So the structure of your mother tongue dictates how forward-thinking you can be? Sounds like hot air, says Mallen Baker

According to a new piece of academic research, published in American Economic Review, the language used in the home base of major companies influences how committed to the concepts of corporate responsibility that company will be.

Specifically, the findings argue that companies located in countries including Germany, Japan and most of the Nordic nations are more likely to practise corporate responsibility and sustainability than companies in France, India or Russia.

To say this is an unusual proposition is something of an understatement. We all know, and understand in principle if not in the detail, that national culture can make a huge difference in how people see the world. But this goes further. It’s not just culture. It’s language.

And, specifically, it’s how that language is constructed. The researchers say they looked at the constructions used to describe future actions. They found that the more separation placed between present and future events, the less socially responsible a company was.

Forbes, in discussing this research, used the example that in languages such as German, Swedish and Chinese, the same grammatical structure is used for a phrase such as “it is raining today” and “it is raining tomorrow”. Whereas in English, Spanish, Arabic and Korean the constructions are completely different: “It is raining today” and “it will be raining tomorrow”.

The proposition is that those companies whose CEOs speak one of the latter languages are more disconnected from consequences. Hence they are less engaged in corporate responsibility. And quantifiably so. The researchers suggested that corporations in countries with strong “future time reference” languages scored 26% lower on corporate responsibility values than those with a weak FTR language.

Indeed, where there were countries with split linguistic regions, such as Belgium and Switzerland, they were able to show that corporate responsibility scores differ according to the dominant language where a company has its headquarters.

How did they identify which companies were strong or weak on corporate responsibility? They drew from the rankings of 1,500 companies in investment expert MSCI’s intangible value assessment tool as well as sustainability data from the Vigeo sustainable country ratings. This enabled them to identify the leading companies and map them onto their home language.

Apparently, English and French speaking companies are not wholly lost to their circumstances. The more global a company is – and the more exposed therefore to countries that have a different future-focused style of language – then the more the results break down. So you can absorb the influence of others if you’re sufficiently sensitive to your surroundings.

It’s all very interesting, and it’s easy to see how someone might build a presentation to show to their chief executive about how the company can move ahead by learning from those cultures with a higher propensity to feel connected to future events. And so on. 

Really? 

Unfortunately, it’s nonsense. Carefully researched, meticulously recorded nonsense.

If it weren’t, then the English speaking countries would all fare about the same – badly. The UK has been seen for decades as a leader in the development of corporate responsibility, and plenty of its companies have featured in the top of the various rankings.

The US has been a different story – some leading companies but very different styles.

And it is a fascinating conjecture that Chinese companies should inherently have the advantage of language when it comes to being socially responsible.

It’s an example of how you can create research by taking two random circumstances and then mapping them against each other – along with plausible excuses and reasons for variances.

Ask the residents of Beijing – choking as they are on today’s extreme pollution – just how future-connected their local businesses are. Or the Chinese consumers who now buy foreign products because of the milk-doctoring scandals that poisoned hundreds of people.

If language made a difference, it wouldn’t just be able to map trends across leading companies, but you would be able to predict the presence of a significant number of a country’s companies among those leaders. China again would dominate the listings. It doesn’t.

Also, since most of the listings are dominated by global businesses that operate across a wide range of linguistic territories, a get-out clause that argues that the more global a company is, the more it may escape the restrictions of its English or French-speaking origins is akin to admitting that there is no correlation of any interest here whatsoever.

Or maybe something was lost in translation.

Mallen Baker is a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation and managing director of Daisy Wheel Interactive. 

academic research  CSR terms  Language  linguistics