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ERIC Number: EJ1108328
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Jul
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0167-8507
EISSN: N/A
Discussion: Imagining the Languaged Worker's Language
Urciuoli, Bonnie
Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, v35 n4 p469-481 Jul 2016
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 (DuchĂȘne 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.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: N/A
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A