

Swedish was used to some extent in social settings. On the corporate level, the bank’s decision to use Swedish as the ‘reporting language’ was considered problematic, especially by the Finns. They pointed out how the Swedes gained the upper hand since they were able to use their mother tongue, whereas most Finns had to resort to a foreign language, which they felt they did not master so well. Finns applauded the change of the ‘reporting’ language to English a few years later when the bank expanded into Denmark.

The survey findings related to the Finnish and Swedish respondents’ perceptions of each other’s communication cultures seemed to support the anecdotal evidence of issue-oriented, direct Finns who are economical with words and people-oriented Swedes who enjoy talking. When Finns and Swedes described their own communication, they used positive language such as ‘effective’ vs. ‘open discussion’, whereas the characterizations of their partner’s communication were more negative, such as ‘too direct’ vs. ‘endless talk’.

All in all, it was a question of how much talk was considered effective communication. Both Finns and Swedes considered their own communication effective and the other’s less so. Although the respondents found it difficult to separate the impact of national, corporate, and organizational cultures, it was evident that BELF communication carried such characteristics that were explained by the cultural background of the user. Here it must be noted, however, that the survey questions might have guided the respondents to emphasize nationality as an explanatory factor.

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
Text 2-20. BUSINESS ENGLISH LINGUA FRANCA IN INTERCULTURAL (BUSINESS) COMMUNICATION	\|	Email messages in BELF

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