The proposed panel focuses on the latest conditions of language policy, planning, and practice (LPP) taking place in diverse blue-collar workplaces as a result of the new globalized economy (Heller 2013). Adopting a transformationalist approach to globalization acknowledges that transnational interdependencies are not new; however, they contribute to the rise of a 'new', international division of labor, which influences the innovative ways in which employers and employees are using, conceptualizing, and imagining language (Pietikäinen et al. 2016) in various workplace contexts (Duchêne & Heller 2012). As a result, language as a resource - whether symbolic, interactional, material or ideological – flows and changes to manage individuals in their everyday lives and workplaces. Much of the existing workplace literature has thus far focused on white-collar rather than blue-collar settings.
It is within this context that we bring together empirical work on language in blue-collar contexts by scholars from different geographical settings. This panel will add to the existing literature on LPP by expanding our theoretical understanding of a domain that is currently underrepresented (García & Kelly-Holmes 2016: 2) and addressing diverse topics that consider the methodological challenges (Ricento 2000; Hult & Johnson 2015; Gonçalves & Schluter 2017) of carrying out such work.
Duchêne,A. & Heller,M. (2012). Language Policy in the Workplace. In. B. Spolsky (Ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 323-334.
García,O. & Kelly-Holmes,H. (2016). Editorial. Language Policy 15. 1-2.
Gonçalves,K. & Schluter,A. (2017). “Please do not leave any notes for the cleaning lady, as many do not speak English fluently”: Policy, power, and language brokering in a multilingual workplace. Language Policy 16 (3).
Heller,M. (2013). Language as Resource in the Globalized New Economy. In Nikolas Coupland (Ed.). The Handbook of Globalization. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 349-365.
Hult,F. & Johnson,D. (Eds.) (2015). Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Pietikäinen,S., Kelly-Holmes,H., Jaffe,A. & Coupland,N. (2016). Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ricento,T. (Ed.) (2000). An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
