Resumen de Linguistic entrepreneurship as affective regime: organizations, audit culture, and second/foreign language education policy

Peter I. De Costa, Joseph Sung Yul Park, Lionel Wee

• Conceived as the act of aligning with the moral imperative to enhance one’s worth in the world through a strategic management of language-related resources (De Costa et al. in Asia Pac Educ Res 25(5–6):695–702, 2016), linguistic entrepreneurship is used as a framework to guide this paper that examines the growing influence of neoliberalism within the broader ecology of second and foreign language education policy. To illustrate its influence, we focus on organizations that are under intense pressure to improve the linguistic capabilities of their members. In particular, the paper expands on the notion of affective regime to show an increasingly pervasive audit culture that has resulted in some languages and identities being assigned greater value over others. By foregrounding these inequity concerns which arise from quantitative technologies that emphasize standards and measurements, we extend the affective turn in language policy scholarship and demonstrate how it contributes to the growing body of language policy research that has critiqued the commodification of language education. We close with a call for a critical engagement with the ideological mechanisms that underlie language education policy so that our resistance towards neoliberalism can focus on undoing their effects.