THE WORKPLACE AS A SITE OF SOCIALIZATION

The “interactional regimes” (Blommaert et al., Reference Blommaert, Collins and Slembrouck2005b) of the workplace make it a site where everyone at some stage is new to the environment and has to be socialized 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, Reference Roberts, Sarangi, Sarangi and Roberts1999). The communities of practice model (Lave & Wenger, Reference Lave and Wenger1991; Wenger, Reference Wenger1998) have traced the gradual process of becoming a full participant in the workplace where there is not only one overarching 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, Reference Jack, Feng, Byram and Fleming2009; Poncini, Reference Poncini2003), this hegemonic discourse is what Scollon and Scollon (Reference Scollon and Scollon1995) have called “the Utilitarian Discourse system.” (p. 107) 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, Reference Iedema2003; Mawer, Reference Mawer1999).

Socialization into professional discourse occurs in formal training contexts both outside the workplace and within it (Roberts & Sarangi, Reference Roberts, Sarangi, Sarangi and Roberts1999). Several studies have charted the processes of shaping a professional identity through acquiring new discourses and values in healthcare, scientific, legal, and vocational settings. Erickson (Reference Erickson, Sarangi and Roberts1999), in medicine, and Arakelian (Reference Arakelian, Feng, Byram and Fleming2009), in nursing, documented how relative novices learn to be professional learners in the workplace. Hobbs (Reference Hobbs2004) analyzed how progress (treatment) notes are used in medical socialization. Mertz (Reference Mertz2007) studied the novice law student socialization through Socratic dialogue and the reworking of legal texts in different contexts. Similarly, Jacoby (Reference Jacoby1998) looked at how adults master new registers and genres in the process of becoming physicists, and Vickers (Reference Vickers2007) 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 (Reference Jacobs-Huey2003) charted how students become so-called hair experts. Like the student lawyers in Mertz's (Reference Mertz2007) 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 socializing the apprentices “into shared moral ideologies and behaviour” (Jacobs-Huey, Reference Jacobs-Huey2003, 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 in the following paragraphs, the apprenticeship model of learning to become expert remains, and notions of what constitutes professionalism continue to be relatively stable, as part of the so-called habitus of a particular profession (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1991).

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 interrelationship of professional and personal or social discourses becomes ever more key. This has always been the case with the caring professions, but now that talk is work in call centers, 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, Reference Katz2000; see later in this article 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 humor in the relational work done within the contexts of power in organizational life (Holmes, Reference Holmes2005; Holmes & Stubbe, Reference Holmes and Stubbe2003; Daly, Holmes, Newton, & Stubbe, Reference Daly, Holmes, Newton and Stubbe2004; see also, in Australia, Willing, Reference Willing1997). Workplace studies in Sweden (Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2009) have shown how migrant workers and professionals have learned to use humor and developed high levels of pragmatic competence in this area. This has involved not only a linguistic view of appropriateness but also adaption to the flattened hierarchies of the Swedish workplace (Andersson, Reference Andersson2009; Nelson & Andersson, 2005, as cited in Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2009).

The informal socialization of office workers (Li, Reference Li2000) and care workers (Duff, Wong, & Early, Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000) 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 U.S. medical equipment company. It was only in the workplace that her “indirect communicative style” (p. 67), particularly realized 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 behavior 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: “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 coworkers 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 et al. (Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000) described a similar gap between formal training and informal socialization in the workplace. The more formal and technically specific focus in the English language training program did not prepare the trainees for the emotional labor 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, Reference Ochs1993) within organizations, in professional socialization, and in the context of gendered migration (Holmes, Reference Holmes2006; Katz, Reference Katz2000; Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2009).

THE “NEW WORK ORDER”

While some aspects of working life remain stable, the globalized economy and working practices produced by the rapid expansion of new technologies has led to a “new work order” (Gee et al., Reference Gee, Hull and Lankshear1996). 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 marketplace has led to a restructuring of the workplace, which, in turn, has created new language and literacy demands that affect even the low-paid worker. These demands arise from an increased use of technologies, more multitasking at all levels, more flexibility required of workers as hierarchical structures are flattened, and, generally, a more “textualised workplace” (Iedema & Scheeres, Reference Iedema and Scheeres2003, p. 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 socialized into these new practices (Hull, Reference Hull1997). Many studies of workplaces have shown how routine activities are mediated by digital technologies (Goodwin, Reference Goodwin1995; Heath & vom Lehn, Reference Heath and vom Lehn2008; Hindmarsh, Heath, & Fraser, Reference Hindmarsh, Heath and Fraser2006; Lemke Reference Lemke2002; Suchman, Reference Suchman and Button1992).

