This book emphasizes the significance of language and in particular plurilingualism in the multimodal learning environment of a globalized high-tech business. JoAnne Kleifgen draws on seven years of ethnographic research collected from a small Silicon Valley based firm called Genesis. The book is composed of seven chapters with chapters 2 through 5 primarily dedicated to analysis and description and chapters 6 and 7 exploring the theoretical implications of the findings in more depth.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the text and presents a theoretical framework for analyzing the practices described in this book as well as an overview of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 describes the context of the manufacturing floor and the preparation of quality-control documents as well as the tools used for data collection and the relevance of the ethnographic approach. Chapter 3 focuses on one exemplar of multimodality and learning in the workplace in which a specific problem-solving event serves as a representation of how workers draw on each other and their environment to successfully navigate the communication necessitated by the scenario. Chapter 4 relates back to the scenario described in chapter 3, but with a lens on power relations during the interaction, specifically detailing the relationship between the professional environment and the home languages and cultures of the employees. Chapter 5 builds on the local communicative practices described in the previous chapter and examines their interconnection with wider social relations through an extended period of ethnographic research during which Genesis worked toward the goal of well-documented quality control for their products by becoming ISO 9002 certified. Chapter 6 explores the educational implications of the Genesis study and argues that ideology and learning come together at the intersection of discourse and action. Chapter 7 discusses previous ethnographic literature on workplace environments and summarizes the contributions of this text toward furthering the understanding of plurilingualism in multimodal learning and problem solving, while simultaneously calling for further research in both the workplace and the classroom.

With the spread of globalization, workplaces are frequently the site of semiotic growth within the network of employees who arrive from a multitude of backgrounds. Kleifgen's ethnography of the high-tech environment at Genesis details how the plurilingual identities of a workforce are constructed as workers navigate the multimodal learning necessary to cooperate on the job and to complete their collective tasks. This text adds to the literature on the multimodality of workplace learning with an emphasis on the too often underexplored multilingual interaction of employees during the sense-making process. Kleifgen's ethnographic study offers a significant contribution to the study of language in the workplace and multimodal learning.