In this paper, I will present insights gained from twelve interviews with language workers in the area of consulting, communications and campaigning, to answer the following questions: What are the backgrounds and career paths... [ view full abstract ]
In this paper, I will present insights gained from twelve interviews with language workers in the area of consulting, communications and campaigning, to answer the following questions:
- What are the backgrounds and career paths of language workers outside academia?
- What are the processes and conditions of professional language work outside academia?
- What is the perceived relationship between linguists in academia and professional language workers in other contexts?
In conducting the interviews and answering the above questions, I draw on my experience and embodied meta-expertise as a linguist working in both academia and private-sector consulting.
The interviews show that professional language workers - including brand consultants, marketing managers and government communication advisors- have very different backgrounds and use a variety of frameworks seemingly opportunistically, ranging from corpus and computational linguistics to interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Time scales for language work outside academia differ widely, depending on organisational context and communicative purpose. Both text production and text analysis are also often done in a team, although hierarchies can determine what version of a text is finally used.
Interviewees see educating their clients about language use and language analysis as another important task, and a feedback model integrating analysis, production and training seems appropriate to their context. Moreover, language workers, especially in the private sector, are more concerned with how their clients view language (work) than how they themselves could and do relate to academic linguists.
The findings raise questions as to what practices need to be in place to facilitate knowledge exchange between academic linguists and language workers outside academia. It stands to reason that the increasing corporatisation of higher education blurs the boundaries between the two settings and makes the expected role of linguists more ambiguous. From a critical point of view, it is furthermore worth asking how we can account for the (strategic) construct of client/audience interest as primary, and how consultants in particular can give recommendations without precluding equally valid alternatives that may be less desirable to their clients.
