Volume 35, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Languaging the worker – Globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces, Guest Editors: Kati Dlaske and Mireille McLaughlin

In the introduction to the special issue “Languaging the worker: globalized governmentalities in/of language in peripheral spaces”, we take up the notion of governmentality as a means to interrogate the complex relationship between language, labor, power and subjectivity in peripheral multilingual spaces. Our aim here is to argue for the study of governmentality as a viable and growing approach in critical sociolinguistic research. As such, in this introduction, we first discuss key concepts germane to our interrogations, including the notions of governmentality, languaging, peripherality and language worker. We proceed to map out five ethnographically and discourse-analytically informed case studies. These examine diverse actors in different settings pertaining to the domain of work. Finally we chart how the case studies construe the issue of languaging the worker through a governmentality frame.

In this paper, I examine how language policy acts as a means of both empowering the Welsh language and the minority language worker and as a means of exerting power over them. For this purpose, the study focuses on a particular site: private sector businesses in Wales. Therein, I trace two major discursive processes: first, the Welsh Government’s national language policy documents that promote corporate bilingualism and bilingual employees as value-added resources; second, the practice and discourse of company managers who sustain or appropriate such promotional discourses for creating and promoting their own organisational values. By drawing on concepts from governmentality, critical language policy and discourse studies, I show that promoting bilingualism in business is characterised by local and global governmentalities. These not only bring about critical shifts in valuing language as symbolic entities attached to ethnonational concerns or as promotional objects that bring material gain. Language governmentalities also appear to shape new forms of ‘languaging’ the minority language worker as self-governing, and yet, governed subjects who are ultimately made responsible for ‘owning’ Welsh.

The “multilingual turn” brings questions of language ownership to the forefront of debates about linguistic minority governance. Acadian minority cultural producers construct language ownership using multiple languages and targeting multilingual publics, but use ideologies of monolingualism to situate Acadian authenticity in place and time. As globalization brings minority language governmentality onto global terrains, cultural workers manage the tension between multilingualism and ownership through affective registers. This paper contributes to theorizing language and governmentality by understanding affect as a discursively produced register that serves to legitimate the distribution of resources. I follow the role affect plays in constructing linguistic minority subjects as agents of globalization. I flip cultural entrepreneur’s understanding of themselves as liberal agents of linguistic change and show how they are constrained by the political salience of monolingualism. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the field of linguistic minority cultural production in Acadie to track moments when questions of ownership appeared. I pay attention to the role affect played in navigating the tensions between the economic value of multilingualism for global markets and the remaining political salience of monolingualism for minorities. Affect served to reproduce the minority speaker as a particular type of subject, one “attached” to a community constructed as ideally monolingual, either in the past, present or future. I then map out global linguistic minority governmentality to show how knowledge production on language is embedded in the tensions experienced by linguistic minority cultural producers.

Volunteer tourism is one of the latest branches of the ever expanding globalised tourism. The initiative Workaway, an expression of this trend, was established in the late 90s with the aim of promoting “cultural understanding between different peoples and lands throughout the world”. The figure of the workawayer as a new cosmopolitan subjectivity started to take shape. With the growth of the tourism industry, the Workaway scheme has started to be of interest also to tourism entrepreneurs, especially in the global peripheries such as northern Lapland, home to the indigenous minority language community of the Sámi. By signing up as a volunteer in a heritage tourism resort, the workawayer, the cultural adventurer, becomes linked up to the network of the globalised new economy. Drawing on aspects of governmentality studies, discourse studies and ethnographic approaches, this study traces the translocal formation of the figure of the workawayer through two crucial technologies of subjectification: the Internet portal workaway.info and the actuality of everyday work in a Sámi heritage tourist resort in northernmost Finnish Lapland. Although the Workaway initiative positions itself as non-capitalist if not anti-capitalist, the study shows how the workawayer is gradually shaped to meet the requirements of the contemporary neoliberal world of work. If Workaway offers new languages and cultures with a flavour of romanticised multiculturalism, in the tourist resort actual encounters are governed by straightforward market rationality. Here, languages are valued as skills among others, but not above others, since ultimately “you don’t necessarily need any language for money transactions”.

This study demonstrates the ways in which discourses in a state-sponsored volunteer program incited transformations of individual subjectivities, focusing on a group of Japanese language teacher volunteers training in Japan to become teachers of Japanese as a heritage language for the country’s diaspora (Nikkei) population in South America. As teachers of heritage Japanese at Japanese language schools in these Nikkei communities, their work was central to Japan’s diaspora strategies, which reframe the Nikkei population as Japan’s “diplomatic assets” connected to Japan through their Nikkei identity. Focusing on these language teachers as important actors in Japan’s diaspora strategies, this study illustrates how their encounter with the institutional discourses resulted in the transformations of their subjectivities. Such transformations occurred during the volunteer training sessions hosted by Japan’s international cooperation agency to conceptualize their roles as teachers of Japanese as someone’s heritage language. By illustrating the ways in which these volunteer individuals’ transformations fit within state diaspora strategies, this article underscores the role of state actors in the process of subjectification, which has tended to be overlooked in previous studies of governmentality.

What people perceive as “a language” – a named entity – is abstracted from practices and notions about those practices. People take for granted that language is somehow a “thing,” an objectively distinct and bounded entity. How languages come to be thus imagined indexes the conditions under which they are imagined. The articles in this issue illustrate various relations of language-imagining to the ongoing production of neoliberal subjectivity under conditions inflected by the pride-profit polarities, especially profit (Duchêne and Heller 2012). The themes that link these articles show the relation of the language under discussion to its languaged workers, how the language indexes the conditions of its deployment, and how the language is imagined. Entrepreneurialized language is fundamentally promotional, whether on a loose entrepreneur-network basis or following scripted policy or as a manifestation of cultural property. Thus imagined, language and language difference are subject to the same metasemiotic regime as are corporate-friendly interpretations of the national, ethnic, and racial differences represented by language difference. In other words, all forms of difference are “supposed” to be understood in terms of desirable contemporary business-friendly outcomes.