Abstract
The aim of the paper is to put the unquestioned use of English as a lingua franca and English as a foreign language, ELF and EFL, 1 on the agenda of the business ethics community. Since the positive functions of English as an enabler of communication are unquestionable and widely accepted, we mainly focus on potential negative functions, such as handicaps for non-native users of English, language discrimination risks, and on missed opportunities of multilingualism. After a brief literature review and after presenting a few preliminary research questions, the paper presents the findings of an exploratory online survey among Journal of Business Ethics authors with English as their non-native language, about their experience with and attitudes towards EFL and ELF in the context of business ethics. More specifically, questions are addressed such as motivation and pressure to publish in English language journals, language self-confidence, experience with writing and reviewing processes in academic journals, discrimination risks of EFL users and of " foreign " language contents (for the latter we also checked two years' JBE literature references). In addition to preliminary findings, we also share a selection of verbatim responses to open questions in the online survey, and impressions from Socratic dialogues about the paper topic. Finally, rather than offering any final conclusions, we formulate suggestions for further " action research " as an ending of the paper.