Volume 2022, Issue 276 - Special Issue: Language, Work and Affective Capitalism; Issue Editors: Kati Dlaske and Alfonso Del Percio

This special issue contributes to scholarship on language and affective economy by exploring the role played by affect in shaping work and workers under current configurations of capitalism. We take as a starting point the observation of increased valorisation and instrumentalisation of affect in the contemporary phase of capitalism. In this editorial introduction to the special issue, we set the scene by first outlining our questions, aims and objectives. Subsequently, we situate the contribution made by this issue in a larger social theorisation of affect and capitalism, particularly the notion of affective capitalism, and reflect on how this theorisation can contribute to sociolinguistic scholarship on work. The introduction concludes with an outline of the articles in this special issue, highlighting the way, empirically and conceptually, each article contributes to our understanding of the intersections between language, work and affective capitalism.

In this contribution, I will look at the imbrication of language, labour and affective capitalism in the exemplary context of a Chilean private university, as part of a larger sociolinguistic ethnography project that seeks to examine processes of precarisation in university teachers. I argue that the affective-discursive practices used by three English Language teachers, which they called the pedagogy of love, constitute a register. This register is one of the many available to women and men, which they can manage, negotiate, manipulate and capitalise on. I show in this article the way teachers enact, align with and detach from the register to make sense of their professional identities and navigate a precarious higher education market, and how the university benefits from it to regulate teachers’ labour and students’ expectations and eventually, obtain financial stability.

How has the ability to express reflexivity, including regulating affect, come to be part of the bundled self that workers are required to be? This paper offers a rigorous genealogical analysis of the multiple histories of knowledge and power that have informed the emergence and shaping of ‘reflexive registers,’ or socially typified ways of speaking and reflecting about oneself that stand for morally marked models of selfhood. It takes as a starting-point programs documented in my ethnography of employability programs in London, UK where workers of all sorts are asked to learn to examine their personalities and to express their feelings. It then draws on original historiographical and ethnographic data that allows documentation of the logics and circumstances informing the emergence and development of reflexivity as a resource for employability. It argues for an interdisciplinary understanding of reflexivity and its communicability that theorises the workers as products of history, capital, and affect.

This paper seeks to advance research on the nexus of language, work-related training and affective capitalism by focusing on an entrepreneurship workshop organized for newly arrived refugees in Germany. Despite the occupational orientation, the primary objective of the workshop was not establishing a business but “empowering” the participants by guiding them to adopt “an entrepreneurial mindset”. To delve deeper into this ‘will to empower’, the study brings together the perspectives of governmentality studies, ethnography, discourse studies and affect studies. To investigate in more detail the evocation of the ‘entrepreneurial mindset’, the study draws on ethnographic data collected in the context of the workshop and focuses on a particular discursive resource, the genre ‘elevator pitch’. The analysis examines how this genre operated as a technology of government by allowing an attempt at modulating the affective states and attachments of the participants so as to evoke an affective configuration characterized by hardness, resilience and diligence, but above all by aspiration, optimism and confidence: faith in oneself, and a horizon of hope that the possibility of self-employment created. The concluding section discusses this subjectification regime as a manifestation of contemporary affective capitalism, in the context of forced migration and beyond, in the light of recent social and sociolinguistic research.

Revisiting data from a sociolinguistic ethnography of an in-bound Swiss call centre (2010–2011), I will show how the scripted smile of agents is fused strategically with the use of the dialect in order to produce ‘affective-discursive practices’ that aim for a projection of quality of service. These practices include ‘scripted affective efficiency’ and the ‘stylization of Swiss authenticity’. Inherently embedded in and emblematic of the political economy, these particular affective-discursive practices are conducive to the company’s branding strategies of authenticity, directly linked to market distinction and profit generation. From today’s standpoint, i.e. 10 years later, transformations in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) have displayed the limits of these affective practices and their underlying discourses and ideologies in the face of cost-benefit analyses when the number of incoming calls dwindled due to the development of smartphones. This paper will discuss affective-discursive practices from a political-economic and critical sociolinguistic perspective.

