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Language Socialization in the workplace
Running head: LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN THE WORKPLACE
Language Socialization in the Workplace
Celia Roberts
King’s College London
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Language Socialization in the workplace
Abstract
This survey article looks first at the changing demands of the workplace in a
globalised economy. The new work order creates a new word order and the workforce
has become a “wordforce” (Heller in press) with new genres of language and
communication. These changes have taken place at a time when global flows of
people, from less wealthy and secure societies to more wealthy and secure ones, have
created multilingual workplaces. Both sets of changes challenge the traditional notion
of second language socialization and this is the focus of the next section. The
workplace represents a complex, dynamic setting where migrants experience a double
socialization: into the hybrid discourses of the workplace, which all newcomers
experience, and into the specific language and cultural practices that realise these
discourses. The new language requirements of the workplace produce for migrant
workers and professionals a “linguistic penalty” (Roberts and Campbell 2006) since
the communicative demands of the selection process may be greater than those of the
job itself. The last section of the article is concerned with language socialisation in
multi-lingual settings where language socialization into the dominant language is only
part of the story. There is a contrast between the low status multilingualism of migrant
workers, and staff in globalised and international organisations who are being
socialized into new lingua franca interaction. The paper concludes with an example of
how the complex linguistic and technical environment of a high-tech multilingual
company produces radically different conditions for language socialization which
challenge how this notion can be used in the twenty-first century.
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Language Socialization in the Workplace
The notion of the workplace as a site where language socialization takes place
is becoming increasingly complex and contested. The reasons for this include the way
in which boundaries between work and other aspects of social life become
problematic, the changing nature of work itself, and the continuing changes in the
communicative environment at work. What counts as a workplace or a location for
preparing for work is not easy to define. The boundaries between education and work
are no longer patrolled by time, with a period of formal education leading seamlessly
to work. People move back from work to education, do internships as part of formal
education, and on- and off-site training and continuous professional development are
routine (Duff, 2008; Vickers, 2007). Similarly, the home is often now the workplace
as teleworking and training become common. Also, working parents socialise their
children into work practices in their narratives of what happened at the office (Paugh,
2005). Language socialization in the workplace is, therefore, a combination of both
formal and informal learning (Scollon & Scollon, 1995) and cannot be readily
separated off from the professional socialization and training that takes place outside
of the formal, physical workplace.
Work itself has also radically changed. The collapse of much traditional
manufacturing in western societies, the “new work order” (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear,
1996; Hull, 1997) and new technologies have had a paradoxical effect on our
understanding of the workplace as a key site for language socialization. On the one
hand, the new work order has led to a “new word order” (Farrell, 2001:57; Iedema, &
Scheeres, 2003). The workforce has become a “wordforce” (Heller, in press) which
manufactures talk and texts. Communications has become the most demanded
competence in an increasingly competence-driven world (Matthewman, 1996). On
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the other hand, the new technologies that have helped to create the new work order
have refocused linguists on the multi-modality of everyday activities. Language
interacts with the texts and materialities of these new technologies which themselves
facilitate new forms of language (Goodwin 1995; Heath & vom Lehn, 2008; Kleifgen,
2001).
Changes in the nature of work itself have occurred at much the same time as
global flows of people have transformed employment. While the physical location of
some workplaces has led to a particular ethnolinguistic group tending to be employed
over others, in large urban centres, many organisations are characterised by
“superdiversity” (Vertoveç, 2007:1024) where no single ethnic group stands out but
where employees are from many different backgrounds. Along with new
technologies, globalisation challenges traditional notions of community as
homogeneous or geographically placed. A more dynamic view of community as
heterogeneous and plural better represents living and working in the city. Similarly
recent theorising about space, language, and culture has raised questions about
language choice and mix (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck, 2005a). Rather than
language practices being determined unproblematically by specific domains, with, for
example, a particular language used in one domain rather than another, they are
highly situated and dependent upon the context of the particular interaction and the
mutual resources of the speakers (Blommaert, 2007; Blommaert, Collins, &
Slembrouck, 2005b; Duff, 2005). So within a workplace there may be a constant
tension between “interactional regimes” (Blommaert et al., 2005b, p. 208) and the
more creative and hybrid language practices of individuals in particular contexts.
