Mobility-in-place: how to keep privilege by being mobile at work

1 The interview as a mobile method

The question of mobility was not one of the questions we sought to answer when we designed a research project to map out the life trajectories of 12 Filipino professional writers in English. The aim of the project (ethics approval was granted in December 2021) was to explore the writers’ experiences with ‘Philippine English’, a local variety of English which scholars have for many decades now painstakingly described and demonstrated as a structurally (Llamson 1969), functionally (Bautista 2000) and politically (Tupas 2004) legitimate variety of English. Our main interest was to find out how the interviewees see the role of Philippine English in their everyday working lives, given the fact that all of them would be fairly described as successful Filipino professional writers of English, having taken on positions of power within their chosen lines of work (e.g., editors of well-known international and national magazines, content strategists, speech writers for key national politicians and leaders, heads of public communication of top universities in the country). This is a significant research endeavour because the different Englishes, which are typically framed under the paradigm of World Englishes (Kachru 1985) or, more recently, the more encompassing Global Englishes (Galloway and Rose 2015), remain undervalued, even mocked in certain contexts of use, resulting in Unequal Englishes (Tupas 2015, 2024). Thus, we wanted to find out how elite and successful users of these Englishes -- Philippine English specifically -- position themselves vis-a-vis these varieties.

We interviewed all 12 writers between December 2021 and January 2022 for an average of about 40 min each via Google Meet. The manner by which we sought answers to our questions, however, departs from much of the work on the area that directly asks interviewees about their views concerning particular local varieties of English such as Philippine English, Singapore English, Thai English, and Malaysia English (Bautista 2001; Jindapitak and Teo 2012; Lee and Ahn 2021; Nair 2017). With this kind of questioning, it is assumed that interviewees know precisely what these various Englishes are and/or that they indeed exist. The epistemological basis of such research, therefore, produces knowledge about attitudes and feelings towards named local varieties of Englishes without clarifying what they constitute, and whether the interviewees or respondents find these constructs of Englishes as salient elements in their everyday life experiences in the first place.

In our case, our interview was framed within the epistemological principles of ‘mobile methods’, which refer essentially to “any attempt to physically or metaphorically follow people/objects/ideas in order to support analysis of the experience/content/doing of, and inter-connections between, immobility/mobility/flows/networks” (Spinney 2015, p. 232). The operative term in our research is ‘follow’, which means to follow ideas that emerge from and circulate during the interview. These ideas are about or related to notions of mobility, although it must be emphasized here that mobile methods do not refer to methods in investigating phenomena associated with mobility. It only happens that epistemological assumptions of mobile methods lend themselves well to how we operationalize our approach to investigating Philippine English. Thus, instead of asking the interviewees what they think about Philippine English, we asked them to narrate their experiences at work, the challenges they face with communication in general, and the strategies they use to navigate the politics of power in the workplace, with the hope of capturing richer understandings of the role of language and communication in the lives of the Filipino professional writers. This sounds like an essential point to make, but, as mentioned earlier, this has not been the default epistemological approach used in the research area (see Tupas and Tarrayo 2024). Respondents would usually be asked to comment on what they think about a particular variety of English, thus already framing the data in a way that assumed clarity about the nature and existence of such a variety, as well as saliency (see Pennycook 2008, p. 304) of the concept in the lives of the respondents. One of the most important revelations from following and tracing “human trajectories” (Blommaert and Dong 2007, p. 14) in the interviews is the fact that in constructing their relationship with English, the professional writers do not refer to their use of it as constitutive of any formalised Philippine English. Only three interviewers mention ‘Philippine English’ but all because they claim they learned about it in graduate school, leading us to surmise that the academic construction of Englishes does not match the reality of how ‘local’ uses of English are appraised by different groups of speakers (for an in-depth discussion of the Englishes as an academic construction, see Tupas and Bernardo 2020; Tupas 2014). In the case of our interviewees, the communication challenges in the workplace and the strategies to address them are both negotiated through context-sensitive inventive and stylistic uses of English.

It is through the same process of following ideas, rather than generating them through pre-determined constructs and lenses such as ‘Philippine English’, that the question about mobility emerges. The interviewees construct their professional life experiences as productive and fluid, but they say so not to configure a professional life that moves across social and cultural borders, but to describe how they to keep themselves in place - or specifically successfully manage and navigate systems of work in their profession. In other words, the interviewees see themselves as professionals who are adaptable and versatile in their use of English to keep themselves in their (privileged) place. This observation is consistent across all respondents, thus our choice of Andrew and Juanito in this paper is simply to ensure that we unpack mobility with more detail. We could have chosen other respondents and arrive at the same conceptualization of mobility. Thus, in the following sections, we map out Andrew and Juanito’s professional life mobilities within their chosen fields of work to show how they assemble and deploy particular forms and functions of English to generate and sustain their positions of privilege within their respective workplaces. Later in the paper, we use their trajectories to engage with notions of mobility, acknowledging the varied and multiple ways it is conceptualised but also alerting us to the possibility that in the case of Andrew and Juanito, mobility could also mean keeping oneself in one space but in highly productive and fluid ways as well.

