Citation

Bhar, Sareen Kaur (2026) Generative AI and Language Ceilings: Career Capital and Mobility in Multilingual Workplaces. Encyclopedia, 6 (9). p. 202. ISSN 2673-8392

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Abstract

Workplace language proficiency functions as career capital because it shapes whose expertise is heard, trusted, and converted into developmental assignments, networks, promotion, and mobility. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) disrupts the assumed correspondence between employee-held language competence and observable communicative performance by enabling linguistic capability to be technologically accessed. This critical integrative review synthesises 41 substantive sources across language and careers, AI-mediated communication, multilingual model performance, workplace productivity, identity, attribution and signalling, sociotechnical work, and AI literacy. Sources were classified by evidentiary proximity to career outcomes, from model benchmarks and simulated tasks to workplace processes and direct mobility evidence. Evidence indicates task-level and workplace-process benefits alongside uneven cross-language performance and unresolved attribution and legitimacy concerns, but no study in the reviewed set directly links GenAI-supported multilingual communication with promotion, pay growth, lateral mobility, or access to strategic assignments. Integrating career-capital theory, attribution and signalling processes, and sociotechnical perspectives, the article distinguishes employee-owned competence, technologically accessed capability, AI-mediated communicative performance, organisationally recognised performance, and career-convertible capital. LANA provides the multilevel organising framework for a conversion model explaining how mediated performance may, or may not, become career value. Two conditional pathways theorise how GenAI may flatten language ceilings through improved performance, participation, learning, and visibility, or re-stratify work through unequal access, verification burdens, cross-language error, and legitimacy penalties. Five testable propositions are advanced. GenAI therefore changes not only communicative performance but the mechanisms through which capability is attributed, recognised, and converted into career advantage.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	AI-mediated communication, career capital, career mobility, generative artificial intelligence, language barriers, language ceilings, multilingual workplaces, workplace inclusion
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28-70 Management. Industrial Management > HD30.2 Electronic data processing. Information technology. Including artificial intelligence and knowledge management
Divisions:	Faculty of Applied Communication (FAC)
Depositing User:	Ms Suzilawati Abu Samah
Date Deposited:	30 Oct 2026 02:07
Last Modified:	30 Oct 2026 02:07
URII:	http://shdl.mmu.edu.my/id/eprint/17022

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