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Current theories on language and globalisation (Blommaert et al., 2005a; Heller,
in press) also raise questions about the notion of language socialization in the
workplace. The foundational studies on language socialization took place in small
scale societies where the notion of a community was relatively stable. The young
child or novice gradually learned how to use language and learned through language
how to conduct themselves within this relatively homogeneous community. More
recent research has extended these studies to include the lifespan and complex,
heterogeneous societies where the idea of single, fixed communities and a set of
established linguistic standards and practices no longer obtain (Garrett & Baquedano-
Lopez, 2002). The originators of language socialization theory, Ochs and Schieffelin
(1983; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986) have themselves played a leading role in
criticising any static notion of socialization into a community, the stereotypes such
research can produce, and the possible underplaying of more general or universal
practices. For example:
Language socialization research is aware that generalizations of this sort have
several undesirable effects: for one thing, cultures are essentialized, and
variation in communicative practices within communities is under-emphasized. .
. . Our accounts also seem like fixed cameos, members and communities
enslaved by convention and frozen in time rather than fluid and changing over a
course of a generation, a life and even a single encounter. . . . [W]e have tended
to over-emphasize the unique communicative configurations of particular
communities and underspecify over-arching, possible universal, communicative
and social practices that may facilitate socialization into multiple communities
and transnational life worlds. (Ochs, 2000, p. 231)
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Ochs also stresses that socialization is a two-way street with more or less experienced
members learning from each other. This more dynamic and transformative notion of
language socialization, along with responses to Och’s critique, are illustrated in the
examples below.
Despite the expansion of studies on lifelong and “lifewide language
socialization” (Duff, 2008:258), there is still only a rather meagre trickle of workplace
and professional socialization research. In Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez’s (2002)
introduction to their review, looking back in 2002 over the previous 16 years, only 5
studies of the 48 they reference related to workplace and professional socialization.
One reason for this is that the methodology used in such studies is hard to carry out in
workplaces. The core methodological features are that the research is ethnographic,
holistic, longitudinal, and based on naturally occurring data. Such studies also require
evidence of learning, both in terms of cognition and social interaction. Even in
longitudinal studies, research on the shop floor or the office cannot readily capture the
changes in how activities are accomplished over time. Another factor is that access to
workplaces to carry out ethnographic studies is not easy to obtain often because
researchers are assumed to be either spies or trouble makers. Thus, many studies of
language use in the workplace are connected to language and cultural training, since
this may be the only way in which employers are willing to offer their organisation as
a field site for research. Teachers can act as ethnographers, collecting data from the
workplace to produce research-based teaching materials.
Given the paucity of relevant research in the workplace, this review takes a
rather elastic definition of language socialization research so that the workplace theme
can be adequately discussed. It includes studies of socialization in formal off-site
research examples of socialization based on ethnographic interviews rather than
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naturally-occurring data, and includes examples of second language use where the
environment creates conditions for socialization, even though there is no systematic
evidence collected of language learning taking place over time.
The Workplace as a Site of Socialization
The “interactional regimes” (Blommaert et al., 2005b) of the workplace make it a site
where everyone at some stage is new to the environment and has to be socialised into
its particular linguistic and cultural environment. This socialization can be seen as
consisting of three parts: corporate or institutional discourses, professional discourses,
and the social or personal aspects of the workplace (Roberts & Sarangi, 1999). The
communities of practice model (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) has traced the
gradual process of becoming a full participant in the workplace where there is one
over-arching community of practice but also multiple local communities depending
on the particular sites of engagement that employees are subject to or contribute to
creating.
Corporate discourses differ (and are dynamic) in different parts of the world
but since virtually all management training resources are produced in the West (Jack,
2009; Poncini, 2003), this hegemonic discourse is what Scollon and Scollon (1995, p.
107) have called “the Utilitarian Discourse system.” It is empirical, deductive,
individualistic, egalitarian, and institutionally sanctioned. New employees are
inducted either formally or informally into the unique forms of text and talk, and the
particular way things are done and categorized in any one institution (Iedema, 2003;
Mawer, 1999).