2 Andrew and ‘variations of accessibility’

Andrew is a young Filipino poet and professional communication writer with MA and Ph.D. degrees in creative writing from universities in the Philippines, the United States, and Australia. He writes poetry and has published several books of poetry already, teaches creative writing in a Philippine university, writes for several popular non-academic magazines (he calls this his ‘freelance gigs’), and works with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), for example by interviewing stakeholders and writing about it for target audiences, albeit anonymously. In all these, he writes ‘exclusively in English’, but the types of work he shuttles between demand different ways of using the language. This is what he means by mobility being facilitated by a highly proficient use of English. Nevertheless, what is clear with Andrew is that it is not proficiency in English per se which has helped him navigate his professional spaces generally seamlessly, but rather his mobilisation of what he refers to as ‘variations of accessibility’, which means his ability to take ownership of English and use it to suit the needs of specific audiences.

When it comes to poetic language, he breaks it down and shows that there is no homogenous poetic language and that he is himself creating his own kind of language, one which does not exploit what he calls the ‘Filipino-ness’ of English because this is tantamount to ‘fetishizing’ it for the sake of ‘fashioning’ himself as a Filipino poet (which he does not like doing). His poetic language style draws on Filipino themes but ‘without having to actually be explicit about the fact that I was dealing with Filipino concerns’. This explains why he is perpetually ‘negotiating’ the use of ‘a more Filipino kind of syntax’ by steering clear of examples and incidents that can be identified as Filipino: ‘I didn’t want to exoticize myself’.

Andrew’s negotiation does not occur in the form of a Filipino/non-Filipino English dichotomy, something that is assumed in much work in World Englishes where postcolonial speakers, who exhibit ‘bilingual creativity’ (Kachru 1985), are supposed to be torn between local English(es) and Standard Englishes because they have “developed institutionalised educated varieties” (Bolton 2010, p. 458) but are nevertheless conditioned by standard language ideologies (Tupas 2015). As far as Andrew is concerned, such an academically-constructed dichotomy does not exist; thus, one does not aim to use ‘Filipino’ English to differentiate it from the more recognised standard English. Rather, negotiation is devoted to ensuring that he reinvents ‘elegant’ English, the description ascribed to his kind of English by colleagues and readers. He said, ‘when my language was praised for its elegance, that really disturbed me’. This comment is something that comes off strongly in the interview since he repeatedly mentions (three times) being ‘disturbed’ by comments that his language is elegant, or what he also describes as ‘a more polished, a more refined kind of English’ which he credits to years of Philippine education, especially the teaching of creative writing, saturated by ‘aesthetic discourse’. Elegant English ‘is for like, an academic research essay.’ So what he does is ‘maybe dismantle my syntax a bit’, ‘maybe mess up my language even more’, make it ‘maybe more of a messier kind of English’, or ‘not to write in a way that was too clean’.

Nevertheless, Andrew also speaks of ‘non-poetic’ language for magazines and is also ‘attentive to like, suiting the way I write or kind of fitting the way I write with, for instance, the kind of language that non-government organizations have’ (italics supplied). He adds:

I’m conscious that I need to talk to a particular set of audience. So, it’s like, if I write for a magazine, I write for, or towards whoever they’re going to sell the magazine to…

I try to do like background reading just so I have a good sense of the kind of English that they want.

In other words, he shuttles between different types of work and audiences, and can accomplish this through his conscious and constant reinvention of English. He departs from the so-called elegant English to construct a professional self that is his own making, but he also moves within his professional workspaces, studies the different kinds of English uses, and writes in a way that is accessible to specific audiences. At the start of this paper, Andrew is quoted as saying that knowledge of English has afforded him some form of cultural capital. Among World Englishes scholars, this cultural capital is extended to taking control of the English language by “reinventing” (Cruz 2011, p. 17) and “colonizing” (Abad et al. 1996, p. 170) it, thus allowing postcolonial speakers and writers to ‘write back’ to imperial power (Ashcroft et al. 1989). However, a fine-grained understanding of Andrew’s notion of mobility through English opens up an even more nuanced take on the language as cultural capital among “post-colonial elites” (Alexander 1999, p. 10). Essentially such capital refers to the ability to move within one’s sphere of work by taking ownership of the English language through appropriating it for one’s identity-making project, as well as for one’s desire to keep their job by ‘suiting’ or ‘fitting’ the way they use English according to the specific needs of particular work platforms and their audiences. Mobility in the workplace, therefore, is generative and productive in terms of how some professionals mobilise their own linguistic and meaning-making resources in dealing with a diversity of needs and audiences to maintain their privileged position in the same workplace.

