Introduction

It has often been argued that in times of neoliberalism and late capitalism, communicative skills and language competence have become a resource and a veritable work instrument (see for example Boutet, 2008; Cameron, 2000; Heller, 2003), which in turn is linked with the increasing tertiarization of labor and services (Duchêne & Heller, 2012; Spilker, 2010). Apart from being the main instrument for communication and client services, language competence is also used by companies to reach new markets and/or to target specific (linguistic) populations (Kelly-Holmes, 2006; Piller, 2001). In displaying competence in the customer language, certain companies can sell themselves as 'different' within a globalized labor market in which the majority of companies oftentimes only fall back on the most widely used lingua francas. On the other hand, individuals competent in these languages can sell this competence to employers and companies, thus turning them into their personal marker of distinction (Bourdieu, 1979) in the process of a job application, for example. Specific language competence thus allows both individuals and companies to create a marker of distinction for themselves and, thus, to become veritable symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1979). In this case, this symbolic capital (i.e. linguistic profiles) can ideally be converted into economic capital (a job, more salary or revenues, more market shares etc.). It is this convertibility of different forms of capital that Bourdieu (1979) regarded as the most important aspect when referring to ‘capitalization’.

Increasingly, the trend to treat languages and language competences based on their potential economic capitalization is not restricted to the private economic sector but has also become perceptible in the public sector. The division between the private and public sector has in any case become less clear, for example due to the introduction of new management structures that are related to the introduction of neoliberal policies. Similarly, higher education has undergone a variety of structural reforms and has had to adopt its own marketization in order to brace the (inter-)national competition (cf. also Hadley, this volume and Park, this volume).