Socialization into professional discourse occurs both in formal training
contexts outside the workplace and also within it (Sarangi & Roberts, 1999). Several
studies have charted the processes of shaping a professional identity through
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acquiring new discourses and values in healthcare, scientific, legal, and vocational
settings. Erickson (1999), in medicine, and Arakelian (2009), in nursing, document
how relative novices learn to be professional learners in the workplace. Hobbs (2004)
analyzes how progress (treatment) notes are used in medical socialization. Mertz
(2007) has studied the novice law student socialization through Socratic dialogue and
the reworking of legal texts in different contexts. Similarly, Jacoby (1998) looked at
how adults master new registers and genres in the process of becoming physicists and
Vickers (2007) documented the processes of becoming a core member of an
engineering team through observation, scaffolding, ridicule, and opportunities to talk
through design processes.
In a very different setting, the African-American cosmetology school, Jacobs-
Huey (2003) charts how students become so-called hair experts. Like the student
lawyers in Mertz’s (2007) study, role-play is a key method for developing the scripts
of the new profession and being evaluated on their competence in using them. One
element of these scripts is the use of metaphors and proverbs socialising the
apprentices “into shared moral ideologies and behaviour” (Jacobs-Huey, 2003, p.
294). Another element is the use of metacommunication, the talk about talk, when a
student breaches the prescribed linguistic code. So despite the constant changes in
workplace practices noted below, the apprenticeship model of learning to become
expert remains and notions of what constitutes professionalism continue to be
relatively stable, as part of the “habitus” of a particular profession (Bourdieu, 1991 ).
The third aspect of workplace socialization relates to the personal and social
discourses at work. As language work (talk and text as institutionalized tasks in the
workplace) takes on an increasingly central role, the inter-relationship of professional
and personal or social discourses becomes ever more key. This has always been the
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case with the caring professions, but now that talk is work in call centres, shop floor
team meetings and workplace training sessions, the presentation of self is part of most
people’s working skills and requires an assertive persona that is by no means a
cultural universal (Katz, 2000;see below for how this plays out in terms of power and
inequality). The Wellington Language in the Workplace project in New Zealand has
made a particular study of politeness and humour in the relational work done within
the contexts of power in organisational life (Holmes, 2005; Holmes & Stubbes, 2003;
Newton, Daley, Holmes & Stubbes, 2004; see also, in Australia, Willing, 1997).
Workplace studies in Sweden (Gunnarsson, 2009) have shown how migrant workers
and professionals have learnt to use humour and developed high levels of pragmatic
competence in this area. This has involved not only a linguistic view of appropriacy
but also adaption to the flattened hierarchies of the Swedish workplace (Andersson,
2009; Nelson and Andersson, 2005, as cited in Gunnarsson, 2009).
The informal socialization of office workers (Li, 2000)0 and care workers
(Duff, Wong & Early, 2000) illustrate the significance of pragmatic and social skills
in the necessary face work of daily interactions in the workplace. Li’s case study
traced the experience of a Chinese woman, Ming, from the employment preparation
course into the workplace as a filing clerk in a US medical equipment company. It
was only in the workplace that her “indirect communicative style” (p. 67), particularly
realised in how she made requests, brought along from her early socialization and
work experience in China, changed to a more assertive style as she faced up to the
unacceptable behaviour of local American office workers. This longitudinal study
goes beyond the pragmatics of making requests to wider issues of self-presentation
and identity. It also explored the mix of the “new American way” of requesting:
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“directly, truthful and things a little bit sweeter”, as Ming noted in her diary (p. 75)
with the inductive way of making requests from her early habitus. Her new
assertiveness in which she requested co-workers to be more polite exemplifies the
transformative nature of language socialization in which the so-called novices become
experts in managing the local politics of the office and contribute to changing the
communicative environment.
In their study of migrant workers training to become long-term resident care
aides, Duff, Wong, and Early (2002)0 describe a similar gap between formal training
and informal socialization in the workplace. The more formal and technically specific
focus in the English language training programme did not prepare the trainees for the
emotional labour of communicating with residents with a wide range of English
language competence (including no English at all) and often with mental and
linguistic abilities impaired by the aging process. Affective, personal, and social
modes of talk and bodily language were more important in the healthcare aide jobs
than accurate English grammar or medical terms.