3 Juanito and his ‘different voices’

Juanito is a graduate of journalism from one of the Philippines’ best universities but has risen up the ranks as a digital content creator for a company managing different brands and magazines, writing about fashion, beauty, wellness, fitness, and health. He credits his early success to having come from a family of art enthusiasts, as this has helped him become familiar with terms and practices in architecture, industrial design, and interior design, leading to his assignment as a fashion editor for Topnotch magazine (not the actual name of magazine), producing content in a variety of social media platforms such as videos on YouTube and coverage of social media events of well-known brands. He currently does content strategising and is mainly in charge of marketing while occasionally creating copies and content for his company’s various branded websites and applications. He also does public relations (PR) writing for public press releases. As the interview continues, however, it becomes clearer that, like Andrew, his navigation of power, politics, and social relations within his sphere of work is shaped by a wide range of resources associated with the lifelong accumulation of social and cultural capital. According to him, in his specialised line of work, the key to success is to be able to ‘communicate with the elite’ because the brands they market (or cover), such as Gucci, cater to this small group of people.

It’s mostly because of my family and my family’s connection in the various industries. And then I grew up okay, so this is your uncle, and this is your auntie, and he owns this and he owns this company. Okay, nice to meet you and everything. And so, I was kind of, like, exposed to that not naman [‘not really’] inner circle, because the inner culture is different, but it’s just that I’m quite exposed already to people who are kind of like them.

Juanito clarifies that he ‘wouldn’t say I’m part of the elite, I come from a humble middle-class family’, but ‘because I was exposed to a lot of fascinating people then growing up and when I was in college’ (plus he emphasises reading as an important element for his preparation for his career), he says he can keep up with the elite’s lifestyles and can speak their language. Thus, he does not easily get intimidated by them.

They know that okay this person can like talk to them and he won’t be intimidated by them. The thing with these people is that they’re quite intimidating for some, but with me, I’m not easily intimidated by them because honey, I can keep up with you.

How then does this translate to effective communication with the elite? For Juanito, it means unlearning what was taught him as a journalism student. He was taught to be ‘straightforward’ and ‘unbiased’, but in his industry, he must learn to speak and write not only in specific ‘opinionated’ ways but, more importantly, in ways that reflect a specialised form of language. While it should be ‘lifestyle-ish’, ‘we are not allowed to use very youthful words’. Thus, ‘chic’ should be replaced by ‘sophisticated’, and ‘dapper’ rather than ‘cool’. Sometimes, he uses words or writing from Vogue, Harper’s, and British GQ to make his language ‘more formal’ and ‘more standard’.

Nevertheless, his writing – and use of English specifically – is not confined simply to this specialised repertoire because, at the end of the day, ‘I’m writing for and to the target audience’; thus, his opinions must also be managed to suit the market needs of brands being introduced or featured. In featuring brand events, for example, a fashion show, Juanito takes pains in explaining how he must be honest with his reviews but ‘cannot be brutally honest about it’ because ‘as a media company, we’re still a business.’ If he does not have anything good to say about a featured event, ‘I just filter it, I just disregard that there was an event, I just don’t write about it.’ If he has to write about it, he needs to be ‘flexible’; thus, for example, ‘instead of saying a “gorgeous” collection, he would just use “interesting”’. What we find here is how language use and communicative behavior are shaped by market forces and, more specifically, economic instrumentalism. Reponen (2011), for example, contends that “[a]s almost all the magazines and some newspapers are financially dependent on fashion advertising, it may not be easy to voice criticism for fear of losing a £100,000 a year advertising account with a major fashion house” (p. 33); thus, in this line of work, “it is important to note that there are only a few writers who are actually called critics” (p. 32).

Another hidden market need that has implications for language use is what Juanito refers to as the need to ‘re-angle’ particular stories in order for them to be more searchable on Google. Instead of focusing simply on a well-known brand’s well-kept traditional reputation, he introduces and constantly reuses words like ‘ingenious’ and ‘sustainable’ for a possibly highly clickable phrase, ‘an ingenious and sustainable collection of [name of brand]’. Juanito refers to this as a specific operationalization of ‘search engine optimization’, or SEO, essentially so that ‘you would be the first article on the top results in Google’ (see Gudivada et al. 2015).