The new work order has created a “new word order” (Farrell, Reference Farrell2001) 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, Reference Hull1997; Iedema & Scheeres, Reference Iedema and Scheeres2003; Kleifgen, Reference Kleifgen2001); in health settings (Cook-Gumperz & Messerman, Reference Cook-Gumperz, Messerman, Sarangi and Roberts1999; Greatbatch, Luff, Heath, & Campion, Reference Greatbatch, Luff, Heath and Campion1993); and in call centers (Budach, Roy, & Heller, Reference Budach, Roy and Heller2003; Cameron, Reference Cameron2000; Friginal, Reference Friginal2009a, Reference Friginal2009b; Heller Reference Heller, Block and Cameron2002; Roy Reference Roy, Bayley and Schecter2003) where there is a constant tension between the highly routinized scripts of interaction and the emotional labor 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, Reference Vertoveç2007) is the norm in most large cities, and few places in the world remain untouched by migration or the effects of the diaspora, as the studies by Li (Reference Li2000) and Duff et al. (Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000) described earlier 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 that serves to maintain and reproduce linguistic and ethnic inequalities. Migration and mobility create the need for “double socialization” (Li, Reference Li2000, p. 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 retraining and more formal socialization expected of the migrant and international worker and professional (Belfiore, Reference Belfiore1993; G. Bell, Reference Bell, Bayley and Schecter2003; J. Bell, Reference Bell1995; Goldstein, Reference Goldstein1993; Grünhage-Monetti, Halewijn, & Holland, Reference Grünhage-Monetti, Halewijn and Holland2003; Hawthorne, Reference Hawthorne1997; Holmes, Reference Holmes2000; Mawer, Reference Mawer1999; O'Neill & Gish, Reference O'Neill and Gish2001; Roberts, Davies, & Jupp, Reference Roberts, Davies and Jupp1992;). Some of this training has been questioned as being too narrow (Goldstein, Reference Goldstein1997) or not sufficiently critical of the positioning of migrant workers within the new work order (Farrell, Reference Farrell2000). Some of these evaluation studies of language training take a wider and more ethnographic perspective, seeing the “workplace as the curriculum” (Mawer, Reference Mawer1999). 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” that contribute to the production of “shared culture and shared inferential practices” (Gumperz, Reference Gumperz, Eerdmans, Previgagno and Thibault1997, p. 15).

This “double socialization” and the shift to language work in the new work order produce new regimes of inequality that, despite the relative stability of some work practices, as noted earlier, make language socialization in the workplace problematic. First, as McCall (Reference McCall, Bayley and Schecter2003) discussed, there is a linguistically divided labor market, similar in many ways to the traditional two-tier labor market. Many low-paid, so-called entry-level jobs are insecure, isolated, in poor and noisy conditions, and organized into ethnic work units (Campbell & Roberts, Reference Campbell and Roberts2007; Goldstein, Reference Goldstein1997; Gunnarsson, Reference Gunnarsson2009; Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Davies and Jupp1992; Waldinger & Lichter, Reference Waldinger and Lichter2003). 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 socialized into the dominant language. Indeed, as McCall (Reference McCall, Bayley and Schecter2003) argued, those areas where there is relatively little talk, or certainly little talk in the majority language of the organization, are the areas where there is little power: “In the workplace power is exercised precisely in those areas where language is most intense” (p. 249). Goldstein's study of female Portuguese factory workers in Toronto illustrated 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 socialized into speaking Portuguese on the assembly lines (Goldstein, Reference Goldstein1997).

Second, unlike the usually supportive conditions for early language socialization, second language socialization in the workplace often occurs in a relatively hostile environment, (Katz, Reference Katz2000; Li, Reference Li2000; Mawer, Reference Mawer1999; Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Davies and Jupp1992). Misunderstandings, racist comments, and the deliberate noncontact 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, Reference Andersson2009; Duff et al., Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000, described earlier). Andersson's study in a Swedish hospital setting documented the use of communication strategies and humor and found that the local Swedish staff were patient listeners. 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, Reference Blommaert2007). Expertise, Blommaert argued, 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 (Reference Hull1997) and Katz (Reference Katz2000) described 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 United Kingdom whose English was expert in their own country but rated as inappropriate in British hospitals (Arakelian, Reference Arakelian, Feng, Byram and Fleming2009).

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 (Reference Parks and Maguire1999) 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, standardization, and codification of the dominant language, French. The ideology of a pure standard French, which was the 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, Reference Roy, Bayley and Schecter2003; Budach et al., Reference Budach, Roy and Heller2003). The effect of globalization in the new international call centers has local, exclusionary repercussions, even for bilingual and multilingual speakers and shows that there is a linguistic marketplace (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1991; McCall, Reference McCall, Bayley and Schecter2003) that determines what counts as linguistic capital and sets the standards for language socialization.