These three aspects of workplace language socialization--corporate,
professional, and social or personal--interact to produce new identities with new ways
of being, feeling, and articulating the self in new moral worlds. These changes have
always been central to the study of language socialization. In the workplace these
identities are collaborative achievements (Ochs, 1993) within organisations, in
professional socialization and in the context of gendered migration (Holmes, 2006;
Katz, 2000; Gunnarsson, 2009).
The “New Work Order”
While some aspects of working life remain stable, the globalised economy and
working practices produced by the rapid expansion of new technologies has led to a
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“new work order” (Gee et al., 1996). This order is supported by the discourses of what
have become known as “new capitalism” or “fast capitalism”. The need to constantly
change products and customize them to survive in the globalized market place has led
to a re-structuring of the workplace which, in turn, has created new language and
literacy demands which affect even the low-paid worker. These demands arise from
an increased use of technologies, more multi-tasking at all levels, more flexibility
required of workers as hierarchical structures are flattened, and, generally, a more
“textualised workplace” (Iedema & Scheeres, 2003:336) in which there is increasing
reliance on written instructions and Web-based materials, so both new and well-
established employees have had to be socialised into these new practices (Hull, 1997).
Many studies of workplaces have shown how routine activities are mediated by digital
technologies ( Goodwin, 1995; Heath & vom Lehn, 2008; Hindmarsh, Heath, &
Fraser, 2006; Lemke 2002; Suchman, 1992).
The new work order has created a “new word order” (Farrell, 2001) or
“wordforce” (Heller, in press). There are new work genres, and new work and
professional identities are constructed and negotiated through talk on the shop floor
(Hull, 1997; Iedema & Scheeres, 2003; Kleifgen,2001); in health settings (Cook-
Gumperz & Messerman, 1999; Greatbatch, Luff, Heath, & Campion, 1993); and in
call centres (Budach, Roy, & Heller, 2003; Cameron, 2000; Friginal, 2009a, 2009b;
Heller 2002; Roy 2003) where there is a constant tension between the highly
routinized scripts of interaction and the emotional labour of dealing on a daily basis
with often irate or frustrated customers and being expected to adapt to their style of
communicating.
The globalized economy is paralleled by the global movements of people.
“Superdiversity” (Vertoveç, 2007) is the norm in most large cities and few places in
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the world remain untouched by migration or the effects of the diaspora, as the studies
by Li (2000) and Duff et al. (2000) described above show. Global flows of people to
more wealthy and secure societies have created workplaces where staff are bilingual
or often multilingual. However, the dominant language of the nation state produces
and enforces a linguistic capital which serves to maintain and reproduce linguistic and
ethnic inequalities. Migration and mobility create the need for “double socialization”
(Li, 2000:61) into the workplace. So, in addition to the socialization processes that all
new employees face, relative newcomers are expected to learn to participate in the
linguistic and cultural practices of work in a new country.
The extensive literature on workplace language and cultural awareness
training demonstrates the amount of re-training and more formal socialization
expected of the migrant and international worker and professional (Belfiore, 1993;
Bell, G., 2003; Bell, J., 2005; Goldstein, 1993; Grünhage-Monetti, Halewijn, &
Holland, 2003; Hawthorne, 1997; Mawer, 1997, O’Neill & Gish, 2001; Roberts,
Davies, & Jupp, 1992; Holmes 2000;). Some of this training has been criticised for
being too narrow (Goldstein, 1997) or not sufficiently critical of the positioning of
migrant workers within the new work order (Farrell, 2000). Some of these evaluation
studies of language training taker a wider more ethnographic perspective, seeing the
“workplace as the curriculum” (Mawer, 1999). However, few of them are framed by
theories of second language socialization or examine the “exposure to similar
communicative experiences in institutionalized networks of relationships” which
contribute to the production of “shared culture and shared inferential practices”
(Gumperz, 1997, p. 15).
