About the project
This study, which is an ethnography of workplaces populated by Polish, Norwegian and Swedish workers, has specifically been designed to contribute to on-going discussions about the role of language and communication on labour markets in late capitalist societies, characterised by transnational mobility and transiency.
Theoretically, the study is anchored within the discipline of critical sociolinguistics which has been instrumental in describing and theorising the relationships between linguistic and communicative difference, social distinction between groups of speakers and the production of social inequalities (Blommaert 2010, Hymes 1973). Contemporary societies are increasingly organised according to orders of flexibilisation (Sennet 1998), and under such conditions ‘soft skills’ such as communication and language proficiency become increasingly important (Urciuoli 2008). The impact of these skills has especially been demonstrated within the service sector, but this thesis shows that they are also important on workplaces in the production sector, even though workplaces within this sector are often considered to be distinctly ‘manual’.
The study takes an ethnomethodological approach, focusing on how workers orient to and make sense of their everyday activities and their social world (Garfinkel 1984, Goffman 1961). From this vantage point, the study explores the linguistic and communicative practices in workspaces characterised by a high degree of change and diversity. Through this exploration, the thesis is able to problematise the apparent contradiction between ‘manual’ and ‘communicative’ work and show that these types of work are in fact closely interrelated practices, evidenced by the extent of actual communicative work needed to keep the primary tasks of manual work up and running. The study thus demonstrates that the importance of linguistic and communicative resources is not diminished within manual work settings.
The analytical chapters focus on three major processes in the workplace related to language use, communication and ideology:
- Flexibilisation of labour conditions, work activities, and workers.
- Disciplinisation and control of the flexible worker.
- Subalternitites of speakers and the option of self-realisation.
One of the central findings emerging from the analyses is that since increased labour migration has lead to significant diversification of languages and cultures within the workplace, the production sector has increasingly begun to see communication as a potential security risk (Arbeidstilsynet 2014). In response to this acknowledgement, the companies under study rely on a solution where some Polish workers undertake the task of acquiring Norwegian in order to perform as ‘language brokers’ between Norwegian, Swedish and Polish-speaking workers and managers. This new linguistic repertoire is not obtained in the ‘classic’ way of language courses but rather through workers’ self-skilling in everyday work activities. This allows them to acquire a specific vocational repertoire in Norwegian, but it also allows them to display a particularly valued behaviour of integration and socialisation which dovetails with managerial core values of social cohesion in the workplace and efforts to ‘build a good team’. Because the practice of self-skilling is unevenly distributed among the workers, the process results in different forms of social stratification, the most visible between those who possess the desired linguistic skills, those who do not, and those who do to some extent.
In sum, the study provides a new understanding of how multilingualism and communicative processes structure the practices of international workplaces and their organisation, while at the same time showing how the process of acquiring specific multilingual linguistic skills may represent an asset for workers in late capitalist societies, but also a restriction on professional opportunities for those who are not able to do so.
References
Arbeidstilsynet. 2014. Forstår du hva jeg sier? Krav til kommunikasjon og språk på bygge- og anleggsplassen. Trondheim: Direktoratet for arbeidstilsynet.
Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Hymes, Dell. 1973. Speech and language: On the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers. Daedalus 102(3), 59–85.
Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist 35(2), 211–28.
Duration
August 2013–August 2016
The thesis will be submitted 31st of July 2016.
Collaboration
The LINGCORP project, Roskilde University