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The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate values are interpreted by local and international employees in a multilingual organisation that has opted for the local language, not English, as its corporate language.

This is a research paper exploring how the recontextualisation and resemiotisation of value terms impact on how corporate values are interpreted, employing triangulation of questionnaire and interview results.

When values are recontextualised in employee discourse, proficiency in the corporate language and cultural background was found to have an impact on their interpretation. Internationals were found to have a broader and not exclusively professional interpretation compared to the locals. Internationals with a low level of proficiency in the local language were more sceptical than the locals as to whether there was a shared understanding of the values.

The questionnaire yielded fewer respondents than the authors expected, which should be taken into account when interpreting the results.

The paper suggests best practices for communicating corporate values to a multilingual workforce.

This paper contributes to the understanding of linguistic challenges in the multilingual work contexts.

To the authors’ knowledge, there is little prior in-depth research on how language impacts on employees’ interpretation of corporate values. As values are cohesive devices in organisations, the language used to convey them is worth addressing as the present paper aims to demonstrate.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on corporate communication issues that arise when a company offshores language-sensitive services to a country which does not have a workforce with the required language skills. It explores the consequences of adopting a total immersion policy and annual testing regime to build and maintain linguistic competence among the workforce, with regard to motivation, challenges and coping strategies.

The approach adopted was semi-structured interviews with management and employee representatives, interviewed separately. The interviews were transcribed and submitted to content analysis, supported by relevant company information.

The company’s language policy has generated a user environment where language proficiency is developed in corporate interaction, and where the workforce is motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Strategic decisions relating to language policy need to take the workforce’s input into account to discuss the testing regime with a view to test content and relevance.

The findings relate to a limited material of 6 interviews with 14 interviewees in total.

The paper focusses on how to strike a balance between developing the skills needed to perform job tasks and preparing for new more complex tasks without demotivating the workforce. The conclusion sets out managerial implications.

The paper contributes to understanding the dynamics of working in a multilingual context.

To the authors’ knowledge the specificities of offshoring of language-sensitive services with regard to motivation and coping strategies have not been explored previously. The fact that the services in question have to be carried out in a minor language and that a total immersion strategy has been adopted also represents something new.

This paper offers an empirical overview of European emergency managers' institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in risk and crisis communication.

The authors collected and analysed material including publicly accessible relevant legal acts, policy documents, official guidelines, and press reports in eight European countries – Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Estonia. Additionally, the authors carried out 95 interviews with emergency managers in the eight countries between September 2019 and February 2020.

The authors found that emergency management institutions' social media usage is rarely centrally controlled and social media crisis communication was regulated with the same guidelines as crisis communication on traditional media. Considering this study's findings against the backdrop of existing research and practice, the authors find support for a “mixed arrangement” model by which centralised policies work in tandem with decentralised practices on an ad hoc basis.

Comparative insights about institutional arrangements and procedural guidelines on social media crisis communication in the studied countries could inform the future policies concerning social media use in other emergency management systems.

This study includes novel, cross-national comparative data on the institutional arrangements and guidelines for using social media in emergency management in the context of Europe.