Abstract
It is the aim of this paper to examine the management of multilingualism in the Swiss healthcare industry and the negotiation of the oftentimes fluctuating and unstable value of linguistic resources in the care for medical tourists; on the other hand highlighting how international healthcare and medical tourism emerge as sites emblematic of the global new economy and the exploitation of those linguistic resources. Insights will be drawn from two research sites that are currently engaged in the care of international patients, a private medical clinic and spa I call Mountain Medical Resort as well as a public general hospital I call Lakeside Hospital. While both institutions offer to provide assistance and translation in a number of languages, this research primarily focuses on Russian as the language spoken by the largest share of medical tourists at both sites and in Switzerland as a whole. In particular, it is my aim to highlight how Russian as a linguistic resource is managed at Mountain Medical Resort and Lakeside Hospital to attend to visiting international patients. This will illustrate, which specific linguistic proficiencies are deemed valuable and how changes in market conditions and patient numbers have an impact on the commodity value of languages and that of Russian in particular. Here, it is the aim of this research to examine how, in which instances and under which conditions languages gain and may again lose a marketable value and how institutional policies react to that. Based on the two research sites that are exemplary for the current rise in numbers of medical tourists seeking treatment in Switzerland as much as they represent the transformation towards health as a consumable product, this also implies to examine how the neoliberal transformation of healthcare is connected to the re-imagination of language as a commodified skill under current political-economic conditions (Park in J Multiling Multicult Dev 37(5):453–466, 2016). Exemplified by medical tourism as a key site of the global new economy and Russian as a potentially commodifiable linguistic resource, this will also leave us with broader implications on the changing regimes of value of languages and on the role of language in the neoliberal economy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This and all following interviews that are part of this paper were conducted in German and translated into English by the author. Because of space-constraints, only translations into English are shown.
The Gottlieb-Duttweiler-Institute (GDI) is a Swiss Think Tank that engages in market-oriented research on trends in consumption, www.gdi.ch.
Original in German, “[…] Patienten aus totalitären und post-totalitären Regimes.”
In the interview, [B] denotes the Russian speaker from Ukraine employed at the time of research.
References
Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The social life of things (pp. 3–63). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 645–668.
Boutet, J. (2008). La vie verbale au travail: Des manufactures aux centres d’appels. Paris: Octares.
Cameron, D. (2000). Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4, 323–347.
Chuang, T. C., Liu, J. S., Lu, L. Y. Y., & Lee, Y. (2014). The main paths of medical tourism: From transplantation to beautification. Tourism Management, 45, 49–58.
Connell, J. (2013). Contemporary medical tourism: Conceptualisation, culture and commodification. Tourism Management, 34, 1–13.
Connell, J. (2015). Transnational health care: Global markets and local marginalisation in medical tourism. In P. Bronwyn, B. Greenhough, T. Brown, & I. Dyck (Eds.), Bodies across borders: The global circulation of body parts, medical tourists and professionals (pp. 75–94). Farnham: Ashgate.
Coupland, N., & Garret, P. (2010). Linguistic landscapes, discursive frames and metacultural performance: The case of Welsh Patagonia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 205, 7–36.
Crozier, G. K. D., & Baylis, F. (2010). The ethical physician encounters international medical travel. Journal of Medical Ethics, 36, 297–301.
Del Percio, A. (2016). Branding the nation: Swiss multilingualism and the promotional capitalization on national history under late capitalism. Pragmatics and Society, 7(1), 82–103.
Dewachi, O., Skelton, M., Nguyen, V.-K., Fouad, F., Abu Sitta, G., Maasri, Z., et al. (2014). Changing therapeutic geographies of the Iraqi and Syrian wars. The Lancet, 383(9915), 449–457.
Duchêne, A. (2009). Marketing, management, and performance: Multilingualism as commodity in a tourism call centre. Language Policy, 8, 27–50.
Duchêne, A. (2011). Néolibéralisme, inégalités sociales et plurilinguismes: l’exploitation des ressources langagières et des locuteurs. Langage et Société, 136, 81–106.
Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (2012). Language policy and the workplace. In B. Spolsky (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language policy (pp. 323–335). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gal, S. (1989). Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 18, 345–367.
Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492.
Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114.
Heller, M., & Duchêne, A. (2016). Treating language as an economic resource: Discourse, data, debates. In N. Coupland (Ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 139–156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holborow, M. (2015). Language and neoliberalism. London: Routledge.
Irvine, J. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist, 16(2), 248–267.
Jones, C. A., & L. G. Keith. (2006). Medical tourism and reproductive outsourcing: The dawning of a new paradigm for healthcare. International Journal of Fertility and Women’s Medicine, 51, 251–255.
Kelly-Holmes, H. (2006). Multilingualism and commercial language practices on the internet. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10, 507–519.
Marcus, G. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117.
McGill, K. (2013). Political economy and language: A review of some recent literature. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23(2), E84–E101.
Muth, S. (2015). Russian as a commodity: medical tourism and the healthcare industry in post-Soviet Lithuania. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–13. doi:10.1080/13670050.2015.1115002.
O’Neill, F. (2011). From language classroom to clinical context: The role of language and culture in communication for nurses using English as a second language—A thematic analysis. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 48, 1120–1128.
Ormond, M. (2013). Claiming ‘cultural competence’. The promotion of multi-ethnic Malaysia as a medical tourism destination. In M. C. Hall (Ed.), Medical tourism. The ethics, regulation, and marketing of health mobility (pp. 187–200). London: Routledge.
Park, J. (2016). Language as pure potential. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(5), 453–466.
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society, 42(1), 23–44.
Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2013). Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer, & C. Roberts (Eds.), Language, migration and social inequalities: A critical sociolinguistic perspective on institutions and work (pp. 95–117). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Smith, M., & Puczkó, L. (Eds.). (2014). Health, tourism and hospitality: Spas, wellness and medical travel. London: Routledge.
Swiss Health (2008). Präsentation Medienkonferenz Gesundheitsdestination Schweiz. http://www.s-ge.com/sites/default/files/Praesentation_Medienkonferenz_Swiss%20Health_v3_1.pdf.
Tan, P. K. W., & Rubdy, R. (Eds.). (2008). Language as commodity: Global structures: Local marketplaces. London: Continuum.
Tissot, L. (2000). Naissance d’une industrie touristique. Les Anglais et la Suisse au XIXe siècle. Lausanne: Éditions Payot.
Turner, L. (2007). ‘First World Health Care at Third World Prices’: Globalization. Bioethics and Medical Tourism. Biosocieties, 2(3), 303–325.
Urciuoli, B., & LaDousa, C. (2013). Language management/labor. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 175–190.
Viladrich, A., & Baron-Faust, R. (2014). Medical tourism in tango paradise: The internet branding of cosmetic surgery in Argentina. Annals of Tourism Research, 45(3), 116–131.
Whittaker, A. (2008). Pleasure and pain: Medical travel in Asia. Global Public Health, 3, 271–290.
Whittaker, A., & Chee, H. L. (2015). Perceptions of an ‘international Hospital’ in Thailand by medical travel patients: Cross-cultural tensions in a transnational space. Social Science and Medicine, 124, 290–297.
Acknowledgements
This paper is part of a research project of the author entitled ‘Niches for riches: Language commodification in medical tourism to Switzerland’ that was funded by the Institute of Multilingualism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 2014 and 2015. I would like to thank Alexandre Duchêne, my colleagues at the Institute of Multilingualism and the participants of the colloquium ‘Exploring the limits of language commodification: Changing regimes of value in space and time' at the AAAL 2016 conference for their generous support and valuable feedback. I would also like to thank my respondents at both MMR and LH, because without their support this paper would not have materialized. Lastly I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments. All mistakes are entirely my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Muth, S. “The ideal Russian speaker is no Russian”: language commodification and its limits in medical tourism to Switzerland. Lang Policy 17, 217–237 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-017-9434-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-017-9434-6