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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 153

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Working in the City: Talking and transitions

Authors: Angouri, Jo; Marra, Meredith; Holmes, Janet
Submitted by: Angouri, Jo (University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom)

The concept of a ‘job for life’ is outdated. Employees now regularly move between jobs and even professions during their working lives.  Workforce mobility is particularly intense within and between national and international urban workplaces (Eriksson and Lindgren, 2009). Overall career journeys involve increasingly complex paths, for both white and blue collar workers. A changing employment market means frequently crossing boundaries into new organisations, new linguistic environments and new countries.  This affects the enactment of professional identity which is necessarily fluid and dynamic, responsive to the continuous crossing of boundaries.

A range of disciplinary areas, methodological traditions and theoretical stances aim to capture the dynamics of these transitions. The stance we take is that they are inevitably enacted linguistically. The workplace is the interactional context where group norms, wider societal ideologies, professional and expert identities are constructed through talk (Holmes and Stubbe, 2003; Angouri and Marra, 2011). Within the subfield of sociolinguistics which investigates workplace discourse, the focus is firmly on naturally occurring interactions (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999). Using discourse analysis, researchers attempt to connect the here-and-now of the interaction with the wider socio-cultural context. A range of datasets and approaches is useful in illuminating different layers of meaning (Litosseliti, 2010).

Accordingly, in this session, our goal is to bring together scholars with diverse views, including discursive approaches to (cultural) identity, the role of multilingualism and considerations of power relationships (Holmes, Marra and Vine, 2011). In each case our interest is the process of socialising into a new group and how individuals scrutinise their own understanding of how things work, simultaneously negotiating their place and (re)creating group norms.  This process is multilayered and includes the ongoing redefinition of personal, social and professional identities.

We pay special attention to the strategies that individuals adopt for navigating the boundaries (language, workplaces, country etc), and we suggest that this process is not linear, but is rather in constant negotiation by the employees. In particular, we focus on the urban workplace environment and discuss issues of the enactment of identities, the deconstruction of ‘culture’, the negotiation of norms, and the process of moving from the periphery to integrating into new groups.

References

Angouri, Jo and Meredith, Marra (eds). 2011. Constructing Identities at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave.  

Eriksson, Rikard and Urban, Lindgren. 2009. Localized mobility clusters: impacts of labour market externalities on firm performance. Journal of Economic Geography 9:  33–53.

Holmes, Janet and Maria, Stubbe. 2003. Power and Politeness in the Workplace. Harlow: Pearson Ed.

Holmes, Janet, Meredith, Marra and Bernadette, Vine. 2011. Discourse, Ethnicity and Leadership. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Litosseliti, Lia (ed.). 2010. Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum.

Sarangi, Srikant and Celia, Roberts (eds.). 1999. Talk, work and institutional order. Discourse in medical, mediation and management settings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.