Introduction: Recasting Institutions and Work in Multilingual and Transnational Spaces

Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa Moyer and Celia Roberts

This volume on Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work appears at a time when linguists concerned with the social meaning of language are asking questions arising from its role in a changing social, economic and political context (Blommaert, 2005; Duchêne & Heller, 2012) and searching for new conceptual and explanatory frameworks to answer these questions (Coupland, 1998, 2010). The institutions and workplaces described here are all realms where the daily lives of migrants are regimented and controlled. They are also illustrative sites for looking at ways social inequality is (re)produced and challenged. Language in these contexts includes a focus on multilingualism and on normative modes of talking in the dominant language. Both sites play a central role in processes of categorisation and legitimation of migrant groups as well as in exercising agency in the organisation of and access to resources. Language, it is argued, is key in selection, social mobility and gate-keeping processes as well as being the object of organisational responses to these wider institutional processes. It is through language that the complex relationship between the material and symbolic capital of migrants is played out on a local scale, as power institutions of the nation-state interact with the globalised economic order.

Language in an Era of Globalisation

This book examines how social and political changes brought about by transnational migration and the new economic order, which are themselves the outcome of globalisation, produce new ways of regulating language and establishing what counts as 'linguistic capital' (Bourdieu, 1991). An explicitly critical ethnographic sociolinguistic stance provides an account of the overt and covert ways language and institutional practices address core questions concerning power and the place of migrants in various national contexts.

Specifically, the new conditions resulting from globalisation force us to reconsider the articulation between language, migration and institutions. In terms of language, the shift to the tertiary economy and so to the increased number of jobs in the area of services has made communication and language key. The chapters in this volume demonstrate how this actually works in various national, occupational and institutional contexts. Linguistic marketplaces are currently being shaped by global forces beyond the control of the individual. In many contexts and geographical spaces, there are new demands on competence in the dominant language. But in many other spaces, single language speakers no longer can get by in their local daily lives in the same way as they did in the past. Here, multilingualism and knowledge of more than one language have become almost a requirement.

Many of these changes affecting the heightened role of language are connected to migration and the manner in which people are mobile today. Migrants in the past tended to have limited connections with their country of origin, as travel was more expensive and contact was difficult to maintain. The internet, along with the inexpensive communication technology now available, has created improved means for migrants to communicate more frequently with family and friends all over the world almost instantaneously. Close-knit networks are facilitated and sustained because of the new ways migrants communicate and are in contact with each other through frequent travel. This in turn has led to the growth of new businesses and services to meet these new requirements.

The linguistic and cultural diversification of national populations in countries around the globe has led to the creation of a wide variety of services that target these new citizens as clients or receivers of welfare. Institutions such as those providing health, legal assistance, consumer goods and social services, to mention just a few, are facing new linguistic and communication challenges. These are also sites where control, selection and regimentation of these newcomers take place. Institutions are places where we can still encounter contradictory ideologies and practices concerning language. In some organisations, especially from public sector institutions, traditional ideologies connect a national language with institutional identity (see Allan, this volume). Here, social processes of exclusion are carried out on the basis of a person's competence and linguistic performance which can be identified and traced to localised micro-level social practices (see Codó et al., this volume). However, in the private sector, multilingualism related, for example, to the marketing of consumer products constitutes an added value and contributes to the way private enterprises make a profit (Piller & Takahashi, this volume).

There is a constant and complex dialectic between what a host society considers to be regimented (language being one of the terrains on which control can be imposed) and the way migrants' linguistic resources can serve economic interests which benefit either large institutions or small-scale minority ethnic businesses. The regulation and the capitalisation of language work goes hand in hand with the blurring of boundaries between the state, the NGO and the private, or between the local and the ethnic businesses (see Sabaté on locutorios, this volume). This is a dynamic that invites us to...