In contemporary work arrangements that are premised on the exchange of information, communication, and services, one dominant instrumentality of affective capitalism is the practice of emotional labor. In this paper, I turn my attention to the promise of empowerment in the workplace and propose that it is another instrumentality of affective capitalism. Specifically, I examine the ways through which positive feelings are evoked and maintained in the Philippine call center industry through the circulation of empowerment narratives that are of particular significance to its Filipino workers. Using Wetherell’s notion of affective practice and Ahmed’s notion of the stickiness of emotion, I examine the affective-discursive dimensions of the empowerment narratives, trace their repeated telling, and surface the other narratives upon which they draw to show how particular affects become sticky, that is, how they gain recognition and resonance, and are felt and taken up by the same bodies that circulate them. In making explicit the relationship between the empowerment narratives and their sticky affects, I demonstrate that the promise of empowerment in the call centers is as much a discursive practice as it is an affective one. Thus, to make sense of the workings of affective capitalism in the new work order, it is crucial to interrogate not only the affective dispositions that workers are made to occupy in the workplace, but also dominant workplace discourses that are, in fact, designed to evoke, circulate, and maintain the desired affects.

This article examines the communication patterns among multicultural African families in Japan. Using ethnographic vignettes, this article uses family language planning (FLP) theories to understand how African parents communicate with their children, how parents aim to shape their children’s language use, how parents conceptualize their family communication, and how Japanese institutions affect the trajectories of parental FLP efforts. This article demonstrates how five intersecting factors influence the outcomes of FLPs in idiosyncratic ways. These five factors include Japanese education and socialization practices, parents’ economic resources, parents’ language skills, identity ambitions, and parents’ willingness to use economic and cultural resources. It also highlights the utility and limitations of applying FLP theories of child agency to the Japanese context. These findings suggest scholars reconsider the interplay of macro- and micro-factors in shaping FLP outcomes, the role of child agency in actualizing FLPs, and the affective elements that shape parents’ understandings of language use.

Though computer mediated communication has been widely studied, private messaging in minoritized languages (many without standardized orthographies) is an area of minimal research. This article looks at texting in four multilingual language communities: Maguindanaon (Philippines), Sebuyau (Malaysia), Mamaindê (Brazil) and Marubo (Brazil). The majority of the data comes from the Maguindanao case study, an Austronesian language spoken by over one million speakers in the Maguindanao province of Mindanao Island. Based on this preliminary data, an initial framework with which to understand the language choices for digital messaging in such societies is proposed. The broader implications of this study are its insights into the variable patterning of texting in minority languages in general, providing a baseline for future work in this area. This preliminary study suggests that the texting repertoires of minority language communities are found to pattern after their parallel repertoires of either orality or literacy. These patterns are collectively referred to as the “Language Repertoire Matrix”. The variable that distinguishes one texting repertoire from another is the language(s) used for intra-group texting: minority (L1), majority (L2), or minority + majority (L1 + L2) languages. We propose that the choice of employing either the orality or literacy repertoires for intra-group texting demonstrates the underlying function of such texting within that society. The conclusion offers some suggestions on how these insights might apply to the field of minority language development.

This article investigates Chinese-Australian parents’ ideologies and visions about the maintenance of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) as well as their struggles in using family language policy (FLP) as defence and coping mechanisms to address tensions associated with the transgenerational transmission of CHL. Language policy defined as an assemblage of ideologies, practices and management and parental agency understood as parents’ capacity to pursue their visions are deployed within Curdt-Christiansen’s dynamic model of FLP that accommodates a complex interplay of internal and external factors. The study focuses on 15 parents who were committed to and made agentive efforts to maintain CHL and transmit it to their next generations. Using interviews, parents’ visions based on their children’s future CHL proficiency and their agentive efforts around CHL transmission were examined. The findings revealed sharp contrasts between parents’ future visions and their lived experiences of struggles at present. Anticipating the eventual loss of CHL among their future generations in the Australian context, the parents struggled to negotiate FLP to combat the foreseeable language shift and defend their visions. The findings have implications for individuals, families, communities, institutions, and policies concerning the maintenance of heritage languages in Australia and globally.