Negotiating Boundaries at Work: Talking and Transitions

Moving between linguistic, professional and national boundaries is part of the daily reality of modern workplaces, where the concept of a 'job for life' is now outdated. Employees move between jobs, countries and even professions during their working lives, but the multilayered process of redefining personal, social and professional identities is not reflected in current workplace research.  This volume brings together a range of scholars from different disciplinary areas in the field, examining the challenges of transition into a (new) workplace, team or community, as well as transitions within different professional communities. By analyzing the strategies individuals adopt to navigate the boundaries they face (in languages, workplaces or countries), this book demonstrates that transitions are not linear but are negotiated and constructed in the situated ‘here and now’ of workplace interaction, at the same time as they are positioned in the wider socioeconomic order.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: Negotiating boundaries at workJo Angouri, Meredith Marra & Janet HolmesPart I: Transitions to a professionChapter 2: Negotiating social legitimacy in and across contexts: Apprenticeship in a ‘dual’ training systemStefano A. Losa & Laurent FilliettazChapter 3: Language mentoring and employment ideologies: Internationally educated professionals in search of workJulie KerekesChapter 4: ‘Oh it’s a DANISH boyfriend you’ve got’- Co-membership and cultural fluency in job interviews with minority background applicants in DenmarkMarta KirilovaChapter 5: Constructing a ‘mission statement’– A multimodal perspective on believable identity construction in a job interviewEwa Kuśmierczyk-O’ConnorChapter 6: Teamwork and the ‘global graduate’: Negotiating core skills and competencies with employers in recruitment interviewsSophie Reissner-RoubicekChapter 7: ‘Doing evaluation’ in the modern workplace: Negotiating the identity of ‘model employee’ in performance appraisal interviewsDorien Van De Mieroop & Stephanie SchnurrPart II: Transitions within a professionChapter 8: Multilingualism and work experience in Germany: On the pragmatic notion of ‘patiency’Kristin Bührig & Jochen RehbeinChapter 9: Working and learning in a new niche: Ecological interpretations of work-related migrationMinna SuniChapter 10: ‘Have you still not learnt Luxembourgish’? Negotiating language boundaries in a distribution company in LuxembourgAnne FranziskusChapter 11: The ‘internationalised’ academic: Negotiating boundaries between the local, the regional and the ‘international’ at the universityAnne H. FabriciusChapter 12: Collaborating beyond disciplinary boundariesSeongsook Choi

About the Author :
Professor Jo Angouri is Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick Meredith Marra is Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. Professor Janet Holmes is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington.

Review :
[Negotiating Boundaries at Work] makes an invaluable contribution to the current scholarship on workplace discourse and will appeal to researchers and students in the fields of intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and language and identity, as well as to practitioners involved in the employment of border crossers. I found the volume worth reading as it gives insight into various national contexts and also various work-related communities of practice. It gives an interesting insight into the complexity of the modern, multilingual working life. Workplace sociolinguistics is a relatively new area of research, and this volume contributes to make it an area of relevance both for practitioners and researchers. This is a stimulating volume in the relatively new area of workplace sociolinguistics. It gives detailed insights into the experience of being and belonging in environments of change. The crossing of physical, social and ideological barriers and its emotional toll is robustly addressed through micro-interactional analysis, while showing how institutions leak in at all points. The impressive range of workplaces speaks to complexities of transitions and, importantly, brings together the formalities of gatekeeping encounters and the coping and balancing strategies required to manage ordinary working conditions.