Juanito’s flexible use of English shows that ‘communicating with the elite’, in fact, demands a sophisticated use of language because there are market conditions that impinge on how particular content should be communicated.

Juanito, however, throughout the interview, gradually evidences a far more elaborate mobilisation of English in his expert role as content producer, designer, and strategist, which he encapsulates as speaking and writing in ‘different voices’. This is because he handles four brands to be marketed on four different topnotch brand magazines, and each brand caters to a different social group, so ‘I have a different voice for each brand’.

For Topnotch Brand A [real name anonymised], my voice there would be very formal and sophisticated, for Topnotch Brand B, it’s going to be like dapper, medyo (‘quite’) formal, sophisticated. Topnotch Brand C, that’s the part where we become millennial-speaking and Gen-Z-speaking … And then for Topnotch Brand D, that’s the time we start using like, I don’t want to say you know when the masa-masa [I don’t want to say it is really straightforward ‘common people’] parang more on masa na [although it does look like it is associated with this big group of people], yung mga words na mas madali nilang ma-understand [we just use words which are easy to understand] because we tried talking to the Class E and D. So, we don’t, we can’t use any highfalutin words like we can’t say ‘oh, I’m flabbergasted’, you know, we just say something that must be understandable like ‘Oh wow’, ‘It’s amazing’ something like that.

‘That’s how I write’, Juanito sums up, ‘[i]t depends on the brand that I’m handling’. However, shifting between styles to address particular audiences and markets requires an expanded communicative repertoire which must be learned. “Honestly, I had to learn the way when it comes to the Topnotch voice, yes, I had to learn”. Like I remember I had this parang [like] one-on-one with our VP, and he taught me okay, this is how you write, this is the voice we want blah, blah’. For Brand D especially, he has come to learn about it more recently because during the pandemic, ‘I get to embrace more of the masa [common people’s] language I would say because through online gaming. So I learned okay so this is how they speak, and you know, these use some terminologies that I never knew existed’. This may be similar to a sociolinguistic phenomenon referred to as ‘crossing’, which Rampton (2005) defines as “the use of language varieties associated with social or ethnic groups that the speaker doesn’t normally belong to” (p. 28) but, as we explained at the beginning of this paper, the focus is not language exchange and intercultural solidarity in order to bring down racial boundaries for the language exchange (Rampton 2017). In the case of Juanito, he constantly mobilises the use of particular “bits of language” (not separate languages) (Blommaert and Dong 2007, p. 8), some of which do not necessarily embody his preferred identities, but for the purpose of being mobile in order to keep his privilege. Therefore, what he does is to cross over dynamically (cf. Vaish and Roslan 2011) into particular uses and forms of language(s) (mostly English but sometimes with Tagalog words for the Brand D audience) as part of his and his company’s marketing agenda. He does not necessarily associate himself socially or ethnically with these groups of people such that he can claim he belongs to them. This is how Juanito thrives in his chosen line of work. On the surface, he communicates ‘with the elite’, but his work does, in fact, involve negotiating with particular market conditions and demands, as well as navigating his assigned role carefully and meticulously through an inventive and sophisticated mobilisation of bits and pieces of English to keep himself and his work relevant and indispensable.

4 Discussion and conclusion

In a study of life stories of professionals who stay in their jobs for a long time and who are usually pejoratively described as having been stuck in ‘career immobility’ or who are “stagnant” (Carson et al. 1996, p. 273), Mainhagu et al. (2016) show how the professionals engage in ‘identity mobility’ or the constant and productive (re)making of their identities, aligning themselves and who they are with the content of their job profiles, but also distantiating from and reconstructing identities as they see fit in their job. Their so-called immobility is ‘in appearance only’ (Mainhagu et al. 2016), and what is happening among these workers is the dynamic mobilisation of their workplace experiences. In fact, other studies also show how a long-term stay in an organisation does not mean static professional lives since many career individuals do keep themselves ensconced within their current workplaces knowing fully well how to exploit the various privileges dispersed or distributed across the different layers of work opportunities in their jobs (Pihel 2017), accumulating and mobilising social capital through small social networks for intra-organisational mobility (Podolny and Baron 1997). In other words, ‘lack of mobility’ in professional workplaces, far from being static and negative (Sivak and Yudkevich 2015), is productive and generative (see also Nachbagauer and Riedl 2002).

