Volume 42, Issue 6 - Special Issue: On-site processes of sociolinguistic differentiation; Guest Editors: Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio

For newly met acquaintances, deployment of a single lexical term, an emblem such as tech or finance , signals where one stands in the professional universe and points to any manner of traits and characteristics or a certain type of person. This positioning and evaluation has pivotal real-world implications for occupational attainment as people decide whether a conversation is worth continuing and a contact worth advancing. This study examines self-presentation sequences at a professional networking event in Hong Kong. In the interactions at these events, professional emblems serve to locate people amongst different taxonomies, such as hierarchies of eliteness, and invoke various traits. But in highly diverse, globalized contexts like this one in Hong Kong, what happens when shared knowledge of emblems is not readily available, and how do participants negotiate this? This study seeks to answer these underexamined questions, acutely relevant in particular social circles nowadays, focusing on misrecognized, vaguely recognized, semiotically transposed, and spuriously recognized cases. It also introduces advanced visual depictions of the indexical maps that participants hold, in all their complexity, drawing both from interaction, where there are some hints of emblem uptake, and subsequent interviews, where emblems’ indexicalities and their social value to social actors are made explicit. This study fills a gap in how people with diverse biographies ‘cobble together’ indexical meanings in the moment to position their interactants within their conceptions of the world and ascribe social value.

This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and under what conditions English-mediated reflexivity, with its stress on self-entrepreneurship, came to replace former Mandarin-mediated reflexivity supporting a notion of collective workerhood. Special attention is paid to reflexivity’s changing roles in shaping, managing and evaluating workers and facilitating understandings of labour, power and agency. The paper argues that the emerging English-dominated reflexivity represents a required linguistic shift for the creation of a new worker type in the current globalised economy as it normalises managerial technologies of discipline, stratification and exclusion.

Since the nineties, the idea that narratives are essential for an efficient communication has massively spread in management, marketing and politics, supported by the profuse publication of storytelling guides and criticized by a number of social commentators. Nevertheless, little is known about how reflexive activities specific to professional communication partake in the visibility and solidification of this specific way of conceiving the use of stories. Drawing on semiotic-inspired works in linguistic anthropology, studies on talk-in-interaction and narrative analysis, this article analyzes how reflexive activities contribute to the construction of specific conceptions of what narratives are and what they do in professional communication. To achieve this, the article relies on a single case study that details the kind of ready-made stories and contextualization devices a storytelling guide provides for its readers. The analysis shows that the storytelling guide builds up a cultural model that is both archiving past narrative situations (a  model-of action) and potentially generating new narrative situations (a model-for action). By doing so, the storytelling guide not only singles out specific communicative resources but also fuels a metapragmatic model in which accomplished storytellers are at the top of the social structure.

New citizens are typically characterized as people who occupy an estuarial position between the global and the local: to simultaneously become authentic to their global provenience and rooted in their new local societies, they are expected to cautiously partake in processes of differentiation as they construct their identities. This article investigates how new citizens negotiate this seemingly untenable position to present themselves as new citizens of Singapore who have negotiated the global/local dichotomy, rendering themselves as legitimate citizens. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, the article focuses on two object-signs that new citizens commonly deploy: familial relations and passports. The analysis traces how the semiotic potential of these object-signs is mediated by accounts of emotions, which are indispensable considerations of how signs realize their semiotic potential. Through situated reflexive practices, new citizens use these object-signs to equivocally and strategically manage supposed markers of difference, which consequently enables them to claim legitimacy as Singaporeans. These identities challenge regimented views about the global and local affordances of the notion of citizenship. This expands the semiotic range of good/new citizenship, which may prove instructive in understanding variegated understandings of citizenship not just in Singapore but also in other contemporary multicultural societies.

This article discusses Volume 42(6) where the editors (Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio) push for a metapragmatic approach to reflexive practices of sociolinguistic differentiation. With reference to my own trajectory, I review this lens as suitable to accounting for how people affectively take part in the making of difference and similarities between signs, social situations and positions in daily meaning-making practices and the larger inequalities that these practices may contribute to sustain and interrogate. In doing so, I focus on story-telling templates in professional communication, citizenship narratives in research interviews, English-oriented forms of self-evaluation in the workplace and ritualised instances of self-presentation in interaction and evaluations of others’ self-presentation in networking events as indexical signs that articulate a range of moralised meanings and categories of “ideal” versus “non-ideal” social persona upon which arrangements of social life and work get (re)instituted. I also discuss the socioeconomic hierarchies and forms of distinction that such arrangements (re)produce in different settings. Finally, I suggest further epistemological avenues for research exploring linkages across events and for following more closely the consequences that such events have for certain people, with attention to existing disciplinary synergies (and social theories) within and beyond the language disciplines.