Language, medical tourism and the enterprising self

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate the implications of health mobility on language practices in the medical tourism industry in India and on the ways, language workers become entrepreneurs. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork that traces the trajectories of three former students of Russian, we highlight their future aspirations as language learners and entrepreneurs and show, how they attempt to capitalize on language skills and respond to changing conditions and patient movements within the structures, constraints and uncertainties of the linguistic market. Here, it is our aim to illustrate what it takes to become an enterprising and successful language worker and at the same time highlight their current positioning as emblematic yet subordinate figures within a fast-growing service industry in an emerging economy. We further demonstrate, how language skills not only become commodities to serve existing or future markets, but instead are recast as tools that can be strategically employed to secure recognition and access to prestigious and lucrative professional networks. In doing so, this paper illustrates how linguistic value is produced in a service industry that to date only received little attention in sociolinguistic research.

Healthcare entrepreneurship: current trends and future directions

“…Scholars in this cluster explore the startup ecosystem, which has been driven in recent years by the digital revolution with Industry 4.0, including in healthcare (Bhatt et al, 2022). They have also explored specific segments of health system and services such as medical tourism, revealing the importance and value of the enterprising self in expanding the boundaries of healthcare (Muth and Suryanarayan, 2020) and showed how the service divide in healthcare could be bridged through digitally-enabled service innovations (Srivastava and Shainesh, 2015) and how health technology assessments (HTAs) could ensure the smooth confluence of technology, innovation and policy in realizing the positive impacts of health innovation emerging from healthcare entrepreneurship (Mukherjee, 2021).…”

Russian in the multilingual environment of three Asian countries

“…Their proficiency is limited and is just enough to suit their commercial needs (Suryanarayan 2017a). Similarly, a considerable workforce with knowledge of Russian is engaged by hospitals to help with language needs of patients coming from Russia and the CIS countries for medical treatment (Suryanarayan 2017b, Muth & Suryanarayan 2020. For all of these, Russian is a foreign language and the level of knowledge is mixed, from very fluent and excellent to medium to limited.…”