This “double socialization” and the shift to language work in the new work
order produce new regimes of inequality which, despite the relative stability of some
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work practices, as noted above, make language socialization in the workplace
problematic. First, as McCall (2003) discusses, there is a linguistically divided labour
market, similar in many ways to the traditional two-tier labour market. Many low-
paid, so-called entry-level jobs are insecure, isolated, in poor and noisy conditions,
and organised into ethnic work units (Campbell & Roberts, 2007; Goldstein, 1997;
Gunnarsson, 2009; Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, 1992; Waldinger & Lichter, 2003).
These are often the only jobs that minority ethnic workers, particularly relatively new
arrivals, whatever their educational background, can obtain. Under these conditions,
there is little opportunity to be socialised into the dominant language. Indeed, as
McCall argues, those areas where there is relatively little talk, or certainly little talk in
the majority language of the organisation, are the areas where there is little power: “In
the workplace power is exercised precisely in those areas where language is most
intense” (McCall, 2003, p. 249). Goldstein’s study of female Portuguese factory
workers in Toronto illustrates how the assembly line workers chose to speak
Portuguese on the line to assert their ethnic solidarity and so both in terms of place
and language were isolated from the “intense” areas of English language work. Even
non-Portuguese speaking migrant workers were socialised into speaking Portuguese
on the assembly lines (Goldstein, 1997).
Second, unlike the usually supportive conditions for early language
socialization, second language socialization in the workplace often occurs in a
relatively hostile environment, (Katz, 2000; Li, 2000; Mawer, 1999; Roberts et al.,
1992). Misunderstandings, racist comments and the deliberate non-contact of some
groups in relation to others both limit opportunities for socialization and actively
construct resistances to it. However, some recent studies present an alternative view
(Andersson, 2009; Duff , Wong, &Early 2000, described above). Andersson’s study
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in a Swedish hospital setting documented the use of communication strategies and
humour and found that the local Swedish staff were patient listeners and even when
second language speakers had to use several communication strategies as they
struggled to convey their intent, the local staff allowed them to finish their turn at talk.
Third, the language and literacy demands of the new work order, and its
associated ideologies, can serve to exclude bilingual and multilingual workers even
when they are considered expert speakers of the dominant language in their country of
origin or in the multilingual community in which they grew up or now reside
(Blommaert, 2007). Expertise, Blommaert argues, is relative. A speaker’s use of
English perceived as expert in, for example, Nigeria or the Philippines is downgraded
to limited or inappropriate in the specific contexts and genres of the workplace in the
new country. Hull (1997) and Katz (2000) describe the linguistic and performance
demands of multilingual workers in high-tech Silicon Valley companies in California.
A similarly assertive stance was required of linguistic minority nurses retraining in the
UK whose English was expert in their own country but rated as inappropriate in
British hospitals (Arakelian, 2009).
Several studies in Canada have shown how speakers of English or French
who were considered experts, linguistically, within their own communities can be
disadvantaged by dominant norms and workplace ideologies. In their studies of
francaphone novice nurses in Quebec, Parks and Maguire (1999) found that the
nursing reports and care plans they had been taught to produce were different from the
conventional practices in both French and English speaking hospitals. Bilingual call
workers in French Ontario also found they were excluded from the better-paid
bilingual jobs because of the commodification, standardisation, and codification of the
dominant language, French. The ideology of a pure standard French which was the
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stated call centers’ requirement excluded local vernacular French speakers from the
better-paid bilingual worker jobs. Their French did not meet this new standard of
bilingualism and so, despite being bilingual, they were hired as English monolingual
speakers (Roy, 2003; Budach, Roy & Heller, 2003). The effect of globalisation in the
new international call centers has local, exclusionary repercussions, even for bilingual
and multilingual speakers and shows that there is a linguistic market place (Bourdieu,
1991; McCall, 2003) which determines what counts as linguistic capital and sets the
standards for language socialization.
