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This study provides insights into the external powers that can influence business leaders' communication on sustainability. It shows how the socio-political context manifested in national and transnational policies, regulations and other socio-political events can influence the CEO talk about sustainability.

This study adopts an interpretative and qualitative method of analysis using the lenses of the theoretical concepts of framing and legitimacy, analysing CEOs’ letters from 10 multinational industrial companies based in Sweden, over the period of 2008–2019.

The results show that various discourses of sustainability, emerging from policies and regulatory initiatives, socio-political events and civil society activism, are reflected in the ways CEOs frame sustainability over time. This article reveals that CEOs not only lead the discourse of profitable sustainability, but they also slowly adapt their sustainability talk to other discourses led by the policymakers, regulators and civil society. This pattern of a slow adaptation is especially visible in a period characterised by increased discourses of climate urgency and regulations related to social and environmental sustainability.

The theoretical frame is built by integrating the concepts of legitimacy and framing. Appreciating dynamic notions of legitimacy and framing, the study suggests a novel view of reporting as a film series, presenting many frames of sustainability over time. It helps the study to conceptualise CEO framing of sustainability as adaptive framing. This study suggests using a dynamic notion of adaptive framing in future longitudinal studies of corporate- and accounting communication.

The results show that policymakers, regulators and civil society, through their initiatives, influence the CEOs' framing of sustainability. It is thus important for regulators to substantiate sustainability-related discourses and develop conceptual tools and language of social and environmental sustainability that can lead CEO framing more effectively.

The study engages with Goffman's notion of dynamic framing. Dynamic framing suggests a novel view of reporting as a film series, presenting many frames of sustainability over time and conceptualises CEO framing of sustainability as adaptive framing.

In this paper, I argue that English could be of more relevance to the Arabian Gulf if we conceptualized it as an educational forum for familiarizing students with socio-linguistic conventions relating to a wide variety of text types and for sharpening their critical awareness of the political implications of the uses of English. I make my case against the backdrop of a particular local context in the Arabian Gulf: the current BA programme in English at the College of Arts and Social Science, Sultan Qaboos University, the Sultanate of Oman. I maintain that the programme is predicated upon conceiving of English as a field (or rather fields) of knowledge, as academic disciplines of English literature, linguistics and translation, each with its own sets of concepts and frames of reference. As such, the programme both falls short of being fully theoretically coherent and fails to take into account the recent educational developments in Oman. Drawing upon the theoretical construct of discourse, I propose an outline of an alternative BA programme in English that revolves around the uses of English and their political implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how professional service firms (PSFs) manage the linguistic tensions between global Englishization and local multilingualism. It achieves this by analysing the work of Big Four audit firms in Luxembourg, where three official languages co-exist: Luxembourgish, French, and German. In addition, expatriates bring with them their native languages in a corporate environment that uses English as its lingua franca.

The paper combines the institutionalist sociology of the professions with theoretical concepts from sociolinguistics to study the multifaceted role of language in PSFs. Empirically, the paper draws from 25 interviews with current and former audit professionals.

The client orientation of the Big Four segments each firm into language teams based on the client’s language. It is thus the client languages, rather than English as the corporate language, that mediate, define, and structure intra- and inter-organizational relationships. While the firms emphasize the benefits of their linguistic adaptability, the paper reveals tensions along language lines, suggesting that language can be a means of creating cohesion and division within the firms.

This paper connects research on PSFs with that on the role of language in multinational organizations. In light of the Big Four’s increasingly global workforce, it draws attention to the linguistic divisions within the firms that question the existence of a singular corporate culture. While prior literature has centred on firms’ global–local divide, the paper shows that even single branches of such firm networks are not monolithic constructs, as conflicts and clashes unfold amid a series of “local–local” divides.

This paper discusses tensions and identity resistance in a cross-cultural educational context in the United Arab Emirates. It focuses on how Emirati students, living and socialised in a conservative Arabic-Islamic society and shaped by Islamic values and epistemologies, construct their cultural identities while learning English with their Western-trained teachers, who are influenced by liberal ideologies and secular epistemologies. To understand the complex engagement between Emirati students and their Western-trained teachers this article uses both phenomenography and reflection on critical incidents to explore, investigate and interpret Emirati students’ intercultural experience with their Western-trained teachers and to highlight the tensions and identity resistance that arise from this educational encounter.