Volume 2025, Issue 292 - Special Issue: Language, Work & Social Critique: In Dialogue with the Translated Works of Josiane Boutet; Issue Editors: Larissa Semiramis Schedel and Katy Highet

Josiane Boutet is a key figure in French sociolinguistics, known for her pioneering work on language practices and their intersection with power, education, and the workplace. This paper explores the intellectual and historical contexts of her contributions, highlighting her commitment to interdisciplinarity, empirical rigor, and politically engaged sociolinguistics. From her early research in the 1970s to her ongoing work in the 2020s, Josiane Boutet has consistently bridged theoretical innovation with practical applications, addressing issues of social inequality and language policy. This article examines the enduring legacy and contemporary relevance of Josiane Boutet’s approach to language as social practice.

In this article, Josiane Boutet, Pierre Fiala and Jenny Simonin-Grumbach offer a response to the erstwhile dominance in sociolinguistics of the “covariance” thesis of language and social structure as distinct domains. Introducing the notion of language practices, the article emphasizes the reciprocal and co-constructive role of language as social practice. They present the notion that language practices are both regulated and produced by the social, while at the same time, they act upon and can transform the social order. In other words, the social is shaped by language, and language shapes the social. Drawing on an example from the terrain of language and work, the article offers a conceptualisation of language as a constitutive element of social formation, and not merely an object that bears the traces of a social to be located somewhere outside of language.

In this article, Josiane Boutet proposes a historical overview of language practices in work situations by using the example of France: starting with Taylorized factories, she moves on to more modern forms of work organisation and concludes with the new productive sectors. In her analysis, she distinguishes between four broad movements that characterise the evolution of language practices in work situations. First, she documents the persistent devaluation and low social prestige of so-called immigrant languages. Secondly, she tracks how spoken varieties of French, which in Taylorism were not recognized or even forbidden, have acquired a new status as important factor in a company’s productivity. Thirdly, she shows how the service dialogue between employee and customer is a language practice that has been considerably expanded. Finally, she demonstrates how practices of literacy (reading and writing) continue to proliferate in all professions.

New types of management as well as new technologies of computerization and robotization have profoundly changed the place and function of language activities at work (i.e., reading, writing and communicating). It is often said that work has become intellectual. In this paper, I question this assertion by taking up Vygotsky’s theory on the relationship between language and thought. I show the realizations at work of the following three modalities: verbal thought, language without thought and thought without language.

The critical dimension was a founding principle of sociolinguistics in France in the 1970s. In this article, I reflect upon the future of this critical thought, forty years on. After outlining the Bourdieusian conception of a critical discipline, I present the development of this thought within French sociolinguistics, dividing it into three stages: the emergence of critical sociolinguistics during the 1970s; the years of its decline (1990–2000); and the current situation, which is characterized by a great amount of scientific diversity. The last forty years have seen the gradual establishment of a scientific community based upon both a sharing of theoretical and methodological principles and upon scientific controversy, including that of the purpose of the discipline. Sociolinguistics in 2017 is faced with the dominance of formal linguistics, and with the intellectual dispersion of the field: what sociolinguistics can offer, in response to this, is its capacity for social implementation.

In this article, I give a historical overview of scientific approaches to language use at work. While early studies that were carried out since the nineteenth century first by laypersons and then by linguists (lexicologists, terminologists, and specialists of professional discourse) focused on the use of specific words at work, a new avenue for exploration was introduced in the 1980s by the network ‘Language and work’ ( Langage et travail ), which proposed an ethnographic, interactional, and interdisciplinary perspective. Based on fieldwork carried out in collaboration with the members of this network and with ergonomists, I was able to propose the concept of ‘the language part of work’ ( la part langagière du travail ). This concept describes the spoken and written language that characterise actual work practices, which can be described from a micro-level perspective by means of observations of specific workplaces as well as from a macro-level perspective regarding general socio-linguistic processes.

As someone on whom Josiane Boutet’s work has a significant influence, reading through the English-language translations brought together in this special issue inspires new connections between Boutet’s oeuvre and English-language sociolinguistic work. In this commentary, I explore some of the possibilities for such dialogue. I begin with the notion of “language practices”, linking it to the key concepts of “indexicality” and “contextualization cues” in the English-language literature. Following this, I look at the ways in which Boutet’s “language part of work” articulates with recent sociolinguistic work focusing on professional contexts. By way of conclusion, I consider the “language part of work” of sociolinguistics as a scientific domain, highlighting how the dominance of English in scientific publication may lead to prominent scholars who publish in other languages being under-cited and to key ideas going unrecognised, before suggesting that initiatives such as this special issue constitute a possible solution to this problem.

This entry highlights the value of Josiane Boutet’s translated articles for the study of precarious work under late capitalism in regions like Asia, which are undergoing rapid socioeconomic transformation and urbanization. The significance of the context is that while work has become precarious, life has become aspirational. Theories of precarity that emerged out of Euro-American experiences are typically unable to account for this twinning of aspiration and precarity in work. However, Boutet’s emphasis on materiality and language foregrounds the context of work as much as the content of work. I illustrate how this approach permits careful analysis of contradictory, multi-directional facets of employment. The analysis draws on data from a longitudinal research project that traced youth transition from education to work in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.

This commentary revisits and extends Boutet’s seminal perspectives on the “language part of work” by reflecting on its relevance in the AI-driven globalised economy, particularly under Taylorist and multilingual conditions. Drawing on Boutet’s research on French workplaces two decades ago, it incorporates insights from diverse labour markets and cultural contexts through two ethnographic case studies. The first case investigates contemporary Taylorism in a fifth-generation international call centre in Shanghai, revealing how traditional principles of standardisation coexist with new managerial techniques and cognitive demands that engage workers’ intellectual agency. The second case examines multilingualism in a Chinese transnational telecom with branches in Shanghai and London, analysing how globalisation and the dominance of English as a lingua franca reshape linguistic practices and the value of language in multilingual workplaces. By demonstrating the language choices and practices of skilled migrants, including non-Chinese professionals in Shanghai and Chinese expatriates in London, this commentary highlights the evolving dynamics of language within global economic integration. It concludes by advocating for a re-examination of language and work frameworks to more effectively address the complexities of contemporary labour practices in global workplaces.

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical reading of J. Boutet’s work from my position as an Argentine linguist who has been working for many years in interdisciplinary teams, including labor scholars and trade unionists. This position motivated the reading I propose here on three aspects of Boutet’s work in relation to language: (1) the concept of “language part of work” and its contribution to interdisciplinary dialogue in labor studies; (2) the idea of “language without thought” and its political implications for trade union action; (3) the meaning of academic monolingualism for academic work. In writing from that position, I understand that my reading takes Boutet’s production out of its original context to insert it into discussions and concerns that are not her but mine. In doing so, I do not intend to be unfair to an intelligent and provocative work, but to link it to my own concerns in the fields of research, political action and academic work.