The professional trajectories of Andrew and Juanito, both highly proficient users of English and educated formally from topnotch universities, align with the life stories of professionals who choose to stay in their jobs and yet remain constantly dynamic and productive through inventive exploitation of communicative and linguistic repertoires to protect and sustain their positions of privilege. Both professionals, in fact, unmask the multilayered signification of what it means to be ‘highly proficient’ in English since it means the ability to mobilise particular bits and pieces of English to cater to specific needs and interests of audiences, as well as to address the socially- and economically-conditioned demands of the market. Andrew and Juanito can navigate their way through networks of social and power relations in their lines of work, shifting between audiences and voices, by creatively reconfiguring their use of English according to the specialised demands of the context. For most Filipinos, to be described as a speaker of ‘elegant’ English – in other words, school-shaped English which is considered standard – would have been enough to give them some form of cultural capital and convert it to, say, getting a high-paying job (Salonga 2015, 2022). For Andrew, however, it is a description that ‘disturbs’ him precisely because he wants to style himself in a way that positions him as a unique user of English, being a creative writer, academic, and teacher at the same time. For Juanito, he presents himself as someone who is successful in communicating with the elite; but probing deeper into his communicative repertoire and how he mobilises it, it is his ability to switch between particular forms and functions of English, including some use of Tagalog for a particular market niche, which best describes his proficient use of English. In both cases, Andrew and Juanito engage in some kind of repertoire development (Canagarajah 2009) to become more intelligible and effective professional communicators; it specifically means drawing upon their respective linguistic and communicative repertoires to keep themselves moving fluidly within their lines of work to stay relevant and effective in their respective privileged professional spaces of work.

All this departs from how Filipino ‘educated’ and elite users of English have been described by scholars (Bautista 2000; Llamzon 1969); in fact, all this by and large differs from how elite users of World Englishes have been constructed (Kachru 1985, 1997; Qiong 2004). Andrew and Juanito do not have a particular fixed form or forms of English which take on elite or privileged indexicalities, and which can then be structurally shown to be different from the less privileged Englishes of other speakers of the language. Rather, Andrew and Juanito theoretically have at their disposal different Englishes interspersed with some limited use of the national language and they mobilize them contextually within their own work as part of their role as elite speakers of English. In a sense all this also expands our understanding of Unequal Englishes (Dovchin et al. 2016; Highet 2023; Salonga 2015; Tupas 2015, 2024), a critical approach to investigating the grounded transformations of the English language due to globalization and localization through its focus on inequalities between the supposedly different but equal Englishes and their speakers. With Andrew and Juanito, their elite use of English is not so much their use of a particular variety or style but their mobilization of a wide-ranging communicative repertoire which they deploy in different ways depending on what suits them best to keep them mobile within their spaces of professional work. Their use, however, may be viewed as instantiations of unequal Englishes if we train our lenses on them as users of English (Marlina 2024; Sabaté-Dalmau 2018; Tupas and Bernardo 2020), rather than on their English repertoire per se.

What we see here is the mobilisation of ‘language-in-motion-in-place’, which troubles the interesting dichotomy between two known paradigms in the study of language and globalisation. One paradigm is what may be referred to as ‘sociolinguistics of distribution’ in which the “movement of language resources is seen as movement in a horizontal and stable space”; thus, the object of study “remains a ‘snapshot’, in which things are in place, so to speak” (Blommaert and Dong 2007, p. 4). This is essentially the study of language-in-place, something that applies to the case of Andrew and Juanito since their use of language is worked out within a space of work that constructs the parameters within which they execute their respective assigned roles. Keeping themselves within these parameters as a matter of choice, Andrew and Juanito are ‘things’, along with their communicative repertoires, which are ‘in place’.

These linguistic and semiotic resources, however, are not mere ‘snapshots’ but are assembled resources, which are mobilised by Andrew and Juanito within their spaces of work to address different audiences and stakeholder demands. The bits and pieces of language both of them deploy enable them to fluidly navigate social and power relations within their lines of work. These communicative resources, in other words, are in place but not “fixed” (Blommaert and Dong 2007, p. 4), static or unmoving. They are exemplars of language-in-motion which is the object of study of a second paradigm, the sociolinguistics of mobility, which assumes that:

the mobility of people also involves the mobility of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources, that ‘sedentary’ patterns of language use are complemented by ‘translocal’ forms of language use, and that the combination of both often accounts for unexpected sociolinguistic effects. (Blommaert and Dong 2007, p. 4)

In the case of Andrew and Juanito, mobility is movement in place but made fluid and dynamic through their inventive mobilisation of communicative resources. The ‘unexpected sociolinguistic effects’ of such mobilisation pertain to the central role of such resources in the affirmation and sustenance of the professional workers’ privileged positions in their lines of work. Theirs is the case of language-in-place and language-in-motion. While in place, they are also mobile.