The “Linguistic Penalty”
The call centre studies in Canada and the U.K. document how the corporate
discourses of the new work order impose a “linguistic penalty” (Roberts and
Campbell, 2006 p.1) on those who do not meet their standards of language and
communicative competence. Early work on gatekeeping encounters in linguistically
diverse societies established the gap between the sociolinguistic demands of the
selection and assessment processes and those of the workplace (Brindley 1994;
Gumperz, Jupp, & Roberts, 1979; Mawer & Field, 1995; McNamara, 1997; Roberts et
al, 1992). More recently, equal opportunity commitments and the widespread use of
competency-based criteria in recruitment and training have done little to narrow the
gap. The socialization required to be successful in the selection interview or
assessment outstrips the language and interactional demands of the job or assesses
language and communication skills that are not relevant to the job (Roberts &
Campbell, 2006). On the analogy of the ethnic penalty, which describes the
discrimination experienced by black and minority ethnic groups (Heath & Cheung,
2007, there is a “linguistic penalty” which excludes on the basis of language. (Other
research suggests that the selection interview does not assess accurately for the
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interactional demands of the job [e.g., Friginal, 2009a] but this is outside the scope of
this article.)
A recent study has shown that job interviews for low-paid, entry level jobs in
the UK require an astute performance by candidates which combines blending
institutional, professional, and personal modes of discourse with a standard narrative
structure (Campbell & Roberts, 2007; Roberts & Campbell, 2006). Candidates’
responses also have to be what Iedema terms “bureaucratically processable” (Iedema,
2003). In other words, they have to “fit their stories into boxes” (Roberts & Campbell,
2005 p.45). The formal language socialization through language training and work
preparation courses is far removed from the competency-based interview which itself
is distant from those areas of work, away from the language intense areas, where
linguistic minorities and relatively new arrivals are routinely positioned. Language
socialization for entry into reasonably secure, if low-paid, work is a bigger hurdle
than language socialization within the workplace itself.
A follow-up study (Roberts, Campbell & Robinson, 2008) looked at the role
of promotion interviews in contributing to what Phillips (2003) has called the “snowy
peaks” of senior management: the fact that most companies had only white majority
group members at the top. This study showed that the gradual process of socialization
into management discourses was essential to success at the promotion interview.
Access to informal interactional networks helped those from minorities to be
socialised into “talking like a manager (Roberts et al 2008)”. However, there were
tensions and struggles for those considering promotion since they were expected to be
“authentic” members of the shop floor community. Going for promotion was seen as a
double betrayal of this community and of their own ethnic group. So language
socialization for promotion to management in this mosaic of affiliations and tensions
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is not a straightforward matter of gradual participation in a new community of
practice.
Socialization into the competences of the promotion interview depended upon
learning its communicative and rhetorical styles. The overriding orientation was to the
self as a project, always self-aware and self-reflecting for the benefit of the
organisation the candidate aspired to be a manager in. Candidates born and educated
abroad were less likely to produce this self, a synthesis of the utilitarian discourse of
claims and evidence with and eueuphemised feelings and informality. This group of
candidates tended to be judged as either too emotional or too impersonal, relying on a
generalised assertive style which did not blend the hybrid discourses of the selection
interview.
Studies carried out on licensing and membership examinations for
international medical graduates form part of a wider literature on this group (Erickson
& Rittenburg, 1987; Spike, 2006). These studies of high-stakes gate-keeping
encounters involving well-qualified professionals represent challenges that are
broadly similar, in terms of communicative and rhetorical styles, to the job interviews
for low-paid work (McNamara, 1997; Sarangi & Roberts, 2002). Mistica, Baldwin,
Cordella and Musgrave (2008) discuss how the communication skills of interacting
with patients and conveying medical information accurately in simulated
consultations correlated with overall final grades in the Australian context. Such
simulations are widely used in health contexts for assessments. Whereas role-play and
simulations are used in educational contexts as part of professional socialization, as
discussed above, when used for assessment and selection they raise some awkward
questions. Simulation requires several abilities in addition to communicative and
rhetorical competences: ability to manage both the outer performance and inner
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psychological experience of being assessed; the ability to manage the frame
ambiguity of both the consultation and the assessment (Seale, Butler, Hutchby,
Kinnersley & Rollnick, 2007); and for international medical graduates the “double
consciousness” (Bell, E., 1990 p.461) of compartmentalising the personal and private
spheres of their life and yet using personal qualities such as empathy in the
consultation. These studies of the linguistic penalty in access to training, employment,
and promotion show that language socialization into and in the workplace is
problematic. There are different versions of the self required at different stages of the
employment process and resistances and tensions within the apprenticeship period.