THE “LINGUISTIC PENALTY”

The call center studies in Canada and the United Kingdom document how the corporate discourses of the new work order impose a “linguistic penalty” (Roberts & Campbell, Reference Roberts and Campbell2006, 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, Reference Brindley1994; Gumperz, Jupp, & Roberts, Reference Gumperz, Jupp and Roberts1979; Mawer & Field, Reference Mawer and Field1995; McNamara, Reference McNamara1997; Roberts et al., Reference Roberts, Davies and Jupp1992). 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, Reference Roberts and Campbell2006). On the analogy of the ethnic penalty, which describes the discrimination experienced by black and minority ethnic groups (Heath & Cheung, Reference Heath and Cheung2007), there is a linguistic penalty that excludes on the basis of language. (Other research suggests that the selection interview does not assess accurately for the interactional demands of the job, e.g., Friginal, Reference Friginal2009a, 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 United Kingdom require an astute performance by candidates that combines blending institutional, professional, and personal modes of discourse with a standard narrative structure (Campbell & Roberts, Reference Campbell and Roberts2007; Roberts & Campbell, Reference Roberts and Campbell2006). Candidates' responses also have to be what Iedema (Reference Iedema2003) termed bureaucratically processable. In other words, they have to “fit their stories into boxes” (Roberts & Campbell, Reference Roberts and Campbell2005, 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, Reference Roberts, Campbell and Robinson2008) looked at the role of promotion interviews in contributing to what Phillips (Reference Phillips2003) 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 socialized into what Roberts et. al (Reference Roberts, Campbell and Robinson2008) called talking like a manager. 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 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 organization 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 euphemized feelings and informality. This group of candidates tended to be judged as either too emotional or too impersonal, relying on a generalized assertive style that 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, Reference Erickson and Rittenburg1987; Spike, Reference Spike2006). These studies of high-stakes gatekeeping 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, Reference McNamara1997; Sarangi & Roberts, Reference Sarangi, Roberts and Kramsch2002). Mistica, Baldwin, Cordella, and Musgrave (Reference Mistica, Baldwin, Cordella and Musgrave2008) discussed 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 earlier, when used for assessment and selection they raise some awkward questions. Simulation requires several abilities in addition to communicative and rhetorical competences: the ability to manage both the outer performance and inner psychological experience of being assessed; the ability to manage the frame ambiguity of both the consultation and the assessment (Seale, Butler, Hutchby, Kinnersley, & Rollnick, Reference Seale, Butler, Hutchby, Kinnersley and Rollnick2007); and for international medical graduates, the “double consciousness” (E. L. Bell, Reference Bell1990, p. 461) of compartmentalizing 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 as well as 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, Reference Clyne1994, Reference Clyne2003; Day, Reference Day and Crischel1992; Duff et al., Reference Duff, Wong and Early2000; Goldstein, Reference Goldstein1997; Jupp, Roberts, & Cook-Gumperz, Reference Jupp, Roberts, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz1982). 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 socialized into, the extent to which such communities change over time, and the sociopolitical realities on the ground that cause these changes. For example, in a food factory in a small town in the United Kingdom, 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 restructuring meant that changes in the linguistic makeup of 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., Reference Roberts, Campbell and Robinson2008).

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 organization, the evidence is rather mixed. The literature suggests that 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, Reference Heller, Block and Cameron2002; Roy, Reference Roy, Bayley and Schecter2003).Similarly, Duchêne (Reference Duchêne2009) described the commodification of multilingualism in a call center. 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 neoliberal 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). 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 organization, 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, Reference Firth1996) are ratified as functional and statusful practices; for example, international business negotiations and the interaction between what are termed bilingual professionals (Day & Wagner, Reference Day, Wagner, Auer and Wei2007). These contexts contrast in several ways with workplaces discussed earlier. 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., Reference Kellerman, Van Der Haagen, Koonen and Long2005). Second, they are not tied to a particular geographic area. Third, and arising from the first two, language socialization in these contexts is a matter of choice dependent on the particular activity (Day & Wagner, Reference Day, Wagner, Auer and Wei2007). Choices relate to choice of linguistic code both for the whole activity and in code-switching within it (Mondada, Reference Mondada, Gardner and Wagner2004; Poncini, Reference Poncini2003; Rasmussen & Wagner, Reference Rasmussen, Wagner, Luke and Pavlidou2002) to create a new “bilingual interactional order” (Day & Wagner; Mondada, 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 (Reference Firth and Firth1995, Reference Firth1996) showed that interactants, in Ochs's (Reference Ochs2000) 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, Reference Ochs2000; p. 232). Similarly, other lingua franca studies have shown how the pragmatic norms of the speakers' first language give way to new more informal norms (Rasmussen, Reference Rasmussen1998; Wagner, Reference Wagner and Firth1995), suggestive of a new “lingua franca interaction” (Day & Wagner, Reference Day, Wagner, Auer and Wei2007, p. 398).