Socialization into the Multilingual Workplace
The double socialization into a workplace officially dominated by the state or
majority language implies that learning the practices of the workplace would go hand
in hand with majority language socialization. However, studies have shown that for
many workers, contact was most frequent either with those who shared a first
language other than that of the majority or with speakers with very different styles and
varieties of this majority language (Clyne, 1994, 2003; Day, 1992; Duff et al., 2000;
Goldstein, 1997; Jupp et al., 1982). Since workplace language policies, work teams,
and the linguistic backgrounds of those employed are all dependent on economic and
structural factors, the communicative environment rarely remains stable. This raises
the question of what linguistic communities of practice newcomers are socialised into,
the extent to which such communities change over time, and the socio-political
realities on the ground that cause these changes. For example, in a food factory in a
small town in the U.K., successive groups of workers, first from Pakistan, then
Kurdish workers from Iraq and Turkey, and more recently from Eastern Europe, as
well as the company’s re-structuring meant that changes in the linguistic make-up of
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the food processing lines outstripped the opportunities for socialization into English,
the official language and the language of opportunity, or indeed into any one language
of the processing line (Roberts et al., 2008).
Although the globalized economy and the rhetoric of multilingualism used in
corporate discourse would appear to imply that those who are multilingual are assets
to the organisation, the evidence is rather mixed. The literature suggests there is a
persistent gap between the official rhetoric of institutions and the policies on the
ground and the linguistic ideology that underpins both of them, either explicitly or
implicitly. Heller and Roy have shown that the so-called purity of the standard French
required in call centers was at odds with the celebratory rhetoric around local
vernacular French (Heller, 2002; Roy, 2003).Similarly, Duchêne has described the
commodification of multilingualism in a call center (Duchêne, 2009). His ongoing
work in a Swiss international airport has shown the structuring work that linguistic
ideologies do in positioning workers with the wrong kind of multilingualism. The
neo-liberal discourse that promotes the hiring of those with multilingual resources
does not work through into status and pay. Even baggage handlers are doing language
work. They are listed as interpreters and translators and expected to do language work
as part of their duties. However, there is no recognition of this in terms of salary or
official status (Duchêne, 2009). In such contexts, unofficial language policy and
language socialization tend to reinforce unequal boundaries between different types of
language workers and the languages they speak. The use of a language other than the
state or majority languages, while functional and indeed of direct benefit to the
organisation, does not grant its user any more power than if they were monolinguals.
Other studies of socialization into the multilingual workplace are in contexts
where bilingualism, multilingualism and lingua franca usage (Firth, 1996) are ratified
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as functional and statusful practices; for example, international business negotiations
and the interaction between what are termed “bilingual professionals” (Day &
Wagner, 2007). These contexts contrast in several ways with workplaces discussed
above. Firstly, they are not ethnically and linguistically stratified but relate to
activities where participants have more or less equal status or valued skills, such as
the international professional sportswoman or man in the Netherlands (Kellerman et
al., 2005) and in Denmark (Wagner et al., 2004). Secondly, they are not tied to a
particular geographic area. Thirdly, and arising from the first two, language
socialization in these contexts is a matter of choice dependent on the particular
activity (Day & Wagner, 2007). Choices relate to choice of linguistic code both for
the whole activity and in code-switching within it (Mondada 2004; Poncini, 2003;
Rasmussen & Wagner, 2002) to create a new “bilingual interactional order” (Day &
Wagner, 2007; Mondada, 2004, p. 19). This order is not created in terms of
difficulties or deficiencies in communication but as a pragmatic response to the
functional requirements of the workplace event.
Studies of the use of English as a lingua franca in international domains
demonstrate a similar defocusing of the problematics of language differences. Firth
(1995a, 1996) has shown that interactants, in Och’s (2000) terms, rely on “over-
arching, possible universal, communicative and social practices” (p.232), which
underplay cultural differences, play up orderliness across these differences and so
“facilitate socialization into multiple communities and transnational life worlds”
(Ochs 2000 p.232ibid). Similarly, other lingua franca studies have shown how the
pragmatic norms of the speakers’ first language give way to new more informal
norms (Rasmussen, 1998; Wagner, 1995), suggestive of a new “lingua franca
interaction” (Day & Wagner, 2007 p.398).
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Conclusion
Micro-interactional studies like these document the complex and dynamic use of
strategic choices in language code and style shifting which suggest that, as
workplaces become increasingly multilingual, so also will the process of language
socialization. The study of a multilingual circuit-board manufacturing plant in
California’s Silicon Valley (Kleifgen, 2001) highlights many of the themes in this
overview and will be used, by way of a conclusion, to draw them together. In
particular, Kleifgen’s micro-interactional analysis confirms the highly situated and
creative use of language which is part of the linguistic environment of such high-tech
multilingual work spaces (Kleifgen, 2001; Kleifgen & Frenz-Belkin, 1997).
This high tech manufacturing plant is structured around natural teams in which
workers are encouraged to organize their own work teams and to use their shared
language and cultural understanding to meet the production demands of the company.
The data example analysed was of a problem-solving task involving a Vietnamese
supervisor and a machine operator. Kleifgen (2001) has documented how they used
what she terms a stripped down version of Vietnamese, together with some code-
switching into English to accomplish the trouble-shooting task. This was not a
simplified or pidginised version of Vietnamese but one influenced by American
English styles of talking. The conventional Vietnamese personal references and
honorifics were replaced by a more direct mode of talk which produced a symmetrical
interaction to accomplish the task. As a solution to the problem was reached, the
supervisor shifted back to forms that indexed more asymmetry but this was done by
using more directives rather than Vietnamese obligatory address systems. In this way,
the interactants drew on language and interactional norms from two contrasting
communicative systems to develop “a creative hybrid, showing remarkable social and
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Language Socialization in the workplace
linguistic adaption to the norms and constraints of the American workplace”
(Kleifgen, 2001, p. 302).
This study illustrates many of the themes of this overview of language
socialization in the workplace, even though it is a snapshot of language use rather
than a longitudinal study of learning. It shows the changing and transformative
potential of language use and the communicative environment (Garrett & Baquedano-
Lopez, 2002). Language socialization in multilingual workplaces can produce
creative, hybrid interaction, new bilingual interactional orders, and changes in the
behaviour of majority speakers. These changes relate to changing cultural conventions
and habitus and new identities and not just to linguistic competence. Another theme of
Kleifgen’s study relates to how language socialization is not only about acquiring new
language but also about how and when to use different languages and styles in the
micro choices and fleeting interpretive moments of interaction.
The Silicon Valley company exemplifies the new work order with its flattened
hierarchies and where language socialization is in part mediated by the new
technologies. The study also implicitly raises questions about the relationship between
face work, language choice, and contexts of power: the extent to which ethnic work
units are locally supportive and in the interests of management, but also present fewer
opportunities of socialization into the language and territories of power within the
workplace.
This overview also reflects the current mix of old and new conditions for
language socialization. In some settings multilingualism is a recognised professional
asset; in others, it is exploited without giving additional status and remuneration. In
many contexts where monolingual policy and practices are enforced, language
socialization into the majority language is the only route to more secure and well-paid
22
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Language Socialization in the workplace
work. And in these settings the linguistic penalty experienced by many migrant
workers is greater in gaining access to work than it is in the workplace itself.
The over-arching context of the workplace determines the conditions for
language socialization and the form it takes. Corporate and institutional priorities,
ideologies and structures, the values and practices of different professions, and the
particular social climate of the local work group construct these conditions and their
dynamics. Language socialization, together with the individual agency of workers and
apprentice professionals, is the consequence of these conditions. But what it will
consist of in terms of language mix, switch, and shift within multi-modal practices
remains still relatively uncharted research territory. Future research will need to map
this territory, with micro-analysis of the local contexts of production, as well as more
long-term studies of what constitutes language socialization in the complex
communicative environments and requirements of the twenty-first century workplace.
23
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Language Socialization in the workplace
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